“I have always been very, very suspicious about finding artificial means–it doesn’t really matter whether it is a mantra or a drug.
Do you know the book by Aldous Huxley about the gates of heaven and hell?
One of his basic points (which I think was a mistake) was that he thought that somehow he had found the key to another realm.
That was the basic notion, and he wrote very beautifully about it.
Now, as more and more people that tried it found out, you don’t get a gateway to heaven.
You get, at the most, a gateway into another chamber within yourself.
We may have wonderful experiences, and clearly have within us more than we know, more than the eye catches, but we are trying to pass over and through the self to the Other.
Now I may find out lots of beautiful things or horrible things within my microcosms, and there may be ways and means and exercises to get there, but the real problem is that this is still my own realm, and what I really want is to go to the Other Side.
There are, I think somewhere in the United States, a few miles of receiving antennas that are meant specifically to receive calls from outer space.
Just imagine that you receive such a message–you are overjoyed.
You hear a voice, and it’s coming from a very small transmitter on the other side of the earth.
It’s a wonderful discovery, but that wasn’t what you are searching for.
You were searching for something from the other side of nowhere.
You didn’t want to find something within your realm.”
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From “The Command is to Hear,” p.243 – 244 in On Being Free by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz