We Don’t Use Drugs

. . . as we rearrange our habitual ways of perceiving and understanding the world

My new book isn’t my solo creation, but a collaboration between me and my Soul Team. For more info about that spectacular fact, go here: tinyurl.com/OurSoulTeam

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Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality is a manual, manifesto, and storybook. It encourages and inspires us to rearrange our habitual ways of perceiving and understanding the world.

We describe earthy experiments, playful shifts in perception, daring dreamwork, quirky rituals, and wild and funny meditations that have helped my Soul Team and me loosen the iron clutches of consensus reality.

We also share our Alternative Enlightenment Shocks: transgressive, playful, and sometimes chaotic interventions in the everyday flow. They’re designed to liberate us from the boring assumptions and theories we’re addicted to.

None of these rumbles and rambles asks us to renounce our humanness. They invite us to inhabit our beloved flesh more fully, so that the sacred becomes available everywhere, not just sitting in the meditation sanctuary, but also standing at the kitchen sink, dancing in the wetland mud, and waiting in line at the DMV.

Below is an excerpt from the book.

We Don’t Choose to Use Drugs

In our fun project to evoke altered states of awareness, my Soul Team and I don’t use drugs.

Some people find it strange that we don’t call on marijuana, psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and similar technologies. A few fellow consciousness explorers regard our choice with bemused skepticism, as if we are choosing to climb a mountain barefoot.

They’re not wrong to be puzzled. Psychedelics are experiencing a renaissance. They have moved from counterculture taboo to therapeutic mainstream, from Grateful Dead concerts to clinical trials at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Ayahuasca ceremonies, psilocybin retreats, and MDMA-assisted therapy are now respectable paths to the Mysterium.

Many wise guys and riot grrrls we esteem have chosen this mode of experimental exploration: Jean Houston, Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, Katherine MacLean, Sara Lewis, Maria Sabina, Sonia Gray, and Rick Strassman, to name a few.

So why don’t we partake?

The short answer: We want to build doorways, not smash our way through temporary portals. Our goal is to become skillful architects of consciousness, not meandering tourists.

We want our access to The Other Real World to be a maestro trick we can summon at will, in any circumstance, without depending on any substance beyond what we ourselves can generate.

But there’s a longer answer too, and it begins with acknowledging the bounty we gained from drugs in our earlier years.

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The Gifts We Received

My Soul Team and I aren’t snooty purists who have never touched psychedelics. In my younger adulthood, I experimented reverently with marijuana, hashish, LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.

These technologies were generous teachers. They provided abundant evidence that our materialism-obsessed culture prevaricates about the fundamental nature of existence.

As a suburban middle-class kid from the Midwest and New Jersey, I had far to go in my quest to shed my mind-forg’d manacles. My journey was slowed by numerous detours and mistakes, but I eventually claimed my own earthy, hard-earned share of Hermetic Gnostic knowledge.

Crucially for me, my early psychedelic forays gave me wondrous gifts. They demolished any illusions I might have that the material world is the only game in town. They gave me visceral, firsthand immersion in the reality that shamans, sorcerers, and mystics have always known: that there are other dimensions and other ways of perceiving in addition to the usual stories that consensus reality insists on. For that, I am deeply grateful.

My Soul Team and I don’t look down on those who continue to use these tools. How could we? The psychedelic path is ancient, sacred, and necessary for many people. It’s among the prime practices of Indigenous cultures worldwide, as well as an often-used technology in many mystery schools.

But we understand that the very thing that makes psychedelics so powerful is also their limitation for us: their ability to blast through the barriers of ordinary consciousness solely with chemical assistance.

The Problem with Shortcuts

As I wrote in my journal during the experiments of early adulthood, psychedelics comprise a “chemical battering ram” that simply crashes through the doors of perception. There’s little adroitness or craft involved. One of my early magick teachers called drug use, no matter how responsible, “storming the Grail Castle through violence.”

That phrase lodged in my consciousness like a healing splinter.

The revelations that drugs provided were indeed hard to hold onto. As I came down from a psychedelic high, I could translate no more than 15 percent (usually much less) of my discoveries in the fourth dimension into usable understandings back in normal waking awareness. If my fantastic insights couldn’t be turned into practical improvements in my life or anyone else’s life, what good were they?

Compare this to dreamwork, which I have practiced since childhood. With dreams, I have seen steady growth, both in my unconscious mind’s ability to generate meaningful stories and in my conscious mind’s skill at interpreting them. Every night, I practice. Every morning, I remember, record, and reflect. Over many years, this has built muscles and created skills. No one can ever become a master of the dream realm, but I have gathered many riches there that serve me well in the waking world.

Psychedelics, by contrast, bypass willpower entirely. They work regardless of whether we have consciously cultivated any capacity for altered states. They deliver the experience but not necessarily the ability to integrate it, sustain it, or return to it at will.

What We’re Building Instead

When William Blake wrote that “this world of Imagination is the world of Eternity,” he gave me a revelation as profound as any drug-induced vision: that the creative imagination itself, when disciplined and cultivated, can be a main doorway to The Other Real World.

His gift changed everything. It meant that my passion for music, poetry, writing, art, dreamwork, and ritual could be at the heart of my spiritual practice. Every song I compose, every poem I write, every waking vision I induce, potentially becomes medicine with which I can shift and mutate consciousness: a method for playing wild and free in The Other Real World.

Here are other practices that can provide robust access to altered states:

• Meditation: We practice multiple, ever-evolving forms. Among our baseline practices are techniques from Hermetic Qabalah and Western Magick, Sufism, the Fourth Way, and Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. But we also celebrate the approach articulated by scholar Christopher Bamford, who said that as a free act, meditation has no fixed recipe. Every meditation is a trial run and experiment, different each time it’s done. It thrives on improvisation and play. There’s no way to “do it wrong.”

• Tantric practice: Erotic play and lovemaking are spiritual technologies.

• Through experiments with breathwork, prolonged arousal, feral prayers, conscious intention, and rowdy play, we generate sustained states of breakthrough ecstasy and epiphanies that can rival drug-induced bliss.

• Music and movement: We drum, chant, sing, and dance ourselves into altered states. Sound and rhythm are among humanity’s oldest consciousness-shifting tools, and we deploy them regularly.

• Creative work: When we write and sing with full attention and surrender, we can enter flow states that open directly into The Other Real World.

• Ritual and ceremony: We create ceremonies and seek imaginal adventures that invoke spirit allies and ancestors. These are collaborative performances that inspire us far beyond what we could do alone.

• An array of Alternative Enlightenment Shocks: healing transgressions and joyous what-the-fuck experiments carried out amidst the everyday routine.

The common thread in all of these? They require work and demand practice. They ask us to develop skills, build capacity, and strengthen the muscles of consciousness.

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The Sustainable Freak Zone

Every time we successfully enter an altered state through our own cultivated abilities, we’re not just indulging in a solo breakthrough. We’re also building infrastructure in the Anima Mundi, or World Soul: what mystics from diverse cultures have called Indra’s Net, the Noosphere, the Akashic Records, the Collective Unconscious, and many other names.

We mostly name it as The Other Real World. But to ensure we don’t take ourselves too tragically seriously, we also refer to it as The Peak Freak Zone.

Consciousness explorers like us are participants in “The Great, Gorgeous, Glorious Work”: a vast interdimensional construction project that has been ongoing for millennia. Each technique we master, each successful journey we make through our own human power, adds another facet to the infrastructure that makes further exploration by others more possible.

Psychedelics are like taking a helicopter to the top of a mountain. You get to the summit, enjoy the view, and gain the revelation. But you haven’t built the trail, and you can’t guide others. You’ll need the helicopter the next time you want to return.

Our practice is trail-building. It’s slower and more laborious. But every time we make the journey, the path becomes more accessible not just for us, but potentially for other adventurers who follow.

We’re not just visiting The Other Real World. We’re creating stable portals between the realms. These portals stay open. The next time, we can access them at will. They don’t require any substance beyond our own consciousness.

The Political Dimension

There’s another reason for our choice.

When you need a substance to access certain states of consciousness, you’re creating a dependency. Not necessarily an addiction, but a structural reliance on a technology outside yourself. You need to acquire the substance. Is it possible to ensure its quality? Maybe, maybe not. If the substance is illegal, you’ve got to avoid being arrested. And chances are good you will require downtime and extra self-care to regenerate from the experience.

By contrast, these are always available for us hassle-free: our breath, our imagination, our nightly dreams, our capacity for inducing waking dreams in broad daylight, and our ability to enter altered states through movement, music, sex, poetry outbreaks, meditation, ritual, and friendly shocks. No government can criminalize them. No scarcity can prevent access. They are freely given gifts we earn through our generous and intimate relationship with the Great Mystery.

In a world of increasing surveillance and control, these concerns matter. For us, the most radical act is to take advantage of the fact that human consciousness itself, properly cultivated, is the most powerful psychedelic of all.

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The Fuller Spectrum

Our choice comes from ambition, not primness or fear. No apologies or inhibitions: We want full access to the entire spectrum of consciousness that’s available, on demand, in any circumstance.

We aspire to enter visionary states while making love or improvising rumbustious music or dancing in the wetland mud. We want to glide into The Peak Freak Zone while hiking up Mt. Tamalpais or babbling poetry or washing dishes and sweeping the floor. Our lives must be continuously permeable to the sacred, not just during special journeys with special substances.

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Hear my song “I Want Everybody”:

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Check out my Linktree, with links to other things I create: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality is available at online stores, and you can get a 25% discount here: tinyurl.com/SacredEarthySelves

Also available as a cheap e-book: https://tinyurl.com/REBELSebook

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Check out my NOTES: newsletter.freewillastrology.com/notes

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of October 8

LIBRA: Periodically, you have the cosmic right to receive precisely what you need. Life is duty-bound to deliver a close approximation of full satisfaction. I believe now is one of those times. So please be bold and articulate about naming the specific blessings you require. Write them down, speak them aloud, and pray for them—not as a demand, but as a hearty invitation. Then, for a while, live as if all of creation is indeed honor-bound to respond accordingly, adjusting its behavior so it’s in harmony with the gifts you’ve asked for.

SCORPIO: Every Thursday night, I haul my trash bin out to the street so the collectors can empty it the following morning. Most weeks it’s three-quarters full. But now and then I produce an unusually large haul of debris. On those occasions, I have to turn into a one-person compaction crew: I grab a low-hanging branch of the persimmon tree, hoist myself up, drop down feet-first into the can, and bounce around to squash everything enough to squeeze in the overflow. Consider this my audition to be your role model, Scorpio. According to my reading of the celestial weather, it’s time for you to consolidate and discard at least half a year’s accumulation of obsolete clutter—both the invisible emotional kind and the tangible stuff filling your space.

SAGITTARIUS: Ancient navigators sometimes crossed vast stretches of sea by studying the swells beneath their boats. Their bodies were instruments of perception that enabled them to feel the subtle wave patterns generated by winds and distant islands. Your intuition has a similar sensitivity these days, Sagittarius. I hope you will trust it: what your whole being senses before your rational mind assembles the evidence. I call this fully embodied intelligence. It deserves a key role in your decision-making.

CAPRICORN: I’ve never been a fan of Capricorn poet Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931). The ideas he expressed seem commonplace and sentimental to me. But his book The Prophet is an all-time bestseller translated into over 100 languages. Millions of readers have adored and benefited from his words, and he’s acclaimed as a literary hero in his native Lebanon. So who cares what I think! I’ll just shut up and appreciate the fact that he worked hard and published a lot. His disciplined, painstaking efforts have been widely inspirational. Let’s make him your role model for the coming months. I think you’re primed to create enduring offerings that nourish people’s souls.

AQUARIUS: Think of an aspect of your life that you have always wished you could change but have assumed or feared you could never change. What if, sometime soon, you try to change it, but this time you do it with playful lightheartedness? You resolve to feel zero stress and have as much fun as possible as you try to shift how this problem works. You decide you will use your imagination to dream up unprecedented and even outrageous ways to break your trance and invite sweet liberation to swoop in.

PISCES: Geologists tell us that over time, rocks really do get transformed under sustained pressure. Their material gets reorganized into denser, more stable stuff. This is an apt metaphor for you, dear Pisces. You’re under pressure right now, and it may feel intense. But what if it’s actually reconfiguring you? Maybe the constraints are what you need to make you more focused, more essential, and more real. Not all pressure is bad, and this is proof. Ask yourself: What is this pressure making possible that freedom couldn’t create? Let yourself be reorganized.

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ARIES: “Dear Oracle: My secret terror is being ordinary. I need to be special, and lately I’m worried I’m just average and unremarkable. That thought is repugnant to me! Can you offer any advice? —Afraid of Average.” Dear Afraid: The pressure to be extraordinary is exhausting because it’s the wrong goal. Your birthright and your life assignment aren’t about being special in the sense of better-than. You’re simply meant to be vividly, generously, amazingly yourself. In the coming weeks, I invite you to trade the anxious hunt for superiority for the warm, throbbing joy of full self-expression. Shine because it feels fantastic, not to outrank anyone.

TAURUS: Ravens sometimes hide food while pretending to conceal it elsewhere, especially if another raven is observing. They’re strategic and imaginative and aware of how they’re perceived. With their social intelligence as inspiration, I will encourage you to think more consciously about the stories you’re broadcasting. Which precious projects will flourish better if protected from premature scrutiny? Do you have any in-progress blooms that really should continue to incubate before being revealed? Discernment isn’t deception. PS: Conversely, there may be a part of you that deserves greater visibility.

GEMINI: The Taurus philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward. You Geminis are naturally inclined to resist that advice. Many of you analyze experiences while they’re still unfolding. Can I coax you to try a different approach in the coming weeks? As usual, you may be tempted to figure everything out immediately. But the most useful clarity won’t arrive until later, as you survey what has occurred and recognize patterns you couldn’t see in real time. So try to stay curious rather than overly diagnostic. Keep gathering impressions, stories, and clues. Allow events to transpire like chapters in a book whose ending you haven’t reached yet.

CANCER: The Germans have a word, Sehnsucht, for a feeling that my English language can’t quite convey: a deep, sweet, aching longing for something you can’t name. It may be a faraway home you’ve never visited or a wholeness you seem to remember without ever having had it. Most people treat this yearning as a problem to be fixed or numbed. But I think it’s sacred information, Cancerian, and you’re especially fluent in it right now. Don’t rush to resolve the ache or explain it away. Instead, follow it like a scent. What is your Sehnsucht pointing toward? Let it lead you toward the beauty and meaning your soul is homesick for.

LEO: Botanists know that climbing vines have a simple approach. They keep extending their sensitive tendrils until they discover something sturdy enough to support upward growth. Their progress depends on continual experimentation. I love it when you imitate this style of intelligence, Leo, which I think will be especially useful and successful during the coming weeks. So instead of demanding guarantees before beginning a new endeavor, offer exploratory feelers. Ask friendly questions. Test prototypes. The right support system probably already exists, but may not reveal itself until you reach toward it.

VIRGO: One of my favorite Virgos works in a museum cleaning centuries-old paintings with exquisite patience. She uses tiny swabs and gentle solvents to lift away layers of darkened varnish and grime. She’s an expert at making the original colors emerge so vividly that the painting looks newly made. But her work demands artful restraint. If she presses too hard or applies the wrong solvent, she could destroy the very thing she means to reveal. This approach can be your specialty in the coming weeks, Virgo. I hope you will attend to valuables that have been obscured by accumulated grime, like old habits, stale assumptions, and other people’s projections. Your task is to gently lift it all away and let the true colors shine.

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