No Pill Direct Access. Clean First

Thursday, two weeks ago I asked a good friend: "Why don't you drink alcohol? Don't you need being intoxicated every now and then?" Answer: "No!" My follow-up question: "Did you know that alcohol is one of many ways for the mystic to reach That?" Answer: "No!" Next to that he explained that he didn't know much about mysticism.

All the above puzzles me. He is a renowned historian who still has the ability to stay curious and wonder.

How to explain my direct experiences with That to someone who apparently never experienced feeling One with humanity and planet Earth with everyone and everything on it? I was given That three times:

• Czestochowa (Poland) in 1984. More
• Aswan (Egypt) in 1987. More
• Castelo de Vide (Portugal) in 1990. More

I did experience That without being intoxicated. Is it a coincidence that all three were abroad? All I know is that I felt pregnant with It for days. I never looked for That. It happened to me. Meanwhile I learned that looking for It makes no sense. It has to be granted. You can literally take no pill for It. 

After my first direct experience with That I hadn't words and a language to speak with. Only after reading Catharina  Dessaur's book 'De Droom der Rede' (1982) I understood that I had my moment of enlightenment. 

Back to being intoxicated. These roads or gates seem "proven" as good 'soma' for entering That (not exhaustive):

• Fasting
• Praying
• Meditation
• Alcohol
• Sex
• Laurier blades
• Hemlock
• Fly agaric
• Other psychedelic drugs
• ... - there must be more

Gates for entering but ... you will never know for sure - there is no guarantee - if you will experience That. (Mark that I don't write "see".) It has to be granted. In a way you have to be ready, clean or pure first. Donna Tartt, 'The Secret History' (1992):

"Only this. To recieve the god, in this or any other mystery, one has to be in a state of 'euphemia', cultic purity. That is at the very center of bacchic mystery. Even Plato speaks of it. Before the Divine can take over, the mortal self - the dust of us, the part that decays - must be made clean as possible."