Alcohol and the human spirit
Lest we forget who and what we truly are
Introduction
In this long-form article I will touch on the topic of alcohol, and my perspective on the ways it can impact the spiritual development of human beings. I am not sure why I’ve taken so long to write on this topic. It was over 10 years ago I shared my perspectives on drug use in the articles Drugs and Spiritual Experiences, and Drugs and Spirituality, in which I wrote about cannabis and various other ‘drugs’. It was nearly ten years ago I wrote an exceedingly popular article on The Dark Side of Ayahuasca, which has been read by hundreds of thousands of people. That was followed by two more articles on the Dark Side of Ayahuasca (Part 2 and Part 3).
After tobacco, alcohol is the most prevalent drug used in much of the modern world. Alcohol use is far more widespread than the use of all other legal and illegal substances. The health impact and death toll from alcohol are much higher than those from all other drugs (except tobacco) and any other illicit substance use. I won’t delve into its physical health impacts here, as there’s plenty of scientific data on that. Rather, we’ll look at the impact alcohol has on the soul and spirit, and on the spiritual development of the human being.
I will start by sharing an overview of my own experience with alcohol and how I came to understand its effects on my body and psyche. Then, I’ll provide a more generalized description of how alcohol impacts a human being in their spiritual development (their state of consciousness). What motivates me to share this important information is that I am constantly surprised to discover just how much alcohol is a part of modern life for many people. In terms of importance, it seems to be only a little behind food and water. It has been so thoroughly normalized that I suspect even people who have a genuine interest in their health and spiritual well-being still consume alcohol to a level that’s detrimental. I can only assume many of us are not aware of its subtle and potentially harmful effects.
Experiments in Recklessness
My experience with alcohol began at 15, tapered off when I was 18, and largely stopped by 20. I recall at first not liking the bitter taste of beer, nor the harsh burn of spirits like vodka. My body’s natural response was one of rejection. Succumbing to social pressure, curiosity, rebelliousness, and wanting to fit in and be liked — especially by my two older brothers — I forced myself into ‘liking’ alcohol. After I got past that initial resistance, I was all in! What followed were four years of full-on partying, drinking, and going ‘wild’.
During that time, I could drink a lot without passing out, losing memory, or getting sick. Out of the countless times I was heavily intoxicated, only once did I vomit and lose my memory of what I’d done the night before. That was after a friend gave me a drink mixed with cola, rum and vodka. For some reason that did a number on me — the evils of Coca Cola? Typically, no matter how much I consumed, I stayed alert and coherent, and would remember everything the next day. For example, I once had 43 tequila laybacks at (technically, “on”) a bar in a nightclub, over about an hour and a half. I stopped at 43 because I started hallucinating, which was overwhelming in the busy and loud atmosphere of a nightclub. There were many nights when my friend and I would share a 1.25L bottle of vodka (55% alcohol) with a bit of peach schnapps to improve the taste before heading out to dance. I share these details because it’s worth keeping in mind that the energetic effects I observed from alcohol consumption came about after drinking unusually large amounts of it, not just an occasional glass of wine.
The low-down on “getting high”
At 16 or 17, I came across a yogi's writings on alcohol's subtle impact on the body. I don't remember his name, but he compared drinking to putting tiny glass shards into the bloodstream. These would travel through veins, arteries, capillaries, and finally into the cells. I was sufficiently intrigued by this revelation that I earnestly told my closest friend about it. Yet, my teenage brain determined it somehow didn’t apply to me. After briefly stopping, I resumed drinking while partying and dancing in nightclubs.
More than just the yogi’s description of alcohol and its effects, what I required was my own direct experience. That also came to me through yoga. When I was around 16, I increasingly dived into a daily practice of Hatha yoga, Qi Gong, and meditation. After two years of this, as 18 neared, I more keenly felt how alcohol and even other substances like cannabis influenced my body and mental state. I noticed how certain foods—garlic, meat, animal products, and heavily processed foods—also had adverse effects. For me, alcohol caused a kind of irritating and dulling effect throughout my body-mind for around 8 days. I could also describe it as a loss of “awareness” (or a dulling of “inner light”) throughout the body. Smoking cannabis created a subtle state of confusion and dullness for around 12 days, especially in the “psychic space” of the subtle energy centres in and above the head. Eating red meat introduced a sense of lethargy and heaviness that would last around 2 to 4 days (depending on the type of meat). Garlic also had a mildly dulling effect on my body, lasting a day or two.
By 18, I was intimately aware of the detrimental effects of alcohol, and although my use of alcohol and cannabis (I swung back and forth between using one or the other whilst partying and socialising on the weekends) progressively diminished, it still persisted. With far less resistance, my days of meat eating ended then and there (much to my mother’s dismay), and yet for alcohol (and cannabis, even more so), it took two years of an inner battle—of reclaiming my power and my natural love and appreciation of sobriety—to really free myself from the alluring pull these substances had on my psyche. Looking back on it, I can see it was not just the pull on my psyche personally, but also the addictive association the collective psyche has with these substances.
Soon after I turned 20, I stopped using alcohol and cannabis. This shift was facilitated by the intensification of my yoga practice after finishing high school, a few months past my 17th birthday. Water fasting for 3, 7, and 12 days at around 18 to 19 years of age proved to be a potent and restorative experience. The euphoric 'high' I once sought from these substances transformed into a listless 'low.' Ironically, this 'low' sensation clarified that my natural state was a 'high,' and any ingestion of these drugs only diminished that. This downturn in my sense of well-being would linger for a week or two.
Seeing clearly that these substances were drawing me 'down' rather than lifting me 'up,' my interest in them quickly dissipated. Since then, I've only had alcohol a few times in my early twenties and have absolutely no regrets about leaving it behind. The notion of becoming drunk or even slightly inebriated, say from a glass or two of wine or beer, is now mildly repulsive to me. For more than two decades, I've had zero inclination towards alcohol, much like my general avoidance of toxic substances.
The human spirit and alcohol — like oil and water
Ingesting alcohol can cause the human spirit to dissociate from the soul and, consequently, the body, including the nervous system and senses. This effect might seem 'beneficial' for some, especially after just a small amount. They may feel more at ease, less anxious, and socially confident, shedding the weight of their insecurities. In this initial stage, alcohol acts as a stimulant, providing a light 'buzz.' My observation is this: With a little alcohol consumption, what will first lift away from the soul (the “psyche”) are the subtle spiritual energies and forces that are otherwise an imposition. These ordinarily act upon the soul in a conflictive, restrictive, and otherwise life-degrading way. Because these imposing energies have a weaker association with the soul than the human Spirit, they lift away first. The person is now better able to experience and feel their natural self, with a greater sense of freedom and less constriction. Aside from the stimulation of the sugars, there’s also life-force freed up from dealing with a state of tension in the psyche / soul. So initially the person feels a kind of ‘high’, in which they are stimulated and enlivened. Most people will also feel less inhibited, because they are (temporarily) less affected by the psychic energies that inhibit the soul in its natural expression.
For most people this initial uplifting effect is quickly lost when their alcohol consumption increases, at which time the alcohol’s true nature as a depressant takes effect. At this stage the human spirit is also pushed away from the psyche and body. We see the extreme of this in the situation where a person drinks to the point of complete unconsciousness (i.e., they black out), or drinks to the point where their body remained active throughout the time they were intoxicated, but once sobriety returns they have absolutely no memory of the many hours there were drunk. (We’ll return to this issue of memory loss in a moment.) It can be very eye-opening, at times embarrassing, to hear stories from friends about all the many things we did and said whilst intoxicated. Once sober there might be no memory of the drunken episode at all, or perhaps just faint glimmers, as if trying to remember a dream. Metaphysically, this is because the spirit (which is our conscious presence or self, our sense of ‘I’) did not partake in the events of that evening, having been forced out of the body through temporary poisoning by alcohol.
‘Possession’
And this thanks:
It’s important to realise that it’s not simply that the ‘I’ (the spirit) is displaced out of the body and psyche. As Aristotle* pointed out, ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. In this case the ‘vacuum’ is within the body and soul—resulting from displacement of the human spirit, our true ‘I’. In this compromised (poisoned) state, the psyche has a tendency to become possessed by two other sources of ‘spirit’. The predominant source of spirit will be that of the plants from which the alcohol was produced. In nature a plant’s spirit mostly remains external to the plant, unlike the human being in which the spirit incarnates (comes into the flesh). Through the process of fermentation some of the spiritual essence of the plant is physically ‘captured’ in the form of alcohol. We could loosely call this the collective ‘I’ of the plant; it is also the collective ‘will’ of the plant. In a person who drinks regularly, this plant ‘I’ will take up the space and function of the human being’s ‘I’. There’s nothing innately negative about plant spirts. But it’s a poor substitute for the human spirit, so it can ultimately have a detrimental and degrading effect on the soul. It’s somewhat akin to using 87 octane gasoline in a jet engine designed to burn 100+ octane aviation gas. It tends to misalign the soul into a state of consciousness that is not its natural trajectory.
It's crucial to understand that when alcohol is consumed, it's not just the displacement of the 'I' (the spirit) from the body and psyche. As Aristotle noted, nature detests a vacancy. Here, the 'vacuum' exists within the body and soul when our true 'I', the human spirit, is displaced. In this weakened state, other 'spirit' sources can take hold. Predominantly, the spirit of the plants used to make the alcohol will fill the void. Plant spirits typically stay outside the plant itself, unlike human spirits that incarnate into the body. Fermentation traps some of the plant's spiritual essence in the alcohol, which can be considered the plant's collective 'I' or will.
For those who drink consistently, this plant spirit can start to act in place of the person's 'I.' While plant spirits are not inherently negative, they are ill-suited to replace the human spirit and can eventually harm the soul. It's like running a jet engine on low-grade fuel when it's designed for high-octane aviation gas. This mismatch can misdirect the soul from its natural path of consciousness.
The other source of spiritual forces that are likely to fill the vacuum, after the human spirit is displaced by what amounts to alcohol poisoning, is more complex. But, simply put, whatever happens to be around in the astral realms at the time, and which the soul (through its own tendencies and inclinations) has an affinity for will tend to take temporary possession of the soul (the psyche). If this happens often enough, and depending on the level of integration of that soul with its human spirit, the possession by other spiritual energies can become more permanent.
Having lost the spiritually elevating, guiding and illuminating influence of the human spirit, the soul (and thus the human being) will become denser and darker in consciousness, and more materialistic (i.e., less spiritually aware). When a society embraces alcohol consumption as a social norm, there is a tendency for it to become more materialistic, degraded in consciousness, and out of touch with the true ‘I’, with the human spirit. Over many generations, a superficial and degraded form of ‘I’ will come into being—a sense of self that is far more based on external inputs than on the influence of the indwelling spirit. We might also see this as a loss of contact with the living intelligence of the ‘Heart’ found at the centre of Man—due to alcohol unnaturally coercing the psyche to function more from either or both of its extremities, an excessively rational head and or the base animal and vegetative nature.
I did what? Alcohol and memory
Let’s elaborate on alcohol and its effect on memory. Anyone who has been sufficiently inebriated with alcohol knows how effectively it blocks memory. Yet the effect on memory goes beyond just forgetting the details of a 'hard night out on the town.' At a collective level, when a culture normalises the consumption of alcohol, that society will tend to lose an aspect of its collective memory. Specifically, the society will tend to lose contact with the 'memory' (i.e., consciousness) afforded to them by the spirit and its relationship to the soul. This includes what I might call the spiritually subjective memory (as opposed to the sensory subjective memory) of events in our so-called 'past'—both personally and collectively. We need to elicit spiritually subjective memory in the spiritual practice of recapitulation (or self-investigation; self-enquiry). Such a practice, by bringing forth the perception and memory of the spirit, allows a person to rise in consciousness by illuminating their memory of the 'past,' rather than being weighed down by their misconceptions and blind-sided memories, which distort their experience of the present and their vision of the future.
It’s worth noting that higher memory—the ability to consciously reflect on or review the past and future—as opposed to cellular and biological memory, is a function of the spirit. Spirit is what makes Life and life-forms conscious.
This dulling or deadening effect on memory includes our memory of that which extends beyond our present incarnation, commonly referred to as 'past lives.' It should be noted that 'memory' of 'past lives' doesn’t necessarily come in the form of rational and describable details, such as your memory of what you had for breakfast this morning. Most often, our spiritual memory informs and influences us at a level and in a way that most people are not consciously aware of. They don’t consciously recognise 'remembering' past lives. For most people, spiritual memory arises as a subtle and guiding influence upon the human being. It is this guiding influence that’s often lost through the personal and ancestral consumption of alcohol.
The effect of this 'spiritual memory loss'—the loss of memory from our 'past lives' and the enduring development of the spirit and soul—also contributes to the materialism that alcohol consumption stimulates in the psyche. When people lose even the most basic felt-sense of their existence beyond their current incarnation, the grander sense of purpose, consequences, and responsibility within Life—all afforded to them by their spirit—tends to fade away. People become less focused on their true purpose, and more engrossed in the self-centred tendency of satisfying their apparent material needs and the primal desire for comfort and convenience.
This effect alcohol has on memory is one reason people who are excessively burdened by their memories, especially by painful soul memories, will have a propensity to become alcoholics. Such individuals feel greatly relieved when their painful memories lift off from their psyche and fade from their awareness. In this sense, their excessive drinking is an attempt at self-medicating for emotional and mental pain relief.
Collective Memory Loss
The effect alcohol has on memory doesn’t just impact people on an individual level; it also affects our collective memory. I propose that the 'Western' culture’s collective ancestral addiction to alcohol has played a significant role in the 'Western' psyche having very little memory of its true history. I suspect it has also contributed to 'Western' culture losing consciousness of the spiritual dimension of our being, our planet, and each other. If so, this means excessive alcohol consumption has played a major role in 'Western' societies being as materialistic as they are. We are also relatively cut off or dissociated from the Earth as a living and spiritual being.
Where to from here?
As with my articles on other drugs, it’s not my intention to convince you to cease using alcohol. Such decisions must be entirely yours, based on your own sense of what aligns with your purpose in life. My intention is that if you choose to use alcohol, you are more fully informed of the potential consequences. For those who drink alcohol regularly, I invite and encourage you to do so with conscious presence. Be aware of what is motivating you and observe the effects it has, and how those effects change as the drinking progresses. For me, once I became aware of the motivations and effects of drinking alcohol, it was a very natural choice to step away from it entirely. It is a toxic substance that has massive social and personal implications in any society that embraces it.
I’ve always felt it important to examine the trajectory of the culture I live in. When I see its trajectory is life-degrading, I pay attention to identifying the unnatural habits and activities the culture normalises and engages in. In light of all I’ve shared above, it is very interesting to me that modern society has normalised and promotes alcohol use as a favourable drug, yet is often deeply afraid of drugs that tend (at least in moderation and in the right circumstances) to increase a human’s awareness of 'spirit' (I am thinking here of the numerous naturally occurring entheogenic plants). Although you’ll see I don’t generally recommend the use of those substances either. Read my articles on The Dark Side of Ayahuasca, for instance.
From my perspective, all natural experiences have their place, and there can be circumstances in which it is life-affirming to make appropriate and intelligent use of substances that strongly affect the psyche. Yet what stands out as a great curiosity to me is that of all the many mind-altering substances (and practices not involving substances) available to us from nature, modern society embraces and promotes regular consumption of alcohol—a substance that ultimately poisons the body and disconnects people from their spirit, from the true internal sense of ‘I’ that arises from deep within the inner mysteries of our Being.
Will it harm the state of your soul to have an occasional glass of wine? Probably not. If you are able to remain conscious and present, and you don’t have an addiction issue with alcohol, and you enjoy a glass now and then, I don’t expect there’s much of an issue. Taking certain herb extracts for medical purposes is likely to introduce as much alcohol into your body at one time as a single glass of red wine. It’s all about moderation and paying attention to whether or not you can remain consciously present after a glass of wine. I expect most people can.
Is a person likely to even feel the desire for a glass of wine or beer when they are constantly fulfilled from the inner wellspring of their spirit pouring forth into their Being? That’s hard to say, but probably not. I can only speak from experience, and for me, it’s been close to 30 years since I felt any inclination to drink alcohol. But there are no hard and fast rules here. You are literally forging your own path of awakening into self-consciousness and eventually God consciousness. For me, alcohol hasn’t played a useful role on that path, so it’s not something I feel drawn to. For you, it might be different, at least for now.
Simply put, it’s up to each of us to consciously determine what does and doesn’t serve our human journey into awakening, and that might vary over time.
* — Actually, it appears the axiom “nature abhors a vacuum” was based upon a concept put forth by Parmenides (485BC). It’s a somewhat creative translation of Latin “horror vacui” (fear of the void”), stated by Aristotle. AFAIK, there’s no evidence Aristotle ever stated “nature abhors a vacuum,” or its Greek equivalent … but that’s a long story.
** — I should add, I suspect it’s only our already degraded state of un-naturalised consciousness that makes our use of such substances potentially helpful.)