The Roundtable: Help or Hindrance
with Ram Dass, Joan Halifax, Robert Aitken, Richard Baker
Whether or not psychedelics have any usefulness to someone on a Buddhist path was the subject off our recent interviews, conducted by Allan Hunt Badiner and combined into the following roundtable discussion.
Robert Aitken Roshi of Hawaii is one of America's most senior and respected Zen masters.
Richard Baker Roshi leads a thriving Zen Buddhist community in Colorado with informal branches throughout Europe.
Ram Dass is writing a new book about the impact of practice on aging, and is a serious student of both Buddhism and psychedelics.
Joan Halifax is a senior Buddhist teacher with Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, and the director of Upaya in New Mexico.
Tricycle: Psychedelics is a huge category. We are focusing mostly on materials that are derived from plants, that when ingested in appropriate doses and in appropriate conditions may contribute to an expanded state of consciousness. Can use of psychedelics of this kind lead to enlightenment?
Halifax: In the earlier days, we defined psychedelic as "mind manifesting." The way it was seen, particularly by LSD researcher Stan Grof and others, is that domains of the mind are evoked when certain substances are taken. Different plant teachers are like keys that unlock different doors within the mind. For example, mescaline produces a different kind of vision than psilocybin does, or yagé, and so on.
Ram Dass: From my point of view, Buddhism is the closest to the psychedelic experience, at least in terms of LSD. LSD catapults you beyond your conceptual structures. It extricates you. It overrides your habits of identification with thought and puts you into a nonconceptual mode very fast.
Tricycle: What about the so-called Buddhist pill, MDMA, a.k.a. ecstasy?
Ram Dass: I don't find it to be a Buddhist pill. I find that MDMA is wonderful for relational therapy. It enhances the quality of compassion, of loving, of seeing the beauty in people and all that, but not the experience of formlessness or emptiness. I don't like the speed component in it, the kind of jawclenching and all that stuff. I took about fifty trips of MDMA and decided that was enough. My guru, Neem Karoli Baba, commented on psychedelics once. "It's useful," he said, "but it's not the true samadhi. It allows you to come in and have the darshan of Christ, but you can only stay two hours and then you have to leave." And he said, "You can't become Christ through your medicine." The distinction between seeing and becoming is where Buddhism comes in.
Tricycle: Two hours of Christ doesn't sound so bad!
Ram Dass: It's not bad! But it can also trap you in a certain kind of experience. And experience isn't non-experience. It's an analog of the thing but it's not the thing itself. It's like the experience of emptiness rather than emptiness itself.
Tricycle: Ram Dass, you mentioned the habit-override potential of psychedelics. But this is short-lived, isn't it?
Aitken: It's all very well to have a delightful experience of forgetting yourself, but what about afterwards! The acid test is how this works out in the daily life of working for a living and paying taxes and raising kids and so on.
Ram Dass: Everybody's a little greedy for being enlightened immediately. What I've noticed in my own life over the thirty-five years since my first ingestion, is that when I reenter, the habits come back in. But what I have in addition to the habits is the memory of the experience, the sense of knowing that it's possible. Knowing that it's possible changes the meaning of all spiritual practice that follows because you go in with a perspective that's not just from here, but from there as well.
Aitken: I think that there are both negative and positive experiences possible under psychedelics, but I think you must leave them behind if you want to take up Buddhist practice seriously. Many people came to Zen Buddhist practice through their experience with psychedelics. I don't meet any newcomers that have that experience now.
Tricycle: How did the refugees from psychedelica do?
Aitken: Drugs gave them a sense of religious possibility, but then they felt they had exhausted the potential and wanted to take up a practice that would lead them to religious insight. There were people during that period who tried to do zazen and take drugs at the same time. This really didn't work at all because there was a quality of selfabsorption in the experience of the people taking drugs that was quite out of keeping with the goal of practice.
