by Howard Marks
Most people never realise that the purpose of intoxication is to sharpen the mind. They take marijuana, then eat heavily, then enjoy sex. They will enjoy penetration for one minute and think that they are copulating for years because of the drug’s distortion of the sense of time. It’s all such a waste.
Aghoris take all sorts of intoxicants, some much worse than these. It is a part of the sadhana. I used to keep a cobra and let him bite me on the tongue every hour, just for that peculiar thrill. To feed him I had to put a small hole in an egg and then forcibly pour the contents down his throat. The idea that cobras drink milk is ridiculous. I had several cobras, including one albino who had three lines on his hood: the symbol of Shiva. I kept a king cobra also. Its poison is much deadlier than that of other cobras because its diet is nothing but other cobras. I used to keep white arsenic also, and lick one of the crystals every hour or two. For my marijuana and hashish I had a special pipe made from a particular type of clay into which I had mixed arsenic, aconite, datura seeds, opium, and whatnot. It was a chillum, about a foot long. Beautiful! I used to drink twenty-four hours a day sometimes, and go through cases and cases of Scotch. I drank it neat, straight from the bottle. But after a while I began to think ‘What is the use!’ I have stopped most of my intoxicants, though I sometimes still drink alcohol or use bhang.
One of the big disadvantages of intoxicants is their side effects. Smoke chillum after chillum of marijuana or hashish and you are bound to develop a terrible cough, and probably chronic bronchitis. Drink bottle after bottle of whisky and your liver must suffer. Drink bhang and become chronically constipated. And long-term use of arsenic or mercury? Don’t even ask about it. But all these substances have their own special advantages, which is why Aghoris put up with all the disadvantages.
Most people think tobacco has nothing but disadvantages. They are so wrong. Tobacco is really a marvellous plant. Nowadays it is being misused by everyone because very few know how to use it properly, and that is why there are so many side effects. Poor tobacco is blamed, instead of the stupidity of the user. If it is properly employed it can work wonders. It has a hundred important uses in Ayurveda. Do you think that the American Indians were fools to worship it? Never! They knew what it could do.
But there are even better intoxicants. The rishis used to take soma, which is a type of leafless creeper. Some people today think soma was the poisonous mushroom Amanita muscaria, but that was also merely a substitute for the real thing. Only the rishis know what the true soma is, because only they can see it. It is invisible to everyone else. Before taking the plant the rishis would worship it on an auspicious day and take its permission. If the plant refused its permission, it was left alone. If it said ‘yes’, if it was willing, then they would make sure the plant would take birth as an animal after its demise. Then they would gather it with the appropriate mantras. If you want to use an intoxicating plant and can’t collect it yourself with mantras, you have to add a mantra afterwards if you want it to have the proper effect on you, and if you want to avoid the karma involved. Taking an intoxicant without its appropriate mantra is certain to ruin your Bhuta Agni, and your mind.
Some of my ‘children’ have started using alcohol or marijuana, thinking they could imitate me. But they have all landed in trouble, because you just can’t fool around with these things without knowing the method. Even those of my ‘children’ who I allow the occasional use of intoxicants have gone beyond their limits sometimes, and I have had to be strict with them.
One boy I am very fond of started thinking he was a great Aghori because I would permit him to take intoxicants with me. I decided he should be taught a lesson for his own good to prevent him from going overboard before he was able to gain complete control. Someone had given me some charas, and this boy was anxious to try it out. You know, charas is not the same thing as hashish. Hashish is the pollen and resin of the cannabis plant. Charas is prepared by taking the fresh fleece from a slaughtered sheep, stuffing it full of this resin, and burying it in the ground for a month. The fat from the sheep and the lanolin from the fleece mix with the resin and liquify it, and the liquid drips into a little pot. After a month the pot is removed, and there you have charas.
I prepared this charas for the boy personally, mixing it with tobacco and rubbing it with my hand in a little water, and I warned him, ‘Don’t inhale too hard. This sort of charas gets a firm grip on your head very easily. I know you’ve taken plenty of intoxicants in your life, but this one is different. Beware!’ But he ignored my advice, as I knew he would, and he and I started puffing away.
Within five minutes – only five – he realised he had taken too much; but it was too late. He began to lose all his body consciousness. His prana (vital force) collected in his throat, which prevented him from wagging his tongue. He was game for it, though, I must admit. He started to try to make the prana go up to the ajna chakra (the energy centre between the eyebrows) and then out through the sahasrara (the energy centre at the crown of the head) – gone for good! Had he succeeded he would have gone into nirvikalpa samadhi, a state in which he would have been permanently unable to self-identify with his body.
But I could not permit that to happen. After all, he still has plenty of rnanubandhanas to clear off yet, and if I prevent him from doing that, I become responsible for clearing them off myself. No thank you. So I told someone to give him some water. Drinking that glass of water kept his prana right there in his throat, unable to go up any farther. Of course the charas was still pushing from below. Now he was in the trishanku state: unable either to go up or to come down. He was neither in the world nor out of it; he lay suspended between the world – the lower five chakras – and the true shunya (state of ‘spiritual vacuum’) of the ajna chakra. So that he would not forget his lesson I permitted him to remain like that for several hours, while I went to the stables to see my racehorses. When I got back there he was, still hovering somewhere in between. When he was finally able to talk again I asked him what he had experienced. He told me, ‘I felt as if I was on the threshold of forgetting everything; as if just a little farther and it would have been only Thee and Me, and from there onward only Thee – or maybe only Me.’
‘Wait, wait,’ I told him laughing, ‘there is still time. Don’t be in a hurry. To go up fast is fine, but to come down too fast is fatal.’ And since that day he has always taken his intoxicants according to his capacity without permitting them to overcome his conscious mind, even by shunya. You must work very gradually with this intoxication business; Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.
Now, obviously, when I prepared that charas for him I added a mantra to it. Otherwise do you think the charas would have sent him into shunya? If that were so, all the charas addicts in the world should be enlightened by now.
One thing I always make sure to do is to take the antidote for whatever intoxicant I use. Ayurveda, our ancient Indian medical science, has provided us with methods to limit or eliminate the side effects on the body which these intoxicants cause, so that you get only the intoxication and none of the evil repercussions on your body, or almost none anyway. Even with all these precautions, however, your body will deteriorate when you take intoxicants, because your mind becomes partially free of the constraints of the body: that is the whole purpose of becoming intoxicated. Your mind works so fast that your body can’t keep up with it, and it becomes flaccid, loose. The less the mind self-identifies with the body the better for your sadhana, but the worse for your body; your physical health will give way to improved mental health. Or at the very least you will remain healthy but you will lose weight and fitness, because you are sitting all day long without exercise or food. But then you don’t care two hoots for your body because you find your mental play much more satisfactory.
Of course it is very good to possess a body when you take intoxicants; it acts as something like a sheet anchor when you want to retain your awareness. When you are ethereal you have nothing to hold on to, and other ethereal bei
ngs can play havoc with you if they catch you unaware; the possibilities are really frightening. But when you become really firm in your subtle body there is nothing to fear.
Until then, though, you need to have a strong, healthy body to withstand everything you will be going through. Don’t get me wrong; I was a wrestler myself, and I appreciate the benefits of a good physique. And this is another reason I discourage people from taking intoxicants: you have to be very healthy first and have done a lot of physical and mental cultivation before you can afford to get involved in this intoxicant business. Otherwise you’ll just make yourself toxic. And remember, the brain is a chemical matter, and each toxin produces a certain state of mind. So if you are not intrinsically healthy the intoxicant will not only not make your mind soar into the astral regions but it will create new brain toxins, which will overwhelm your mind with disturbing emotions, which will ruin your sadhana. So it is usually better to leave such things alone.
Aghoris believe in reducing sleep to the absolute minimum, because during sleep there is a possibility the mind may slip out of your control. All your careful precautions during waking will come to naught if you get caught up in a dream. Either you must suppress sleep absolutely or you must learn to control your dreams. There exists a plant for this purpose. Make a paste of it and apply it nightly to the soles of your feet. If you do it for thirty nights, or even forty nights, every night you’ll get the same dream. It is a type of intoxication; the toxins from the plant are affecting the same brains cells each time in the same way. This is necessary for the sadhana of Svapneshvari (Goddess of Dreams). Once you get siddhi of Svapneshvari you can control your dreams or stop dreaming altogether. You can also control the dreams of other people, which can be very useful.
Once, one of my friends had taken Aghori Baba’s stick for some work. When I asked him for it he refused to return it. I sent Svapneshvari to him. When she comes to someone she comes in a dream; her face can’t be seen. She warned him to return the stick or face the consequences; he ignored the warning. This was repeated three or four nights in a row. Then Svapneshvari came to him and told him, ‘This is your last warning. If you don’t return it, you’re heading for big trouble.’ When he woke up in the morning, he found a handprint in blood on his pillow. He obstinately refused to return the stick even then. The next night Svapneshvari came to him and said, ‘Now you have gone too far; take your punishment.’ The next morning he and everyone in his household woke up with high fevers, which would not go down; no medicine could cure them. He returned the stick, and then the fevers subsided.
There are plenty of other uses of Svapneshvari, but any way you look at it wakefulness is better than sleep. Intoxicants can be extremely useful in sadhanas, or they can ruin your consciousness. It all depends on how you use them, and to use them correctly you have to die first.
Aghora, 1986
Man, being reasonable must get drunk
The best of life is but intoxication
Lord Byron
Charles Baudelaire
Be You Drunken!
ONE MUST ALWAYS be drunk. That’s all there is to it; that’s the only solution. In order not to feel the horrible burden of Time breaking your shoulders and bowing your head to the ground, you must be drunken without respite.
But with what? With wine, poetry or virtue, as you will. Be you drunken.
And if sometimes you awake, on the steps of a palace, in the green herbage of a ditch or in the dreary solitude of your room, then ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, the clocks, ask everything that runs, that moans, that moves on wheels, everything that sings and speaks – ask them what is the time of day; and the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds and the clocks will answer you: It is time to get drunk. In order not to be the martyred slave of Time, be you drunken; be you drunken ceaselessly! With wine, poetry or virtue, as you will!
The Idler’s Companion, 1997
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Friedrich Nietzsche
Expeditions of an Untimely Man
TOWARDS A PSYCHOLOGY of the artist. For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic society or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens. All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this: above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of intoxication. Likewise the intoxication which comes in the train of all great desires, all strong emotions; the intoxication of feasting, of contest, of the brave deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction; intoxication under certain meteorological influences, for example the intoxication of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; finally the intoxication of the will, the intoxication of an overloaded and distended will. The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy. From out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them – one calls this procedure idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealization does not consist, as is commonly believed, in a subtracting or deducting of the petty and secondary. A tremendous expulsion of the principal features rather is the decisive thing, so that thereupon the others too disappear. In this condition one enriches everything out of one’s own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power, until they are reflections of his perfection. This compulsion to transform into the perfect is – art.
Twilight of the Idols, 1889
Truth comes out in wine
Pliny the Elder
Aleister Crowley
First Aid
I FOUND THAT during the day I had fifteen sniffs of heroin. Lou had only had eleven. The reaction in my mind was this: If she can get on with eleven, why shouldn’t I? Though I hadn’t sufficient logic to carry on the argument to the people, millions of them, who hadn’t had any at all, and seemed to be thriving.
We were both pretty tired. Just as Lamus and Lala rose to leave I took a final sniff.
‘What did you do that for,’ he asked, ‘if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Well, I think it was to go to sleep!’
‘But this morning you told me you took it to wake up,’ he retorted.
That was true, and it annoyed me; especially as Lou, instead of being sympathetic, gave one of her absurd little laughs. She actually seemed to take a perverse pleasure in seeing me caught out in a stupidity.
But Lamus took the matter very seriously.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it certainly is extraordinary stuff if it does two precisely opposite things at the will of the taker.’
He spoke sarcastically. He refrained from telling me what he told me long afterwards, that the apparently contradictory properties that I was ascribing to it were really there, that it can be used by the expert to produce a number of effects, some of which seem at first slightly mutually exclusive.
Diary of a Drug Fiend, 1970
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT
There went up a smoke out of His nostrils
II Samuel 22:9
Psalms 18:8
Howard Marks
The Story of Christmas
I’m dreaming of a stoned white Christmas, just like every other. Do I want the powdery stuff dissolving my nostrils? Or do I want to hold the icy stuff in my hands, reignite my hash hand-rolling skills, and make snowballs, the only known objects capable of indicating the difference between snowmen and snowwomen? When did it ever snow in Bethlehem?
This and other Christmas frauds was the first proof I’d encountered of my parents’ ability to sacrifice their principles of honesty and say downright lies for the sake of something held by them to be more sacramental than mere truth. In their case, m
anifesting care for loved ones (by distributing gifts), being charitable (by helping the needy and engendering goodwill) and expressing faith (believing something despite vast evidence to the contrary) were considered higher ideals than factual accuracy. But why this deal with a saintly North Pole resident called Santa Claus upstaging infidel magic-carpet rides and, by a correct focus on hanging stockings and suspenders, making witches headfucking broomstick flights look like wanking with a piece of wood? This holy Eskimo delivers your annual dope supplies on a flying trolley operating on several reindeer power. There’s no chance of being busted, even if the cops are watching: he delivers down the chimney. Cool! Then there’s mince pies, trimmings, holly, King Wenceslas, crackers, fir trees, fairies, partridges, pear trees and puddings, to say nothing of loving and shagging one’s neighbours under mistletoe and virgins giving birth in stables under shiny stars guiding heavily perfumed but wise Oriental despots.
At the very least, Christmas is meant to be a celebration of the birth of someone called Jesus Christ. Some say he was both God and the Son of God, born through immaculate conception provided by Himself. Logically, this renders him a motherfucker. Other unkind souls say he was a deranged faggot. Many think he was just a cool travelling dude whose dad was a carpenter and whose mum was a sweet lady called Mary. But there wasn’t much love around before Jesus Christ, not in the Old Testament. A mild, peaceful and pure guy, that’s for sure. Gentle as a lamb. While shepherds watched their flocks by night, Mary had a little lamb.
When the booze ran out at his mate’s wedding, Jesus turned water into wine. (He’d already trodden on the water in preparation.) When he knew Judas had grassed him up, he grabbed a bottleful of red wine, swallowed it and asked to be remembered by others through their doing the same trip. He is the true vine. So let’s have rivers of the Blood of Christ. Let it flow for Christ’s sake. Get off your face, and see God.