Osho Talks: about Drugs

Publié le 20 décembre 2007 par ati dion

I am against all prohibition. My own understanding is that if LSD can give some glimpse of samadhi, then all its bad aftereffects should be removed, because it is a chemical and it is in our hands. Those bad aftereffects are the problem. They should be removed and an LSD number two should be made -- clean, taken in complete awareness that it is going to give you only a glimpse. Its addictiveness can be taken out, and when you know it is going to give you only a glimpse there is no harm. It may lead you to the search for the real.

Rather than prohibiting the drugs, what is needed is to produce drugs which lead people to samadhi, which give an indication: if a chemical drug can be such a blessing, what will the real thing be ? It is just a dewdrop in comparison with the real oceanic feeling, the oceanic ecstasy.

But nobody listens to any right approach. Thousands of people are unnecessarily in the jails. The number may be millions, not thousands, and most of them are under-age; even six-year-olds have been found taking drugs. Nobody has suggested any solution for it.
And once a boy or girl, whatever their age, takes the drug, they cannot forget the experience. Everything else becomes just rotten; the mind continuously hankers for the drug. It is the duty of the governments of the whole world, through their chemical drug research, to produce drugs which are not harmful, which are not addictive. Any bad after effects have been removed, and only that part which gives a joyous feeling, a desire to dance and a desire to find something real is left, because that feeling will disappear within hours.

These drugs can be used in a right way. Everything can be used in a right way and everything can be used in a wrong way, but it is still the same thing.

It happens sometimes through drugs. Not a very good way to attain it -- very dangerous, very costly, and illusory -- but it happens. Hence the appeal of the drugs down the ages. Drugs are not new in the world; even in the Vedas they talk about SOMA. SOMA seems to be one of the most powerful drugs ever discovered by man. It must be something like LSD. Aldous Huxley has said that in the future, when the ultimate drug will be known, we will call it SOMA. From the Vedas, the ancientmost book in the world, to Timothy Leary, man has always been attracted by drugs -- alcohol, marijuana, opium. Why this attraction? And all the moralists have been against it, and all the puritans have been against it, and all the governments have tried to curb and control, but it seems beyond any government to control it. What has been the cause of it? It gives something... it gives a glimpse into the innocent mind of the child again.

Through chemical impact, the mind becomes loosened for a few moments or a few hours. Under the impact of the drug your thinking slips. You start looking into reality without thinking; again the world is colorful, as it is for the child; again in a small pebble you can see the greatest diamond; ordinary grass looks so extraordinary; an ordinary flower looks so tremendously beautiful; an ordinary human face looks so divine. Not that anything has changed. The whole world is the same. Something has changed in you -- and that too only temporarily. Through the forceful drug your mind has slipped down. You don't have the mask; you can see into things with clarity. That is the appeal of the drugs down the ages.

And unless meditation becomes available to millions of people, drugs cannot be prevented. Drugs are dangerous because they can destroy your body's equilibrium, they can destroy your nature, they can destroy your inner chemistry. You have a very delicate chemistry. Those strong drugs can destroy your rhythm. And more and more drugs will be needed and you will become addicted -- and less and less will be the experience. By and by, the mind will learn how to cope with the drugs, and then, even under the drug, you will not attain to the state of innocence. Then you will need even stronger drugs.
So this is not a way.

The mind can be put aside very easily. There is no need to depend on anything chemical, on anything artificial. There is a natural possibility to get out of the mind, because we were born without minds. Deep down we are still no-minds. The mind is only on the periphery. That's why I say it is just a cloak, a dress that you are wearing. You can slip out of it.

And one moment of slipping out of it will reveal to you a totally different world: the world of the first principle.
So the real fight in the future is going to be between meditation and drugs. In fact, that has always been the case: the real fight is between drugs and meditation, either drugs or meditation.

So it is not coincidental that when you start meditating by and by the pull of the drug becomes less and less. If it is not becoming less and less, then know well you are not meditating yet, because when you know the higher, the lower is dropped automatically.
But one thing has to be understood. Drugs do something; they UNDO something in you. They help you to get out of the mind. They give you courage to look into reality without thinking. For a moment the curtain slips, and suddenly you are aware that the world has a splendor. It had never had it before. You had passed through the same street and you had looked through the same trees and at the same stars and the same people, and today now everything suddenly is so luminous and everybody is so beautiful and everybody is afire with life, with love. A saint -- one who has attained -- lives in that state continuously, without any effort.

Hope is the greatest drug that man has invented. Strange, that religious people are against drugs; politicians are also against drugs. Politicians make laws against drugs, religious people create hell and punishment against drugs.

Why are they so afraid of drugs?

It needs a deep search, investigation. They are afraid of drugs because drugs are competitors to them. LSD can give you hallucinations of heaven. That's the trouble. No religion can afford to allow people to use LSD. LSD is not dangerous; taken in the right proportions, under medical care, it can be tremendously helpful in religious growth. But religions are not ready to allow it for the simple reason that if LSD can give you a beautiful experience -- hallucinatory, but still it is an experience and tremendously satisfying, fulfilling -- then just promises will look like dry bones without any juice in them. Only idiots perhaps may continue to chew the dry bones.

Dogs do that. They chew dry bones and enjoy very much, not knowing what is happening. When they chew dry bones those dry bones hurt their mouths and their mouths start bleeding. The more they chew, the more bleeding happens. And blood goes through their throat and they think -- logically enough -- that the blood is coming from the bone. Now, how to explain to a dog that, "it is your own blood; the bone is absolutely dry."

So perhaps a few idiots may still continue to go to the churches, but intelligent people will stop. Rather, when they feel the urge to have a beautiful hallucination, whenever they want to live in another world, they will not wait for death to come: they will go to a medical clinic and have a two, three-day session with LSD, and enjoy everything that their religious leaders have been telling them that they will get after death.
Drugs are dangerous to religions for the simple reason that they are their greatest competitors. And even better drugs can be invented, but religions continuously cripple the research.

Politicians are against drugs, because if people start taking drugs then who cares about your five-year plans? Who cares about the classless society that will come in the future to your grandchildren? Who cares about the revolution, democracy, freedom of speech? You don't have even the freedom to hallucinate!

This is absolutely innocent because only you are doing it, nobody else is involved. No, you don't have the freedom to hallucinate. Reduced to the basics, that's what drug prohibition means, that you don't have the freedom to hallucinate. The government is in control of your dreams. Drugs can give you dreams, and properly used, can help you to see many things in yourself which in psychoanalysis will take three years, four years; then too it is not certain that you will be able to see.

It is a well-known fact that scientists have discovered something like truth serum, but it is prevented from being used, because if something like truth serum is possible .... You take an injection of truth serum and then suddenly you can see all your falsities, your hypocrisies, your bogus personality ... and certainly if anything can make you aware of truth, it is bound to make you aware of all that is false: that is going to happen simultaneously. The moment you see the truth you see the false too.

In Eastern religions, for thousands of years drugs have been used just to make you aware that you are not your personality that you go on projecting in the world, that you are much more. The personality is just the tip of the iceberg. Deeper down is your bigger reality -- nine times more than your conscious mind.
Drugs can certainly be used to make people psychologically healthy. They can be used to make people again one, to destroy their split. What psychoanalysis does in three, five, seven years with thousands of dollars wasted, thousands of hours wasted, drugs can do within hours. But religions are against them. Politicians are against them. Governments are against them.

Why so much antagonism? I can understand there may be some bad side effects, but we have so much scientific knowledge today that all those elements which have bad side effects can be removed from the drugs. Rather than forcing millions of people into jails around the world, rather than wasting money on all these prisoners, the better and wiser way will be to give the money and the project to the scientists. LSD can be more purified, can be more ecstatic, without having any side effects. But nobody is ready to do it. Why are they not ready to do it? The governments are afraid that if people are not split, they will have so much energy that they will not be controllable. To enslave a split person is easy, because he is fighting with himself; he has no time to fight with anybody else. Politicians don't want you to become one.

The man living on the instinctive level only has an hallucination of love. That hallucination is created by nature, by biology, chemistry. You have in your body drugs which are released when you are making love, and you start moving into euphoria. That is one of the reasons why people who become addicted to drugs slowly slowly become uninterested in sex.

The hippies and yippies and all kinds of people -- when they became too interested in drugs, they lost their fervor for sex completely, because now they had found a better way of getting into a euphoric state. Now sex seemed to be nothing compared to it. That can give you a clue that both are drugs.

Nature has been using that drug in a very minute quantity; there was no need for more up to now. Perhaps nature will have to think again -- find out better drugs, create better chemistry, bring its level up to date; it is lagging far behind. Man's mind has created things like LSD far superior; so superior that a man like Aldous Huxley thought that LSD gives you samadhi -- that it is actually what Kabir and Buddha and Rumi and all the mystics of the world have been talking about. But they had bullock-cart methods to reach to this state.

Now science has given us very advanced drugs, there is no need for yoga and tantra and other things -- you just take an injection. You yourself push the injection, there is no need for somebody else to do it. And for hours you are in a euphoric state which is certainly superior to what you call orgasm, because orgasm is so momentary that it only creates more desire for it; it never gives you any satisfaction.

Drugs can make you happy; they can also make you unhappy, because no drug is guaranteed to give you happiness. The drug can only magnify your mood. If you are unhappy, you will be more unhappy with the drug; you will have nightmares. If you are happy, you will be more happy, madly happy. But a man who is happy under a drug you can immediately detect, for the simple reason that his happiness will be tense. It is just forced by chemicals on him. His face will be smiling, but as if somebody is putting a gun behind him and ordering him, "Smile, otherwise I am going to fire."

Chemicals can force you, but the forced smile, the forced happiness will show the tension. And it can last only for hours, and then you will fall back into a ditch, deeper than you were before, because all that tension has tired your whole system. All that happiness, which was false and forced and chemical, has taken even the little bit of natural happiness which was in you. And once it is gone you will fall into a deep darkness. And with drugs you will become addicted, so soon you will need more quantity, then more quantity, then more quantity, and a moment comes....

In India, we have experienced everything in these thousands of years. There are monks in India who can drink any amount of alcohol and it does not affect them, any amount of marijuana and it does not affect them at all, they remain just simply the same. The only thing that in the end they have to try when nothing else affects them is a cobra snake bite. So they keep cobra snakes with them. On their tongue they will take a bite by the cobra which can kill you -- but to them it just gives a little.... What drugs give to you, only cobra poison can give them -- and sooner or later they become accustomed to it.

I am against drugs for this reason -- because the drugs can give you a false blissfulness, and can stop you questioning, enquiring, doubting. Even a man like Aldous Huxley fell into the same ditch. When he took LSD he thought, "This is what Buddha was experiencing, Kabir was experiencing, and all the great masters of the world were experiencing." He thought, "We have found, for the first time, the shortcut to paradise." But within hours the effect of the LSD disappears, and you are back again, the same man, the same miserable creature. LSD has not transformed you.

Any hallucination -- either created by drugs, or created by programming your mind, or created by your hidden desires of being great -- is a hindrance to realizing the truth.

Why has the West come to drugs?

It is a very, very rational process. It has to come to it because searching for happiness one has to reach LSD sooner or later. The same has happened in India before. In the Vedas they reached soma, LSD, because they were seeking happiness; they were not really seekers of truth. They were seeking more and more gratification -- they came to soma. Soma is the ultimate drug. And Aldous Huxley has named the ultimate drug, when it is to be found somewhere in the twenty-first century, he has called it soma again. Whenever a society, a man, a civilization, seeks happiness, it has to come somewhere to drugs -- because happiness is a search for drugs. The search for happiness is a search to forget oneself; that's what a drug helps you to do. You forget yourself, then there is no misery. You are not there, how can there be misery? You are fast asleep.

The search for truth is just the opposite dimension: not gratification, not pleasure, not happiness, but "What is the nature of existence? What is true?" A man who seeks happiness will never find it -- at the most he will find forgetfulness. A man who seeks truth will find it, because to seek truth he will have to become true himself. To seek truth in existence, first he will have to seek the true in his own being. He will become more and more self-remembering.

These are the two paths: self-forgetfulness, the way of the world; and self-remembrance, the way of God. The paradox is that one who seeks happiness never finds it; and one who seeks truth and doesn't bother about happiness has always found it.

Pleasure is escape. That's why pleasure is not worth it. In fact it is not pleasure, it is a sort of suicide. You escape from the problems, you put your back to the problems, but this is no way to solve them. You will have to come back, because once you have become conscious, unconsciousness cannot be a permanent state of affairs. You can have a dive into unconsciousness, but how long can you remain underwater? For a second -- and then you are back again to the surface. You cannot remain unconscious for long. Alcohol or drugs or sex or anything in which you become unconscious, in which you lose for a moment all your worries, forget about them -- it is a forgetfulness, but forgetfulness cannot be a permanent state.

So this is not helping in any way, pleasure doesn't help. You have to come back again and again -- and then it becomes a vicious circle. When you come back and you find the anguish is waiting, the anxiety, all the problems -- rather, they have increased -- you become afraid, you become nervous. Your whole being trembles and becomes fear; then you have to escape again and again. The more you escape, the more problems increase. The more problems you face, the more alcohol is needed. And then the quantity of the intoxicant has to be increased continuously because you become attuned to it. You take a certain quantity of a drug: the first day you feel unconscious. After a few days you are not unconscious; you are still conscious, worries are still there knocking at the door, you can hear -- you need a greater quantity. The greater quantity will also become less. You can move to a point.... In India they have tried; there are a few sects which have been working through alcohol, drugs, things like marijuana, mescaline. In the West it is a new phenomenon; that's why the West is so worried about it. In the East it is one of the oldest things.

A particular sect of Tantrikas have been working through drugs, finding a way to attain consciousness through drugs, and they have found that, by and by, you become so attuned that nothing can make you unconscious. Then they have poisonous snakes -- just a bite and an ordinary men will die. When no drug affects them, then they take the snake to their tongue so the tongue is bitten by the snake. Ordinarily a man will die immediately. They do it just to seek unconsciousness through the most poisonous thing -- but even that doesn't affect them. A time comes when the man is completely beyond the world of drugs; you cannot make him unconscious, nothing helps. And this man, if he bites you, you will die immediately. His whole body is poisonous.
In old, ancient Indian history, there is reference to a particular detective woman. Every king had beautiful girls to be trained from their very childhood in such a way that their whole body became poisonous. They were known as VISHKANYA, as poisonous girls -- very beautiful. And then the king could send those girls to the enemies, to the enemy king, and they were so beautiful that he was bound to be attracted. Once they kissed the king, the king was dead. They were absolutely poisonous. Even their kiss was enough -- no need to bite.

A moment comes when no drug helps. These Tantrikas have been working through drugs towards awareness. When no drug affects you, you are already integrated, and now you can move towards the height without any fear of falling -- because you cannot be made unconscious, you have crystallized your consciousness. But ordinarily one is not working through drugs for consciousness, and the path is very dangerous. Ordinarily one is seeking unconsciousness, a little forgetfulness in this world of worries, anguish, anxiety, this world which looks like a hell. One wants to forget. All your pleasures are just forgetfulness.

Many times you will think: To become consciously one seems almost impossible. Rarely does a buddha happen. To a buddha, again the song comes, then again he is singing like a bird, he is flowering like a tree, he is open like the sky, he is rich like the earth, he is wild, like the wild ocean. Again he is one, but now this unity is a higher unity -- the highest. He is consciously one. Oneness has been attained through consciousness. He is again nature, but in a totally different way. The quality of his being has changed. He is again back to nature, but he is no more the same. Consciousness has been attained.
But this happens rarely, so your mind will say: That seems to be impossible. It seems more possible to fall back into unconsciousness; hence the appeal of drugs, alcohol. Always, governments have been against drugs. Always, religions have been against drugs. Always, moralities have been against drugs. But still, for man they have a deep appeal. No law has been able to prohibit them from man.

What is the appeal? The appeal is this: alcohol and other drugs -- now there are many in the market: marijuana, LSD, psilocybin... and many more will be coming -- the appeal of drugs is that they give you the feeling of oneness without the effort of becoming a buddha. You fall back into nature. Through chemicals you force yourself back into unity with nature, where birds are singing and trees are flowering. You force yourself back.
This is a violence on the whole system of your being, and this is destroying the effort of nature to reach a higher harmony through you. This is against nature. For a few moments you can attain a forced oneness with nature, through drugs. But it cannot be a permanent achievement. It cannot become an integral part of your inner being. It can never become an integral part because to go back is not possible. You can only force yourself back.
It is like.... You cannot become a child again. You cannot step back. You cannot enter the womb of the mother again. There is no way back. Time doesn't move that way. It moves forward, it never moves backward. So you cannot go backward. The only way, the only going, is to go forward; there is no other going.

So drugs are a deception. They give you a feeling which is imaginary, hallucinatory, they give you a feeling that you are back, part of nature. People come to me; they say, "I have been on a drug trip, and it was beautiful, and so many things happened." Nothing happened! -- because after it you are again the same, even worse. It only releases dreams in you, but you become so unconscious that you take the dreams to be real. You are not aware, so you cannot see whether this is a dream or a reality.

Under drugs you can think yourself a bird singing in the trees, flying in the sky, but you remain all the time on the earth. You have not moved a single inch. And when the trip is over and you open your eyes, you are where you were. But in the meanwhile a dream was created, a vivid dream, a very real-looking dream, not even a suspicion that this was just a hallucination of the mind. You have done something with the cells of the mind, and they have started revolving, and they have created something -- sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes hell, sometimes heaven. It depends on your mood, the physical condition of your body, the situation around, the whole milieu.

So sometimes you can visit hell, and sometimes you can visit heaven through chemicals, but you are not going anywhere, you remain where you are. But man is in such anguish that if even for moments he can escape from duality it feels like freedom.
All religions have been against drugs. The reason is this: if you become an addict then the whole possibility of your higher dimension, of your higher unity, of achieving buddhahood, of becoming a christ, is lost. They are not against drugs, in fact. They are not concerned with drugs, they are concerned with your higher unity. If you start falling backwards in your mind, and if you become attuned with the lower unity of nature, then who will evolve? Then you have frustrated the very effort of nature through you. It was going to achieve God -- and you are satisfied with a drug.

It is a poor substitute, very very poor -- but the appeal indicates something; it indicates that man can be at home in only two ways. Either he falls back into nature through chemicals, through sex, or through other means, or he rises above himself, and reaches a point where his whole consciousness has become conscious; nothing remains unconscious in him. The dark continent of unconsciousness is there no more. All corners of his being are lighted up. This is the meaning of becoming a buddha. A buddha means he who has no unconscious. A buddha means he whose whole being is transformed into light, awareness. Again -- the celebration, the marriage, the feast, but on a totally different plane.

I am also against drugs, for the simple reason that they help you to forget your misery for a time. They do not prepare you to fight misery and suffering; rather they weaken you.
But the reasons of religions and governments for being against drugs and my reasons for being against drugs are totally different. They want man to remain miserable and frustrated, because the man in suffering is never rebellious; he is tortured in his own being, he is falling apart. He cannot conceive of a better society, of a better culture, of a better man. Because of his misery he becomes an easy victim of the priests because they console him, because they say to him, "Blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who suffer, because they shall inherit the kingdom of God."
The suffering humanity is also in the hands of the politicians, because the suffering humanity needs some hope -- hope of a classless society somewhere in the future, hope of a society where there will be no poverty, no hunger, no misery. In short, they can manage and be patient with their sufferings if they have a utopia just close to the horizon. And you must note down the meaning of the word utopia. It means that which never happens. It is just like the horizon; it is so close that you think you can run and meet the place where earth and sky meet. But you can go on running your whole life and never meet the place, because there is no such place. It is a hallucination.

The politician lives on promise, the priest lives on promise. In the last ten thousand years nobody has delivered the goods. Their reason for being against drugs is that drugs destroy their whole business. If people start taking opium, hashish, LSD, they don't care about communism, and they don't care about what is going to happen tomorrow; they don't care about life after death, they don't care about God, paradise. They are fulfilled in the moment.

Here my reasons are different. I am also against drugs, not because they cut the roots of the religions and the politicians, but because they destroy your inner growth towards spirituality. They prevent you from reaching the promised land. You remain hanging around the hallucinations, while you are capable of reaching the real. They give you a toy.

But since drugs are not going to disappear, I would like every government, every scientific lab, to purify drugs, to make them healthier without any side effects, which is possible now. We can create a drug like the one which Aldous Huxley, in memory of Rig Veda, called soma, which will be without any bad effects, which will not be addictive, which will be a joy, a happiness, a dance, a song.

If we cannot make it possible for everybody to become a Gautam Buddha, we have no right to prevent people from at least having illusory glimpses of the aesthetic state which Gautam Buddha must have had. Perhaps these small experiences will lead the person to explore more. Sooner or later he is going to be fed up with the drug, because it will go on repeating the same scene again and again. Howsoever beautiful a scene is, repetition makes it a boredom.

So first purify the drug from all bad effects. Second, let people who want to enjoy, enjoy. They will become bored by it. And then their only path will be to seek some method of meditation to find the ultimate bliss.

IT IS BEING SAID THAT YOU ENCOURAGE DRUGS; CAN YOU PLEASE CLARIFY THIS?

That is absolutely nonsense.
I am against drugs.
I have to be against drugs for the simple reason that meditation cannot grow if you are taking drugs. Drugs make you unconscious, and meditation makes you conscious. They are opposite to each other. Drugs are needed by people who are miserable so that they can drown their misery in unconsciousness.

People who are meditating do not need drugs, because if they use drugs they will drown their blissfulness into unconsciousness and that will be absolutely irrational, unnatural. Who wants to forget blissfulness? Everybody wants to forget misery, suffering, anguish. My whole teaching is meditation, and drugs are against it. How can I support drugs? It is a contradiction.

The great appeal of drugs in the West is only because the West has succeeded in destroying the right hemisphere completely because of compulsory education. The West has become too educated -- that means it has gone to the very excess, to one side. It has become extreme. Now there seems to be no possibility. Unless you introduce some ways which can help the right hemisphere to be revived again in the universities and colleges and the schools, drugs are not going to go. There is no possibility of prohibiting drugs by law alone. There is no way to enforce it unless the inner balance is put right again.

The appeal of the drug is that it immediately shifts gear -- from the left hemisphere your energy moves to the right hemisphere. That's all the drug can do. Alcohol has been doing it for centuries but now far better drugs are available -- LSD, marijuana, psilocybin. and even better drugs will be available in the future.

And the criminal is not the drug-taker, the criminal is the politician and the educationalist. It is they who are guilty. They have forced the human mind into one extreme -- into such an extreme that now there is a need to revolt. And the need is so great! Poetry has completely disappeared from people's life, beauty has disappeared, love has disappeared... money, power, pull, they have become the only gods. How can humanity go on living without love and without poetry and without joy and without celebration? Not for long.

And the new generation all over the world is doing a great service by showing the stupidity of your so-called education. It is not a coincidence that drug-takers almost always become drop-outs. They disappear from the universities, colleges. It is not a coincidence -- this is part of the same revolt.

And once a man has learned the joys of drugs it becomes very difficult for him to drop them. Drugs can be dropped only if better ways can be found which can release your poetry. Meditation is a better way -- less destructive, less harmful, than any kind of chemical. In fact, it is not harmful at all, it is beneficial. Meditation also does the same thing: it shifts your mind from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. It releases your inner capacity of creativity.

A great calamity that is going to be in the world through drugs can be avoided by only one thing -- that is, meditation. There is no other way. If meditation becomes more and more prevalent and enters peoples' lives more and more, drugs will disappear. And education must start to be not so absolutely against the right hemisphere and its functioning.

Let me say to you: Politics and money are as much drugs as LSD and marijuana -- and far more dangerous. If one has to choose between LSD and money, LSD is far better. If one has to choose between politics and LSD, then LSD is far better and far more religious. Why do I say so? because through LSD you will only be destroying yourself, but through money you destroy others too. Through LSD you will be simply destroying your chemistry, your biology, but through politics you will destroy millions of people.

I OFTEN TAKE DRUGS. ONCE WHEN I WAS ATTENDING THE DISCOURSE, I CLOSED MY EYES AND SUDDENLY FELT THE SAME AS I FEEL ON A DRUG TRIP. OSHO, IS THERE ANY RELATION OR SIMILARITY BETWEEN SAMADHI AND DRUGS?

There is and there is not. There is because drugs create a false SAMADHI, a pseudo SAMADHI almost like the SAMADHI. SO there is a relationship because even if drugs create false SAMADHI, they create something similar to SAMADHI; and there is no relationship also because the false is not the real, and the false can never be the real. It is like this: if you are hungry in the night you dream that you are eating -- yes, in the dream -- everything looks like eating; you feel satisfied, you turn over and go to sleep. In the morning you feel it was just a dream. It has not nourished you, it simply deceived you.

Drugs deceive you and create a false SAMADHI -- they don't nourish you.

Some day, when you will awaken, then you will see that you were simply dreaming that you were eating. It helped, because if you are hungry the dream that you are eating helps you to continue sleep, otherwise your sleep will be broken. If the hunger is too much, how can you sleep? So the mind creates a dream: the mind says 'Okay, you are hungry -- eat!' In the dream you go to the fridge, you open the fridge, you are eating many things that you have always been denying yourself. You eat well, you feel perfectly good, you turn over and you go to sleep. In the morning you know that it was a false food. Dream food cannot help -- but you will only know in the morning, not before it. And the morning I am talking about may not come if you don't work for it.
So drugs can deceive you, they can deceive you for your whole life. They create a similarity through chemical change: through chemical coercion of the body and the mind cells a certain state is created which feels as if one has arrived. In the morning, when the drug influence is over, you are in exactly the same place as you were before -- maybe even lower, because every high experience through drugs is bound to be followed by a very low and depressed experience. Then again more drugs are needed, and the quantity has to be increased -- you become an addict. This is not a way towards truth because it is not nourishing.

SAMADHI is a nourishment. You are not drugged by SAMADHI, you are awakened. But there is a similarity, so sometimes it can happen if you have been taking drugs. There can come a moment listening to me when you become silent, you are in tune with me. And suddenly there is a moment, a moment of tremendous joy and beauty, and because you have been taking the drug, you will start thinking in terms of the drug. But if it is happening just by listening to me.... Think of it. If you meditate, if you go into the same world where I exist, into the same dimension where I exist -- and if it can happen just by listening to me -- then what to say about when you yourself will move into that world? Then you will know that all those experiences through drugs were just foolish, silly; you were wasting your energy and wasting your time.

But they keep you asleep. If you are interested in sleep, drugs are good, alcohol is good, any type of chemical that helps you feel that you are happy is good. Happiness never comes through it, it just gives you the illusion of being happy; it keeps you asleep. But if you are interested in becoming alert, awakened, then it is dangerous. Then you are undoing your very longing to become awakened, enlightened. You are undoing it by your drugs.

Man needs drugs because civilisation has dulled your senses. Now this is a problem. The government, the society, the politicians they are against drugs, but they are the source, because they have created such an ugly humanity that people have lost all sensitivity. Now they are trying desperately to find that sensitivity in any way -- even if it comes through drugs. Drugs are harmful, but to live without sensitivity is not to live at all. To live without sensitivity is to live a very dull life, a dead life. Five thousand years of culturisation, five thousand years of civilisation, have dulled humanity so much that they are bound to rebel against it. Now the politicians and the priests are the source. It is they who are responsible for driving humanity to such a desperate state where people want to take drugs. And drugs cannot be stopped unless man is made sensitive again. Drugs will disappear once man becomes sensitive again.

My approach is that if you are sensitive, you will not take the drug. For what? Just to harm yourself? When you are sensitive, even if somebody gives you a drug free you will not take it, because a sensitive man will feel his sensitivity lessened through drugs. A dull person will feel that his sensitivity grows and a sensitive person will feel that his sensitivity is dulled. It is relative: it depends on you. If you feel good through a drug, it simply shows that you have become very dull; and to feel sensitive through chemicals is simply meaningless because they are not going to make you sensitive. You will need more and more drugs, in larger and larger quantities, but the basic problem remains there. The basic problem is how to attain the receptivity, the sensitivity, of the body again, how to make your body alive again. The resurrection of the body is needed, and that resurrection is possible only when you are no longer using your body as an ego vehicle.

BEFORE COMING TO YOU, WHEN TAKING DRUGS I ALWAYS FELT MORE ONE WITH THE WHOLE. AFTER SIX MONTHS WITH YOU I HAD A FEW SMOKES AND EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE HAPPENED: STONED, I FELT MORE SPLIT. CAN YOU EXPLAIN THIS?

There is no need. It is self-explanatory. If you are neurotic, drugs will give you a glimpse of health, of oneness. If you are split then drugs will give you a dream of being one, undivided. But if you meditate you really become one; then to take drugs won't help. If you meditate then the reality of oneness is realized; then the dream will not be of any use. In fact, then to take drugs will be destructive: through them you will feel split. That's why I go on saying: people who are in search of drugs are really in search of meditation -- searching for something in a wrong direction. Their search is perfectly right, their direction wrong. I am not against them, because they are the seekers. The urge has arisen in them, but they are moving in a wrong direction. They can be brought to the right direction.

More people are needed to help them to meditate. No government, no state can suppress them, that's impossible. The more they will be suppressed, the more they will feel attracted towards drugs. The more they will become neurotic, the more there will be need for drugs. Only more temples, more meditations around the world, more people meditating will be of help. Once you meditate you have moved in the right direction -- sooner or later, drugs will fall by themselves. No need to drop them; they will drop.

It is just as if you are carrying stones, colored stones, and then suddenly I give you real diamonds. Will you go on carrying those colored stones in your hands? Will there be any effort on your part to drop them? You will simply drop them: hands will open and they will drop because now diamonds are available. And now if you want to carry those stones you will have to drop the diamonds.
No need to explain. It is self-explanatory.

All experiences are chemical -- but one distinction has to be made. There are two ways. One is to put the chemicals in -- inject, smoke, or throw in the body. They come from the outside; they are intruders. That's what all drug people are doing around the world. The other way is to change the body by fasting, breathing.... That's what all the yogis have been doing in the East. They belong to the same path; the difference is very little. The difference is that drug people take drugs from the outside, they intrude in the biochemistry of the body, and the yogis try to change the balance of their own body, not to intrude from the outside. But as far as I am concerned, both are the same.
But if you have any urge to experience, I will tell you to choose the path of the yogis, because that way you will not be dependent, you will be more independent. And that way you will never become an addict, and that way your body will retain its purity, its organic unity. And that way, at least, you will not be an offense to the law -- no police raid possible. And that way you can go beyond easily. Hmm?... that is the most important thing.

If you take chemicals from the outside into the body, you will remain with them. It will be difficult, more and more difficult every day to go beyond. In fact you will become more and more dependent, so dependent that you will lose all life, all charm of life, and the drug experience alone will become your whole life, the whole center of it.
If you move through yoga, through the inner changes in the chemistry of the body, you will never be dependent, and you will be able to go beyond. Because the whole point of religion is to go beyond experiences. Whether you experience beautiful colors -- rainbow all around through LSD -- or you experience heaven through yoga exercises, basically there is no difference. In fact until you go beyond all experiences, all objective experiences, until you come to the point where only the witness remains and no experience to be experienced, only the experiencer remains, you have not touched the boundary of religion.