The good news is that having life-changing experiences under the influence of caffeine does not require a life of seeking, experimentation, visions and quests. You don’t have to become a Beat poet, sell everything you own and live in a loincloth, and you don’t have to be hit by a car on a dark Irish road. The gift of coffee is that whatever you are looking for, wherever you focus your attention, it will propel you in that direction. Bring coffee your concerns, and coffee will amplify your attention on those concerns. Bring coffee your plans, and coffee will throw your attention into planning. Bring your anger, and you will find plenty of evidence and reasons to justify your cause. Bring your appreciation, and you will find gratitude. Caffeine is light, energetic, responsive and agile. But… also fickle.
To help guide you towards the promised land of entheogenic bliss, I thought it might be helpful to provide some tools, or tips and tricks. If you’re looking for a prescription, I’m afraid I don’t have one. The truth is, there’s just no way to guarantee any particular outcome or experience. Some people may find their bliss in the leftover grounds at the bottom of a cup of cowboy coffee, while others’ bodies will demand something highly refined and rare. And even if you perfect your process and can repeat it reliably, the very best you will ever accomplish is to provide a welcome environment for the coffee faeries to show up. Sometimes they’ll show up, and sometimes they won’t, but if you do everything just right, you might have a better chance at having one grant your fondest wish. You may find the following tips and tricks useful for keeping your attention focused, intentions clear and expectations in check, none of which will guarantee anything, but all of which may help nudge the faeries your way.
These are the basics: Set, Setting, Awareness and Action. Anything you can do to deepen your relationship to any of these will help attract the coffee faeries.
Set
Set your attitude
Set and setting matter. A lot. By now this is probably obvious, but it bears repeating. If you continue to relate to caffeine as the rocket-fueled crutch you lean on to propel you into a modern maelstrom of enforced production quotas, then very likely coffee will continue to rise up and serve that purpose. And if that’s enough for you, then by all means, please continue to enjoy that experience. However, if you’ve gotten this far in the narrative, I suspect you’re after something more. If that’s true, then probably your experience is going to benefit from an attitude adjustment.
Consider that caffeine, and by extension, coffee, is your ally. In the world of entheogens, coffee is like a super-charged Swiss army knife. It is here to assist you with getting your needs met, whichever ones you bring to it, and it’s a great tool for many purposes. If you’re looking to power through the crunch night before a big exam, coffee is here for you. Want a lovely accompaniment to smooth the awkwardness of that first date? Head to the café. And if you’re looking to stop time, land yourself in the present moment, and discover the joy that is the very fundament of your being, then again, coffee is ready to serve. How you get there is uniquely yours, and the best way to start is to begin, but however you do this, I strongly recommend that you know what you are about, and do it consciously.
One more very important thing to remember: pleasure is not the same thing as happiness, and no drug-induced experience is a substitute for true self knowledge. As you turn your attention towards self knowledge, caffeine, like any entheogen, can be a powerful ally. When consumed with care and attention, coffee can help foster experiences of beauty, truth and Love, but it is an error to believe that these pleasurable experiences come from the drug or that such experiences are the end goal in and of themselves. The best that coffee can do, in fact all any entheogen can do is to help clear your mind of the distractions that keep you from experiencing the happiness that is your fundamental state of being. In so doing, these substances can help reorient your attention to your source, to your true self. But if you confuse the pleasant flush of dopamine with the clarity and security that comes from true self-knowing, then you risk selling out permanent happiness for transient objective pleasure. That is the pathway of the addict.
Set your chemistry
If you regularly drink caffeinated beverages, you’re probably desensitized to their effects. Taking a break from caffeine is a time-honored and proven method for re-setting. Wean yourself off gradually, or stop cold turkey as you wish, but once you’re completely off, stay off and clear for at least two months. I’ve seen claims that you can reset in as little as two weeks, but in my experience that doesn’t seem to allow the body enough time to truly clear. Maybe more time is needed to restore adenosine receptors to their previous levels. I honestly don’t know, but in my own experience I’ve found that a shorter abstention didn’t have the impact I was looking for.
Set your dose
Once you are ready to re-introduce caffeine into your body, I strongly recommend that you set limits for yourself, and stick to them. These limits should be low enough that your tolerance won’t slip back into place, and high enough that you can still get the desired effect. For me, this translates to one 2oz shot of espresso with breakfast, and then a fairly strong cup of black tea in the afternoon. I’m a 57 year-old male and weigh 230Lbs. Your mileage may vary, but remember, environmental and economic exigencies dictate that, as a species, we are going to have to drink less coffee, and pay more for it. The smart money is on getting used to that now.
For myself, and maybe for many, the quality of the source also seems to be important. When I drink coffee made from crappy beans, or coffee that’s been brewed with no passion or craft, my body reacts poorly. I feel jittery, edgy, crunchy, and unfocused. Not everyone feels this way. Some folks swear by their mass-brewed convenience store joe. But I think it’s also important to keep in mind that the source of your beans and how they were grown and harvested makes an enormous difference to the environment, to the farmers, and thus by extension to the viability of the entire industry. Remember that coffee is a shade-loving plant, happiest in the 80% shade cover found in Southwest Ethiopian cloud forests. Growing in friendlier conditions means fewer inputs – less fertilizer, less pesticide, and less labor to maintain. Currently very, very few farms can reproduce these conditions. Coffee labeled as “shade grown” may actually be grown in as little as 20% shade and may require quite a lot of amendments to sustain. “Forest grown”, “agroforested”, and “forest garden” coffees are likely to be easier on the planet. Given that most of the farms that have implemented these practices also work with representatives in the specialty coffee industry, chances are the farmers who grow those beans are getting a living wage. One possible benefit that may come out of the current land crisis in the coffee industry is that in the near future employing these techniques may be the only viable option for continued coffee production. For now, the only way to know for sure is to ask your roaster. I highly recommend you call or email them. Any of them who care about what they do will be more than happy to tell you anything you want to know.
Set your routine
I think it really helps to set aside special time for your coffee routine, especially in the mornings. I understand that this may seem an insurmountable hurdle for some, but consider that even five minutes may be enough. If you can set aside more, then great, but either way, the point is that this is time for you to pay attention. Focus your intention and pay attention, first to your body – looking inward, and then to the space around you – looking outward. Find something to appreciate, and let that appreciation unfold.
Your routine can be anything you do that engages and holds your attention. My own routine is relatively elaborate and specific, but yours doesn’t have to be. I think maybe it helps to find something you can do repeatedly, the same every time. Maybe you always buy your morning joe from the same café, or maybe you always use the same cup for your cowboy coffee. You could do one simple thing, or create a complex dance of many elements – it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a reflection of your intention, engages your attention, and you can repeat it. Some find it helpful to think of this like a temple bell that calls them to prayer, or like the orchestral fanfare that signals the beginning of the show. Whatever it is, let it be the signal to yourself that your time for you, your time for your experience, has begun.
Setting
Find a place that inspires you – or find inspiration in whatever space you find yourself. Either way, the setting, or more accurately, your relationship to your setting, makes a difference that can have a powerful effect on your experience. I have a strong preference for woodlands and rivers, but I’ve also found profound joy drinking drip coffee on the loading dock of a fish hatchery in the pouring rain. In both cases what made the difference was how I centered myself and curated my experience in the space, grounded in my routine.
Awareness
The promise of the Revised Value Proposition is that not only does drinking coffee feel good, but with the right set and setting, the feeling of drinking coffee goes beyond good and can even be a gateway to a deeper, more powerful experience that I’ve been calling “divine”. But here we come up against a critical distinction: the profoundly pleasurable sensations and perceptions that sometimes accompany entheogenic experiences are not themselves the entheogenic experience, but rather, those feelings help to clarify the mind and point you in the direction where the heart of the entheogenic experience can be found. Knowing that these feelings, thoughts and perceptions are not the experience is not enough. The key that opens the door to the heart of the entheogenic experience is to recognize the place to which these thoughts, feelings and perceptions are directing your attention.
At this point, if I were a shaman or a guru or even a professional coffee guide of some kind, I’d have some technique or prescription to guide you into a graceful enlightenment. Well, I’m none of those things, and have no dogma, no yoga, no formalized prescription for you. And, in my defense, I don’t think such things are actually possible or even desirable. The place to which I’m directing your attention is profoundly private and personal – really nothing I can think of is more completely yours than (to paraphrase Mr. James) your attitude to that which you apprehend to be divine. That said, I think I might be able to offer at least some clues, hunches, or tips and tricks from my own practice that might be useful.
By now you have probably guessed that I am more or less a devotee of the “Direct Path” of Advaita Vedanta, or non-dualism, and so a lot of the nudges and cues I have to offer are more or less directly lifted from the teachings of modern proponents of that path such as Rupert Spira, Alan Watts and Amoda Maa, though the source of the wisdom they draw upon is part of a set of teachings that stretch back many hundreds of years. Unlike the profound insights those teachers provide, the clues and hunches I offer do not come from years of meditative practice and study or a deep knowledge of a particular school of thought such as Advaita or the Direct Path. If you want advice or guided meditation that is based in those kinds of bonafides, then I highly recommend you seek out the writings and recordings of the people I mention above, or others like them from traditions that speak to you.
Rather, what I have to offer are more like hints and nudges based on my own direct experiences, some of which I related in the last chapter, and also from teachings that have resonated with those experiences, such as Advaita, Knowledge, and Landmark Education. I have tried to distill them from the teachers who have inspired me, and present them here in what I hope are my own words. That said, some concepts are so simple and basic, there are very few ways to say them, so I’m bound to repeat something already said by someone else. What isn’t explicitly derived from any of those sources I’ve already mentioned will be from bits and pieces of experience I’ve picked up from the side of the road or floating down a snowmelt river, or discovered in deep conversations with friends on moonlit walks, or derived from the ecstasy of countless jam sessions… So although I will endeavor to express something in my own unique way, I promise there’s nothing original here.
What I think may be novel or at least little explored about the journey we are taking together is the starting point from which we embark, and the ally to which we apply for guidance: we shall begin with and travel through an experience of our awareness modulated by the entheogenic effects of caffeine as expressed through coffee (or black tea, if you prefer). Like some of the other traditions I’ve mentioned, this relationship to coffee is many hundreds of years old, originating at the very genesis of coffee’s discovery. And yet, knowledge of this relationship has remained largely dormant for much of the past 500 years, and is now being revealed once again in a new context, alongside an equally fresh look at our relationship to our true selves afforded by the Direct Path, also long dormant and now only recently brought into public view.
So, with that, here are my suggestions and hints.
Action
Before you take your first sip, take a moment to breathe. Hold the cup in your hand, and breathe in the aroma. Let the feeling of that first breath of the beverage sink in. If gratitude is your jam, this could be a fine moment to appreciate.
In these next few moments, there are a lot of things you could do – visualizations, prayers, mantras. If those things are fun or meaningful for you, then go for it, and if not, don’t sweat it. You’ve made it to your coffee. You’re doing great.
As you sip, I recommend continuing to pay attention to your breath. See if you can follow the feeling of your breath down into your lungs as it fills your chest. Do you notice anything happening there? Follow that.
Continue sipping your coffee and breathing consciously.
Pay attention to your spine, from your sacrum (base of your spine) and perineum (bottom of your crotch) all the way up to your occiput (where your spine enters your skull) and up and out the top of your head. Maybe try closing your eyes, and see if you can follow that path with your breath. Allow your breath to flow down and fill your belly and from there down into your perineum, then back through your sacrum and up your spine, through your occiput and out the top of your head, then back down through your mouth, into your lungs and through the whole cycle again.
Do you notice anything happening there? Follow that, and see where it takes you.
Open your eyes and look around. Find something to appreciate, and let the feeling of appreciation follow the same path you just traveled with your breath.
Whatever you are feeling now, notice that these feelings come and they go. How you feel now isn’t how you felt a few minutes ago, and soon you’ll feel something else.
Whatever you are thinking now, notice that, just like feelings and sensations, thoughts come, and then they go.
Breath comes and goes. Heartbeats come and go.
Notice how you are aware of these perceptions, feelings, thoughts and sensations as they come and go, but that your awareness remains, constant and unchanged.
You are not your perceptions, thoughts, feelings and sensations. You are something else.
See if you can be just that awareness. Let your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, sensations and so forth arise and pass without getting attached to them. If you find yourself getting caught up in them, that’s OK – just let them pass again. Perhaps allow them to be like a train. If you try to get in front of the train and stop it, it just rolls over you. Try getting off at the station, and just be aware of the train passing by.
See if you can find the place where awareness happens. Follow your awareness to its source. Where is awareness? I’m not talking about awareness of something. I’m not talking about awareness of thoughts, feelings, perceptions. I’m not talking about being aware of your breath, or the sounds in the room, or of how your clothes feel against your skin. I’m talking about just awareness. Where is that?
Just be here.
What is here?
Follow that.
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