the curious case of psychedelics
fitting the square peg of psychedelics with the round hole of islam
When I first came to college, I was obsessed with psychedelics. I literally became friends with someone (HI S!) because they shared my passion for psychedelics. We were so into it that we tried finding a lab to do psychedelic research in and I seriously considered switching to neuroscience.
Alhamdulillah, this is one of the few cases I did not follow through with my dumb impulses.
By the time I left college I had flushed all the psychedelics obsession from my system, including once actually flushing some LSD in Sargent Hall, and since I always need something to be obsessed with, the new thing was dhikr!
I have said before that psychdelics led me to Dhikr and people often asked me how and to elaborate so I wanted to organize some of my thoughts here.
Mawlana Rumi said that there is one kaaba and many roads to it and these are some quick thoughts on how I think both dhikr and pyschedelics are pointing at the same thing, one road just more thornier than the other.
Some stories on psychedelics.
A woman, under palliative care, is acutely aware of her impending death. More than physical pain, it's the terror of mortality that haunts her. She is given a high dose of Ayahuasca, triggering a profound transformation in her perception of life and death.
"I understood how I am connected to the universe and death wasn't something to be scared of", she says.
"I understand my time here is coming to an end. I'm grateful for the time I had."
Smokers often find it harder to quit than individuals addicted to other substances. In a study, a group of smokers seeking to quit were given LSD. One participant had an epiphany, seeing his lungs as living entities which he could no longer bear to harm. Amazingly, in a follow-up study after five years, an impressive 90% had successfully quit smoking, without a single relapse.
Far from being unique, these are quite common stories with psychedelic usage.
Here's another set of stories.
A man in 12th century Baghdad, who was born and raised a muslim, is trying to topple a wall in order to rob a house. From within the house he hears a man reciting Quran
"Is it not time that the heart of the believers tremble in awe when they hear the dhikr of Allah" (Surah Hadid, 16)
He says "Yes" to himself.
He has a moment of kashf, an unveiling, and completely cleans up his act. He goes from being the highway robber people were scared of to a renowned scholar of spirituality.
A student comes to his teacher and boasts how he finished reciting the whole of the Quran in 10 days to his teacher. His teacher tells him to redo it tonight but this time, imagine that he is in the presence of Allah while reciting His words.
The next morning the student tells his teacher that as soon as he recited bism of bismilla, he immediately lost consciousness out of his awe in being Allah's presence.
Across culture and time you see people experiencing "mystical" experience. The nature of a mystical experience is that you can't really talk about it, you just hint and indicate in the general direction. However, the language people use to describe the islamic understanding of fana, or annihilantion in Allah, closely resembles that of ego death with psychedelics.
Except one is the real deal and one isn’t.
Being impressed with psychedelics is like being impressed with the finger that points at the moon instead of the moon itself. All it points to is the human beings ability to have transcended experiences, not that mushrooms are the only way or even a valid way. You look towards revelation and the Prophet ﷺ to make sense of these things.
The modern slight of hand happened in two places. Firstly, everyone got the impression that if you want something more out of life, it can only be done through psychedelics. And secondly, the 100B saudi marketing propaganda took out anything remotely mystical out of Islam and they left Islam with only the outer and nothing of the inner.
(I love blaming the saudi $100B marketing project but I’m sure the diluting Islam of real spirituality had many many reasons)
Islam acknowledges that the human being is capable of transcendence. Not only that, it begins with acknolwedging our soul's heavenly origins and our capacity for pre-dunya memories. But esoteric parts of the religion is always coupled with the exoteric nature. This is why spirituality without revelation becomes heresy and people just go off the deep end and start dancing and start talking about universal love without any grounding in reality. hipsters and all. And this thing just another tool of the shaytan to spread misguidance.
You can’t talk of flying without prayer.
And there is no flying without prayer.
Sharia (The outward Law) and Haqiah (the Inner Reality) and never one without the other.
I was sitting next to Sidi when we were driving back from the Moroccan village of Tourug in the middle of the atlas mountains. Last night’s Dhikr went till 3 in the morning and I was personally saw people go into ecstatic states with nothing in their system and just the name of Allah on their tongues, but much more importantly, in their hearts.
I asked sidi what he thought of psychedelics.
“Unauthorized access”.