Having heard the supremely confidential spiritual knowledge,
which You have revealed out of compassion for me,
my illusion is now dispelled.
—The Bhagavad Gita - Chapter 11, Verse 1
My friend once told me the story of how Ram Dass went to India and supplied a Hindu guru with three tabs of LSD. The man allegedly took them all at once, yet showed no signs of being affected by this potent substance. The implication was that this man was already so enlightened that modern “medicine” had no impact on him whatsoever. He apparently lived in the state of mind that LSD typically induces in the human psyche.
I thought about it for a moment before I said, “You mean to tell me this guy perceived the world through a vision of constantly shape-shifting distortions and purple glasses, where the world is dominated by specific colors for hours? Or is it possible that the Acid-gobbling guru was unaffected because his brain chemistry didn’t react to that chemical, just like some people are unaffected by consuming marijuana while others drift off into another universe?”
Perhaps Ram Dass was unaware of such possibilities at the time, blinded by the notion that someone could ingest a dose of LSD that would knock any normal person on their ass. And like anyone prone to good storytelling might do, he crafted this fable around someone he revered, someone seemingly capable of something he didn’t understand.
I doubt that anyone can be so spiritually “above” LSD that they walk away unaffected by an otherwise reliable shift in consciousness. Give that same man a heroic dose of mushrooms, however, or enough DMT to blast him into another dimension, and maybe the initial perspective of Dass would be washed away by the guru’s exposure to a different chemical.
My friend agreed that this story served as a good example of how we can become blinded by the allure of a legend, and this was a valuable reminder for me to continue searching for any of my own beliefs that can be dissolved by an alternate perspective.