"If you look at the great mystics of past and present, you'd be hard pressed to find one that depended on external stimuli."

A good (albeit possibly apocryphal) example would be Jesus. His epithet was 'the anointed one', because he regularly covered his body in an oil that contained enormous amounts of cannabis, among other psychoactive ingredients. (At least a according to several linguists.)

"and here I sat several retreats with dagger-like pain in the knees, wandering mind, and a deep desire to somehow exit stage left unnoticed."

You're not going to have a mystical experience from meditation as a beginner, but it's pretty typical to start experiencing various energy phenomena after a few days. It depends what kind of meditation you're doing though.

re: Jesus and annointing himself with cannabis, I'll stand by the historically great mystics (Jesus,Buddha,...many others,Ramana Maharshi,Krishnamurti,etc.) not _needing_ anything to alter or enhance what is.

re: stages of meditation, sure, energetic experiences will come soon after starting a retreat, but in my experience, while interesting events will happen, there was a certain grind to a 5, 7, or 10 day retreat that left me feeling more bored out/raw than realized.

Don't do retreats anymore, drawn fully back into the world, for better or worse, not sure ;-)

Isn't Buddha normally depicted as being surrounded by datura flowers on his death bed? They might not have needed these things on any given day, but given that it's a path, you might need various tools from time to time to get around obstacles blocking the way. You might only use a substance once or twice in your life, but if not for that you might never have advanced any further.

If we take the sutras attributed to the Buddha as coming from one being, it would be laughable to think that this utter non-person would require anything to alter an already complete experience.

Repeating myself, but the same goes for the great mystics past & present. As to what they did prior to awakening, perhaps some did take hallucinogens, but given that none of the extant teachings suggest ingesting external substances, we can conclude that hallucinogens are non-essential to awakening.

In the west, where materialism reigns, many of us grow up spiritually bankrupt and turn to strong experience (hallucinogenic intake in my case) as a means to fill the void. Provides a much needed break from technology and rational thinking, but not convinced that this does much more than spin the wheels in place.

I think the number of teachers is much more affected by demand than supply. You can't be a teacher unless people want to pay attention to you. I had an experience that blew those gates clear off their hinges, and into the nearest ocean. But I'm not teaching, and nobody's asking. My best friend was vaguely interested for one conversation over coffee, while we were sitting around waiting for something else. Everyone other than her was far less interested than that. How many people express that they're looking for more? How many act like they know just who they are and what they're doing? The world only has attention for a relative few dalai lamas or Eckhart Tolles.

Interesting, an old friend, whom I, and a couple of established Zen teachers (Rinzai and Soto) view as hugely awakened, sat a single weekend retreat, which he left due to aforementioned pain in the knees.

Apparently he tooks loads of LSD in his late teens, enough to drop out of college, literally grab a blanket and head into the woods for 6 months (verified by mutual friends).

That's a pretty "old" school approach ;-)

In the couple of years that I knew him he routinely blew my mind with in-the-moment koans.

FWIW, a brilliant mathematician and programmer who gave up silicon valley money for a non-thinking form of employment so he could more fully contemplate the magnitude of death.

OK, sure.