Question: In your opinion, can one realise the Highest through the use of certain drugs?

Sri Chinmoy: To be very frank with you, everybody has his own way. If somebody feels that by taking drugs he will get inner experiences, highest experiences, then it is up to him. I am not a judge or authority, since I have not taken drugs, but I am offering my opinion based on my inner spiritual understanding. I have meditated and, as far as my understanding is concerned, I have realised the Highest. So, in my case, if somebody asked me what I did, I will say that I meditated for twenty years, from the age of twelve right up to thirty-two. I went through twenty years of sincere and serious meditation, eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours a day, in order to realise God. I can only say that, in my opinion, I feel that God-realisation, the Highest Realisation, cannot be achieved through drugs. That is my personal opinion, and I say it on the strength of my realisation. But, if somebody says that he can get it through other ways, through drugs, then he is perfectly entitled to do so in his own way. As far as my realisation is concerned, on the strength of my own highest realisation, I wish to say that I worked very, very hard on the spiritual path. This path is really long and arduous. Here, you need a disciplined life. Everything depends on self-discipline. From self-discipline and self-perfection, we get God-realisation. Since you are asking me my opinion, on the strength of my own realisation I wish to say that the use of drugs is not proper. Realisation must come through proper meditation. I have a few hundred disciples in the States and in other places. Thirty or forty students of mine who are now my close disciples used to take drugs. They came to me with the idea of seeing the difference between the experiences that they had had with drugs and the experiences they were expecting from meditation with me. So they stayed for a few days. Then they got real spiritual experiences from their meditation. To my deepest joy and pride, all of them gave up drugs. It is they who are in a position to judge, because they had many, many experiences from drugs. Then they came to me and they got experiences from the meditation. They came to learn from me how to follow the path of spirituality. I taught them and they felt the enormous difference between the two types of experiences.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Earth’s Cry Meets Heaven’s Smile, part 2, Aum Press, Puerto Rico, 1974
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/ech_2