MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Pseudo-religion
But the younger generation, disillusioned with the war-tarnished prestige of science, has preferred a counter-conversion to one of the new subrational pseudo-religions that pullulate in such periods of decadence as the present. These cults can easily be detected because their self-appointed founders and leaders lack any true prophetic function but betray an insatiable appetite for power and money. Though they lay claim to the Second Coming, there can be only one more Avatar in each of the authentic Traditions: he who will bring the present cycle to a close. So at best such pretenders can merely found further sub-sects or schisms of existing religions; and at worst are either lapsed members of some orthodox lineage who preach a deviant doctrine or arrant charlatans who knowingly mislead their suggestible followers unawares into spiritual danger.
Dabblers in such dubious practices run the risk of being plunged into inferior psychic regions and of becoming possessed by sinister drives and impulses beyond their conscious knowledge or control. Incapable of distinguishing between white magic and black, their vanity is easily persuaded that they have received an esoteric initiation, when in fact they have merely been inducted into some low grade of sorcery. That such perversions of spirituality are by no means an exclusively modern problem is evidenced by secret societies like Thuggee and the Assassins, as well as by the ritual blood-baths of the Aztecs and the sadistic torture-chambers and autos-da-fe of the Inquisition. Not everything that claims to be traditional is good, and that way the infernal madness lies.
More recently, hallucinogenic drugs, by their widespread and ready availability, have tempted many unsuspecting victims with the allure of paradis artificiels, only to trap them in a solipsistic and self-gratifying addiction of ever-increasing dependence and ever-diminishing returns. Only those who have been isolated from the inner worlds by anti-religious instruction need the aid of drugs to penetrate the barrier of disbelief that separates them from participation in the subtle modes of manifestation. So they grow confirmed in the materialist fallacy that it is the drug that causes their fascinating psychedelic visions, which they mistake for spirituality, whereas the drug is merely a catalyst: the 'separate reality' of their fantasies is created by the psyche and can be experienced without recourse to drugs at all.
Since it enables them to envision pretty patterns of colour, they falsely assume that they have 'seen God', whom no man has beheld. The Buddha, like the founders of the other great Traditions, warned against mistaking such drug-induced hallucinations for true Enlightenment. An object and its image reflected in water may look exactly alike, but the reflection is both inverted and an optical illusion. What the apologists of drug-taking wilfully ignore or conveniently forget is that although certain drugs may be physically harmless and even psychologically non-addictive, they never yet resulted in the positive regeneration, moral and spiritual, of anyone who took them.
Indeed, one of the sure signs that this primrose path to lunacy is not spiritual at all but merely psychic is the conspicuous absence of the whole ethical dimension from its outlook. It cannot be reiterated too often that the Buddha alone has risen above the moral opposites, not the self-deluded ego, whose pretentious claims to transcendence of good and evil, when it has merely ignored or evaded them, is enough to convict it of hubris or spiritual pride, the one transgression that the gods never forgive, forget, or fail to punish.