Alcohol

Alcohol consumption is not recommend in Theosophical literature for a variety of reasons.

General description

The emphasis of the Theosophical life is not on the physical but, rather, on the psychological nature. As Blavatsky wrote:

After all is said and done, the purely bodily actions and functions are of far less importance than what a man thinks and feels, what desires he encourages in his mind, and allows to take root and grow there.

However, since the body is the vehicle of expression on the physical plane of all the principles, if the diet and other physical habits are not in tune with the spiritual search, they can become an impediment for the spiritual consciousness to influence our personality:

Purity of mind is of greater importance than purity of body. If the upādhi be not perfectly pure, it cannot preserve recollections coming from a higher state.​

Blavatsky's teachings

H. P. Blavatsky was against the use of alcohol, specially in the case of people who were interested in spiritual growth. She wrote:

Alcohol in all its forms has a direct, marked, and very deleterious influence on man's psychic condition. Wine and spirit drinking is only less destructive to the development of the inner powers, than the habitual use of hashish, opium, and similar drugs.

In her Esoteric Instructions, she explained that alcohol affects two glands in the brain that are very important in spiritual development, as are the Pituitary and Pineal:

Pure psychic vision (ordinary clairvoyance is not the use of this organ) is caused by the molecular motion of this body [the Pituitary Body], which is directly connected with the optic nerve, and thus affects the sight, and gives rise to hallucinations. Its motion may readily cause flashes of light, seen within the head, similar to those that may be obtained on pressing the eyeballs, and so causing molecular motion in the optic nerve. When molecular action is set up in the Pituitary Body these flashes are seen, and further action gives psychic vision, as similar motion in the Pineal Gland gives Spiritual Clairvoyance. Drunkenness and fever cause disorderly motion in the Pituitary Body, and so produce illusions of sight, visions, hallucinations. This body is sometimes so affected by drunkenness that it is paralyzed, and the strict forbiddance of alcoholic liquids to all students of Occultism turns on this effect which alcohol produces on the Pituitary Body and Pineal Gland.​

According to Besant

Take a man who is suffering from delirium tremens. It is not a fancy that he sees. That man is in a real world, although not in the objective world you are most acquainted with. He sees certain things by a certain faculty which is asleep in the ordinary man, but which can be stimulated into abnormal power under certain conditions, for good or evil. One of those conditions is the continuous drink habit, which has this peculiar physiological result, that it brings into activity this ordinarily latent sense of sight, and under those conditions he sees thought-forms of a very low and horrible character, but still thought-forms. You may have noticed the very peculiar fact that the type of things seen in delirium tremens is the same, whoever the person may be. The kind of thing the patient sees is of the same sort. These things are real, in a particular form of existence which is veiled from you in the ordinary body, and with which you only come into contact under these very abnormal conditions.

Another problem is the attraction of undesirable astral entities:

Drunkards who have lost their physical bodies, and can therefore no longer satisfy their longing for intoxicants, hang round places where drink is taken, and round those who take it, endeavouring to push themselves into the bodies of people who are drinking, and thus to share the low pleasure to which they surrender themselves. Women of refinement would shrink from their wines if they could see the loathly creatures who seek to partake in their enjoyment, and the close connection which they thus set up with beings of the most repellent type. Evil elementals also cluster round the thoughts of drunkards clad in elemental essence, while the physical body attracts to itself from the surrounding atmosphere other gross particles given off from drunken and profligate bodies, and these also are built into it, coarsening and degrading it.​

According to de Purucker

Alcohol is pernicious at all times and in all circumstances and never should be used except in certain very rare cases of illness, and then only in strict moderation. In such cases it is far better if it be used only externally by rubbing and not taken internally as a beverage. Even the fumes of alcohol are bad and all students of Occultism are strictly forbidden to use it as a beverage.

The E.S. rules have come down from immemorial time and cannot be changed. They are not in any sense arbitrary, but are based upon actual facts of our human constitution. And the rule regarding total abstinence from alcohol is one that is most important; for, to take alcohol even in moderate doses has a deleterious effect on certain centers of the nervous system. It dulls and stupefies these centers and the faculties that function through them which it is the aim of all esoteric training to awaken. H. P. B. in her article on ‘Practical Occultism’ has pointed out that "Wine and Spirits are supposed to contain and preserve the bad magnetism of all the men who helped in their fabrication."​

It may help the new applicants to know the way in which most of our E. S. members handle the question of refraining from the taking of alcoholic drinks: i. e., simply by saying very naturally and quietly that they do so from motives of health; and this is a fact, because, as said above, alcohol does affect the health in an inner way. It would be wrong to speak of these rules and principles of esoteric training as being fanatical and dogmatic; for in fact they are no more so than are the rules which an athlete would follow, for example, while undergoing training for some athletic contest. They are simply preliminary means of preparation and by no means difficult for one who is in earnest. There are so many people who do not drink, and they are just as jolly and happy as anybody else and can take part in all proper social life, without causing any feeling of constraint.

According to Leadbeater

Destruction of the protective web

C. W. Leadbeater described how the abuse of alcohol may destroy the protective web that separates the physical from the astral plane:

[There] is a sheath composed of a single layer of physical atoms much compressed and permeated by a special form of vital force. The divine life which normally descends from the astral body to the physical is so attuned as to pass through this with perfect ease, but it is an absolute barrier to all other forces-- all which cannot use the atomic matter of both the planes. This web is the natural protection . . . Any injury to this web is a serious disaster. There are several ways in which injury may come, and it behooves us to use our best endeavours to guard against it. It may come either by accident or by continued malpractice. . . . The malpractices which may more gradually injure this protective web are of two classes-- the use of alcohol or narcotic drugs and the deliberate endeavour to throw open the doors which nature has kept closed, by means of such a process as is described in spiritualistic parlance as sitting for development. Certain drugs and drinks-- notably alcohol and all the narcotics, including tobacco-- contain matter which on breaking up volatilizes, and some of it passes from the physical plane to the astral. (Even tea and coffee contain this matter, but in quantities so infinitesimal that it is usually only after long-continued abuse of them that the effect manifests itself.)

When this takes place in the body of man these constituents rush out through the force-centres in the opposite direction to that for which they are intended, and in doing this repeatedly they seriously injure and finally destroy the delicate web. This deterioration or destruction may be brought about in two different ways, according to the type of the person concerned and to the proportion of the constituents in his etheric and astral bodies. First, the rush of volatilizing matter actually burns away the web, and therefore leaves the door open to all sorts of irregular forces and evil influences.

The second result is that these volatile constituents, in flowing through, somehow harden the atom so that its pulsation is to a large extent checked and crippled, and it is no longer capable of being vitalized by the particular type of force which welds it into a web. The result of this is a kind of ossification of the web, so that instead of having too much coming through from one plane to the other, we have very little of any kind coming through.

We may see the effects of both these types of deterioration in the case of men who yield themselves to drunkenness. Some of those who are affected in the former way fall into delirium tremens, obsession or insanity; but those are after all comparatively rare. Far more common is the second type of deterioration-- the case in which we have a kind of general deadening down of the man' s qualities, resulting in gross materialism, brutality and animalism, in the loss of all finer feelings and of the power to control himself. He no longer feels any sense of responsibility; he may love his wife and children when sober, but when the fit of drunkenness comes upon him he will use the money which should have bought bread for them to satisfy his own bestial cravings, the affection and the responsibility having apparently entirely disappeared.

Online Resources

Articles and pamphlets

• The Influence of Alcohol by Annie Besant
• Theosophy and the Alcohol Question by Herbert Coryn