Psychoactives and Psychedelics in Yoga: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Culture

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the relationship between the mind-body disciplines of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain systems of yoga, focusing on the use of psychoactive substances in the Indic religious context and the ways that modern cosmopolitan forms of yoga have been intersected with the use of psychedelic substances.The foundation of the study is a comparative examination of the semantic field of psychoactive substances in Indic texts related to yoga and tantra, including typologies such as soma (extract), viṣa (agent or poison), auṣadhi (herbal), amṛta (ambrosia), rasāyana (essence), and dravya (substance), and the utilization of specific plant agents such as dhattūra (datura), bhaṅgā (cannabis), and ahiphena (opium).These concepts are, in turn, connected to relevant strata of Indic religion and philosophy, from the Vedic, classical, and medieval contexts, with attention to discussions in The Yoga Discourse of Patañjali (Pātañjalayogaśāstra) and Buddhist Abhidharma literature of siddhi and ṛddhi (accomplishments) and nirmāṇacitta (constructed minds) arising from the use of herbs.I examine how the use of psychoactive substances, particularly psychedelics, has played an important role-and perhaps will play an increasing role-in the culture of yoga in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whether through the intersection of global countercultural trends, retreat and festival culture, or emerging paradigms of the psychedelic "facilitator" that parallel yoga teacher training.I demonstrate how linkages between yoga and psychedelics in contemporary contexts parallel psychoexperimentation characteristic of the Indic context but are also thoroughly modernist, illustrating the cosmopolitan nature of transnational yoga traditions.Lastly, I offer an analysis of how the Second Wave movement or Psychedelic Renaissance as exemplified by the work of neuropharmacologist Roland Griffiths is deeply indebted to Hindu yogic and tantric traditions linked to the psychedelic counterculture of the First Wave psychedelic movement in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.Ultimately, I argue that though the use of psychedelics is of relevance in yogaespecially in the contemporary context-it is important to avoid the dangers of "psychedelic exceptionalism" and recognize the importance of a larger variety of psychoactive substances that have been part of its ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological history.