Alysia and Lovelight- Fear is the killer, you're right. I can tell you the drug side, since I was initially a drug sotted hippie. By intending to "see God" and vigorously practicing appropriate pranayamas etc, plus a liberal dollop of psychedelics, the drug user can effectively depart the everyday world and reach a point of emptiness in which the ego is sufficiently suppressed that there's just a viewpoint looking at God from a partially merged perspective. Then, because the lifestyle does not support that knd of ealization, it is lost. Further, it cannot be regained by taking more drugs (although all of us have tried) because it is a state that lies beyond definition. Until we can live in a manner that our lifestyle alone brings that realization back, it's gone forever. That's when people start worrying, getting confused and anxious, and they start looking for comfortable alternatives, like just "getting high". That's the danger of drug use. However, the other approach is to take the experience to heart and use it as a goal for the future, changing life so that it becomes closer and closer and one day we can work up to that same level again. That's a more difficult trip, but it leads in the proper direction if we let it. Forty years after the fact, I'd say that it has been a wonderful trip.
Doc - I don't think anyone rationally sets out to be a total a$$hole. My feeling is that it is a social problem, especially arising out of limited options as a child. We are limited in the places that we can go because of the structure of the world, and an error at one point becomes a cause of problems at another point.
On the assumption that God worked within logic to create the cosmos, in the very first instant of creation, all the relationships and linkages for all time and eternity were logically implied, and began unfolding, expressng their nature. This is like a city in which all the roads and sidewalks have been cast into concrete. We are going across town from our birthplace to our future, a sort of exploration. The pathways are all completed, but we choose the various walkways and roads over which we will pass acording to what we have learned. If it seems that some bypass is more interesting, we might give it a try. (Eg: I tried the drug route.) Then we find ourselves in a new location from which to make the next choices etc. (In my case this was to become an addict and focus on gratifications, or become a yogi and focus on ending dependencies on gratifications.)
If a person has experiences that suggest physical gratification and violence are the way to go, that person will move toward those pathways, hanging out with people of similar type, and acting in that manner. Similarly, if a person had chosen pornography and gross sexuality and aggression as a useful path, there is a tendency to move closer to that kind of people, and to share experiences with them. We make choices, receive social support and gravitate toward the extremes of the various ways of living. With a total social support system that favors sexual excesses, such as clitoridectomy of women in the Middle East, then it seems that what we are doing is actually normative and proper, as we force people to undergo such things. In exactly the same way, a person caught up in macho power, aggression, hatred as a way of self expression, and who feels that sexual aggression is normative, will tend to act out by sexual aggresion, raping and sodomizing by force. All the social supporters will cheer this on, folie en groupe.
To the degree that we simply act out of the social control imposed on us, we do not exhibit freedom. One of the primary purposes of education is to bring new norms to light, and to broaden the parochial vision of narrow little minds. As they expand, narrow minds discover a wealth of new options, and they become the creative sources of a new social order. Even if the new social order is only a few percent better than before, this overall tendency means that we can free ourselves. When we move to the other side of the collection of struggling beings, we find the expanding wavefront of reality blooming forward into emptiness - this is the cutting edge of manifestation of the Creator, guided by the same creative logic as in the Big Bang, and thus we become the means by which the will of God is projected, through our own faculties, and in so doing, we are totally free. (Freedom does not imply that we can act illogically - to expect that you could hop out of an airplane without a parachute would be jumping to an unsupported conclusion. You'd go limping away with an invalid inference.
From a purely logical viewpoint, it looks to me like once we are in a valid place, our karma finally run down, and once we live logically by following a path in accord with the universe, then we sort of become part of the manifestation of the creative impulse, and begin to merge into the nature of God - since this is an infinite process, things just keep getting better until we make the next jump and abandon indivuation, at which time we merge back into God, except for a point of identity to which our history is attached. As someone told me, "I feel like a drop of water in a bucket of water. I'm still the drop, but I'm also all the water in the bucket." That's sarvastarka samadhi. Nirvastarka samadhi is total Oneness.
PUL
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