I’d go for meditation every time. Except at parties then I’m strictly an MDMA man. The electric kundalini buzz, high’s and lows of meditation, sorrows, profound understandings and misuderstandings of life need all to be explored. There is only one question one needs to ask and only two outcomes as to how one travels and where one arrives.

Why are you meditating? If your answer is “to become a Buddha”. Then you have understood why the Buddha bothered. If your answer is not then you may have misunderstood why the Buddha taught and what he taught.

There was an early distinction in Sangha during the Buddha’s life. There were members of the Sangha who were renunciants and lived the life of the Buddha and there were lay persons. The renunciants were all definitively answering “to become a Buddha”. Some of the lay persons also answered in this way and practiced with diligence and attained the goal.There were several hundred Arahants (goal winners) in the Sangha at the death of the Buddha. Several hundred Buddha’sThe main difference between being a Lay and Monastic Buddhist that each person is more likely to more quickly attain the goal in the monastic community.

So if you really really want to be a Buddha, the whole point of following his way, you need to just sit and eat a bit o rice pudding every now and again, when offered, untill you let go enough to be who you really are. And that probably means no drugs, realistically. The Pali cannon certainly has numerous texts where the Buddha makes reference to intoxication so one can assume it isn’t helpful on the whole. Were he here today he might be an advocate for LSD or Heroin or who knows what. But I doubt it. They had most of that stuff or something similar in his day anyway.

So how about you? Do you want to be a Buddha?