What would happen if the Buddha was administered drugs (like weed) after his enlightenment?

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I doubt he would have been very impressed.

India has always been a dynamic, crazy place. Steve Jobs went there to find his enlightenment, and yes, copious amounts of drugs were involved. The Buddha lived a courtly life before he decided to renounce and become an ascetic. He did this at the ripe old age of 29. Plenty of time to have gotten his crunk on before settling down for a long marriage with God.

Drugs work by overloading the limbic systems in your brain. Enlightenment is somewhat similar, but it’s not just your limbic systems that go crazy, it’s all the systems. Drug use might open up a few pathways for an enlightened person to explore, but it’s not going to be the huge life-changing epiphany that it is for a lot of people.

I was thoroughly unimpressed by weed the first time I tried it. I’d like to try psychedelics once in my life but everything I’ve read about it leaves me somewhat uninspired about their potential. I knew a guy once with truly phenomenal visualization skills. He didn’t need drugs to produce some fantastically detailed experiences.

He was also quite troubled and bored by earthly life. As far as I could see, his spiritual journey was only marginally better than constantly drug tripping or watching TV all day. People undervalue the spiritual potential of entertainment, having it is way better than not having it, but when your life starts to get overtaken by just having experiences all the time without consequence, you just stop moving in any real direction.

I’ve said before that consciousness growth cannot be meaningfully accelerated or halted, and it’s true, whether you move or don’t move in any particular lifetime isn’t going to meaningfully affect how fast you grow. But we’re dealing with eternity here. You can speed up amazingly fast at a local level and it still be a drop in the bucket compared to where you’re at from a cosmic, eternal perspective.

But it’s more fun to move. It’s more fun to learn and grow. It’s the whole reason why we’re here, to test our mettle in a world where the things that we do actually matter.

When you’re enlightened, you move at a grander scale. Your mind awakens to possibilities beyond all imagination, whereas drugs only act at the level of imagination. The Buddha would have smoked his weed, looked at you, taught you a sublimely important lesson while super baked, told you, “this shit’s decent, but not half as good as the stuff we had back in my father’s palace,” handed it back to you and moved on to his next student.

Then when you’re sober again, he’d come around and ask you if you remember what he told you while you were baked. Of course you didn’t. And he’d smile and say, “that was the real lesson.”