Baba's Message about Drugs
Avatar Meher Baba’s messages on drugs were given during the ’60s, as drugs were becoming a staple of American youth culture and promoted by some as aids on the spiritual path.
If God can be found in a pill, then God is not worthy of being God.
The experiences which drugs induce are as far removed from reality… as is a mirage from WATER. No matter how much you pursue the mirage, you will never quench your thirst. And the search for truth through drugs must end in disillusionment.
No drug, whatever its great promise, can help one to attain the spiritual goal. There is no short-cut to the goal except through the grace of the Perfect Master, and drugs, LSD more than others, give only a semblance of spiritual experience, a glimpse of a false Reality.
All so-called spiritual experiences generated by taking mind-changing drugs... are superficial and add enormously to one's addiction to the deceptions of illusion which is but the shadow of Reality.
There is no drug that can promote the aspirant’s progress – nor ever alleviate the sufferings of separation from his beloved God. LOVE is the only propeller and the only remedy. The aspirant should love God with all his heart until he forgets himself and recognizes his beloved God in himself and others.
The one and only True experience is the experience of the Truth, the Reality; for once the realization of God is attained, it remains a continual and never-ending experience.
A fascinating story ranging from the hallowed halls of the Harvard Psychology Department to a hitchhiked journey to India resulting in a meeting with the leading spiritual authority of the Age. This book reveals how it all happened: how a few stoners and dopers and psychedelic frontiersmen, who were each and all spiritual aspirants in their own way, ended up provoking God in human form to shed divine light upon the subject of mind-altering drugs.
Dr. Goher, Baba’s personal doctor and close disciple, relayed this message regarding LSD personally given by Meher Baba. Dr. Allan Cohen writes more on drugs here.
The experience of a semblance of ‘freedom’ that these drugs may temporarily give to one is in actuality a millstone round the aspirant’s neck in his efforts toward emancipation from the rounds of birth and death! It is absolutely essential for a spiritual aspirant who genuinely longs for union with God – the Reality – to shun experiments with the effects of certain drugs. These things do not uplift the aspirant nor draw him out of the rut of Illusion. Experiences born of these practices wear off as soon as the aspirant withdraws from or is thrown out of the orbit of the effect produced by the technique employed.
In an age when individual liberty is prized above all achievements, the fast-increasing number of drug addicts forms an appalling chain of self-sought bondage! Even as these drugs hold out an invitation to a fleeting sense of ecstasy, freedom or escape, they enslave the individual in greater binding. LSD, a highly potent ‘mind changing’ drug differing from the opiate derivatives and being used in the research of mental science, is said to ‘expand consciousness and alter one’s personality for the better.’ In America it has become tragically popular among the young, used indiscriminately by any and many. They must be persuaded to desist from taking drugs, for they are harmful – physically, mentally and spiritually.
Many people in India smoke hashish and ganja [marijuana]. They see colors and forms and lights, and it makes them elated. But this elation is only temporary. It is a false experience. It gives only experience of illusion, and serves to take one farther away from reality… An individual may feel LSD has made a ‘better’ man of him socially and personally. But one will be a better man through love than one can ever be through drugs or any other artificial aid. And the best man is he who has surrendered himself to Perfect Master irrespective of his personal or social standing.
