First of all, Nirvana is not the 'extinction of self or doer'.
This is because there never was a truly existing self or doer that
could be pinned down to begin with. Nirvana is the end of a
habitual misperception with its resulting afflictive emotions, and
this misperception arises out of ignorance of what reality always
already is.
Nirvana is *not* a peak experience, it is certainly not inducable
by drugs and it requires wisdom to realize Nirvana. Deep sleep
doesn't cause that realization.
As I wrote before:
"First I do not see Anatta as merely a freeing from personality
sort of experience as you mentioned; I see it as that a self/agent,
a doer, a thinker, a watcher, etc, cannot be found apart from the
moment to moment flow of manifestation or as its commonly expressed
as ‘the observer is the observed’; there is no self apart from
arising and passing. A very important point here is that
Anatta/No-Self is a Dharma Seal, it is the nature of Reality all
the time -- and not merely as a state free from personality, ego or
the ‘small self’ or a stage to attain. This means that it does not
depend on the level of achievement of a practitioner to experience
anatta but Reality has always been Anatta and what
is important here is the intuitive insight into it as the nature,
characteristic, of phenomenon (dharma seal).
To put further emphasis on the importance of this point, I would
like to borrow from the Bahiya Sutta (http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.1.10.irel.html)
that ‘in the seeing, there is just the seen, no seer’, ‘in the
hearing, there is just the heard, no hearer’ as an illustration.
When a person says that I have gone beyond the experiences from ‘I
hear sound’ to a stage of ‘becoming sound’, he is mistaken. When it
is taken to be a stage, it is illusory. For in actual case, there
is and always is only sound when hearing; never was there a hearer
to begin with. Nothing attained for it is always so. This is the
seal of no-self. Therefore to a non dualist, the practice is in
understanding the illusionary views of the sense of self and the
split. Before the awakening of prajna wisdom, there will always be
an unknowing attempt to maintain a purest state of 'presence'. This
purest presence is the 'how' of a dualistic mind -- its dualistic
attempt to provide a solution due to its lack of clarity of the
spontaneous nature of the unconditioned. It is critical to note
here that both the doubts/confusions/searches and the solutions
that are created for these doubts/confusions/searches actually
derive from the same cause -- our karmic propensities of ever
seeing things dualistically"
Nirvana is Analytical cessation in contrast to non-analytical
cessation (peak experiences, deep sleep, etc):
"
Cessation (Wyl.‘gog pa; Skt. nirodha) — generally the
word refers to the absence or extinction of a given entity. As the
third of the four noble truths, it refers specifically to the
pacification of suffering
and its causes, and is therefore a synonym of nirvana.
Cessation is of two kinds:
In his commentary to Mipham
Rinpoche’s Khenjuk,
Khenpo
Nüden writes:
This is the unconditioned aspect of the permanent elimination of
destructive
emotions and other factors to be eliminated, through the force
of developing realization of the undefiling path, such as the
wisdom
of discernment, within the mind.
This does not refer to the ceasing of latent habitual
tendencies as a result of analysis and investigation, but
rather to the absence of a given thing in a particular place due to
an incompleteness of necessary causes and conditions, as in the
case of horns on a horse’s head, for instance. Another example
which is mentioned in the commentaries is the fact that other types
of consciousness do not arise when the eye-consciousness is
distracted by a visual form. This also includes all the various
forms of non-existence (or absence), such as the absence of a vase
in a particular place."
About drugs: smoking weed does not lead to the loss of the sense of
self. In fact sometimes it aggravates it, and sometimes it causes
states of dissociation, called depersonalization. In a state of
depersonalization, the sense of self is still strong, but now it
feels separated from reality as a Watcher. So now you are a Watcher
of things, happening on its own, but you do not feel you have
control over it. Reality starts to have a dream-like quality and
you become dissociated from it. Smoking weed can lead to such a
situation (apart from the high and other possible side effects like
paranoia, etc). I do not see this as helpful in to
spiritual progression as it does not lead to the dissolution of
sense of self. Ketamine also produces dissociative feelings.
There are drugs like psychedelics. Psychedelics such as LSD, DMT,
ayahuasca and so forth do lead to a temporary loss of sense of self
(non-analytical cessation). It does lead to intense peak
experiences and religious experiences of "cosmic consciousness".
But even so, the experience is more similar to I AMness rather than
no-self. And even if they have peak experience of non-duality it is
not anatta. Nonetheless, a lot of westerners turned to spirituality
and Buddhism after experimenting with psychedelics and glimpsing a
deeper reality of their consciousness. I say these drugs have a
limited potential or benefit for turning certain groups of people
towards a spiritual path. Nevertheless I do not advise or recommend
any intake of drugs, as doing proper meditation and practices is
enough, and that brings sustainable meditative experiences rather
than quick unsustainable glimpses. But neither am I particularly
against people experimenting with these drugs (but like Alan Watts
said about psychedelics: "when you get the message, hang up the
phone") - many of my Westerner friends had openings and initial
glimpses and peak experiences that turned them towards the
spiritual path. They have later reached very deep realizations (not
by psychedelics of course, psychedelics merely opened a window for
them).
(Please do not try Any kind of drugs, at least not in Singapore,
sometimes the law is more dangerous than the drugs to its users
(depends on what drugs, of course hard drugs like heroin, ice/meth,
cocaine etc are extremely harmful and deadly, while a number of
softer drugs are considered to be less harmful than alcohol and
tobacco, but nonetheless banned due to our strict zero-drugs
policy, which I think is good in many ways). In certain countries
like Netherlands, certain 'softer' drugs are legal to some extent,
and even in certain states of Australia, U.S., etc, and even in
states that are not legal, the enforcement is usually little and
sometimes you get let off with just a warning. In any case,
any form of habit towards substance abuse and intoxication
is always very negative from a practice point of view and must be
avoided.)