One of the first obstacles encountered along any contemplative path is the basic uncertainty about the nature of spiritual authority. If there are important truths to be discovered through introspection, there must be better and worse ways to do this—and one should expect to meet a range of experts, novices, fools, and frauds along the way. Of course, charlatans haunt every walk of life. But on spiritual matters, foolishness and fraudulence can be especially difficult to detect. Unfortunately, this is a natural consequence of the subject matter. When learning to play a sport like golf, you can immediately establish the abilities of the teacher, and the teacher can, in turn, evaluate your progress without leaving anything to the imagination. All the relevant facts are in plain view. If you can’t consistently hit the little white ball where you want it to go, you have something to learn from anybody who can. The difference between an expert and a novice is no less stark when it comes to recognizing the illusion of the self. But the qualifications of a teacher and the progress of a student are more difficult to assess.
Spiritual teachers of a certain ability, whether real or imagined, are often described as “gurus,” and they elicit an unusual degree of devotion from their students. If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.
In the West, the term guru immediately conjures the image of a surrounding “cult” of devotees—a situation known to give rise to terrifying social deformities. In cults and other fringe spiritual communities, we often find a collection of needy and credulous dropouts ruled by a charismatic psychotic or psychopath. When we consider groups like the People’s Temple under Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians under David Koresh, and Heaven’s Gate under Marshall Applewhite, it is almost impossible to understand how the spell was first cast, let alone how it was maintained under conditions of such terrible deprivation and danger. But each of these groups proved that intellectual isolation and abuse can lead even well-educated people to willingly destroy themselves.
Gurus fall at every point along the spectrum of moral wisdom. Charles Manson was a guru of sorts. Jesus, the Buddha, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, and every other patriarch and matriarch of the world’s religions were as well. For our purpose, the only differences between a cult and a religion are the numbers of adherents and the degree to which they are marginalized by the rest of society. Scientology remains a cult. Mormonism has (just barely) become a religion. Christianity has been a religion for more than a thousand years. But one searches in vain for differences in their respective doctrines that account for the difference in their status.
Some gurus claim to channel the dead, to be poised to leave Earth on an alien spacecraft, or to have once ruled Atlantis. Others impart perfectly reasonable teachings about the nature of the mind and the causes of human suffering—only to make ridiculous claims about cosmology or the origins of disease. To hear that someone is a “guru” tells us almost nothing apart from the fact that some students hold this person in high esteem. Whether their reasons for doing so are good or bad—and whether these people pose a danger to their neighbors—depends upon the content of their beliefs.
Teachers in any field can help or harm their students, and a person’s desire to make progress and to win the teacher’s approval can often be exploited—emotionally, financially, or sexually. But a guru purports to teach the very art of living, and thus his beliefs potentially encompass every question relevant to the well-being of his students. Apart from parenthood, probably no human relationship offers greater scope for benevolence or abuse than that of guru to disciple. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the ethical failures of the men and women who assume this role can be spectacular and constitute some of the greatest examples of hypocrisy and betrayal to be found anywhere.
The problem of trust is compounded because the line between valid instruction and abuse can be difficult to discern. Given that the entire purpose of a devotee’s relationship to a guru is to have his egocentric illusions exposed and undermined, any unwelcome intrusion into his life can potentially be justified as a teaching.
Whenever Gutei Oshō was asked about Zen, he simply raised his finger. Once a visitor asked Gutei’s boy attendant, “What does your master teach?” The boy too raised his finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. The boy, screaming with pain, began to run away. Gutei called to him, and when he turned around, Gutei raised his finger. The boy suddenly became enlightened.1
If cutting off a child’s finger can count as compassionate instruction, it seems impossible to predict just how fully a spiritual teacher might depart from conventional ethical norms. This is both a theoretical problem in the literature and a psychological one in many spiritual communities: A student’s moral intuitions and instincts for self-preservation can always be recast as symptoms of fear and attachment. Consequently, even the most extraordinarily cruel or degrading treatment at the hands of a guru can be interpreted as being for one’s own good: The master wants to have sex with you or your spouse—why would you resist? Can’t you see that your impulse to refuse such a generous overture rests on the very illusion of separateness that you want to overcome? Oh, you don’t fancy tithing 20 percent of your income to the ashram? Why are you so attached to the fruits of your own labor? What is enlightenment worth to you anyway? You don’t like scrubbing toilets and doing yard work for hours at a stretch? Are you above performing such simple acts of service to the Divine? Don’t you see that this feeling of self-importance is precisely what must be surrendered before you can recognize your true nature? You found it humiliating when the master had you strip naked and dance in front of your parents and the rest of the congregation? Can’t you see that this was just a mirror held up to expose your own egocentricity? Oh, you don’t think an enlightened adept would behave this way? Well, what makes you think that your provincial assumptions about enlightenment are true?
Given the structure of this game, it is little wonder that many people have been harmed by their relationships to spiritual teachers—or that many teachers, given so much power over the lives of others, have abused it. This ethical terrain is all the more confusing because there is no cult leader so deranged or sadistic, or whose fall from grace was so hideous, that one can’t find students who will insist that he or she is the Messiah. It is amazing to consider, but there are people still walking this earth who believe that Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite were genuine saviors. It is also safe to say that no teacher has been so saintly and impeccable that someone hasn’t left his company convinced that he was a dangerous lunatic. If every guru were judged by the worst thing anyone has ever said about him, none would escape hanging.
It is true, however, that the role of guru seems to attract more than its fair share of narcissists and confidence men. Again, this seems to be a natural consequence of the subject matter. One can’t fake being an expert gymnast, a rocket scientist, or even a competent cook—at least not for long—but one can fake being an enlightened adept. Those who succeed in doing this are often quite charismatic, because a person can’t survive long in this mode unless he can bowl people over. G. I. Gurdjieff set the standard here, and he may have been the first man to return from his travels in the East and establish himself as a proper guru in the West. He was the classic example of a gifted charlatan. He managed to attract a wide following of smart, successful devotees, including the French mathematician Henri Poincaré, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and the authors J. B. Priestley, René Daumal, and Katherine Mansfield. He reached other luminaries as well—including Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, and Gerald Heard—through the efforts of his main disciple, P. D. Ouspensky. Frank Lloyd Wright once declared Gurdjieff “the greatest man in the world.”2 Coming from a narcissist of Wright’s caliber, this says quite a lot about what sort of impression the man could make.
However, Gurdjieff taught his students that the moon was alive, that it controlled the thoughts and behaviors of unenlightened people, and that it devoured their souls at the moment of death. He used to make visitors to his chateau in Fontainebleau spend long days digging ditches in the sun—only to have them immediately fill them in and begin digging elsewhere. He must have made quite an impression in person, given how long he was able to get away with this mischief. I’m confident that if I were to teach a similarly insane doctrine, all the while demanding painful and pointless sacrifices from my students, I wouldn’t have a friend left on earth by the end of the week.
I’m not saying that being forced to do hard and seemingly useless work cannot benefit a person. Consider the Navy SEALs: To become a SEAL, every candidate must pass a qualifying course so arduous that it would constitute torture if imposed on him against his will. This is a selection process that allows the U.S. Navy to produce the most elite special operations force found anywhere. But it is also a bad selection process that serves primarily as a rite of passage. It is well known, for instance, that some of the best recruits to the SEAL program are weeded out owing to sheer bad luck. They simply suffer too many injuries to continue with the training or to survive “hell week”—a five-and-a-half-day purgatory of wet sand, dangerous boat drills, calisthenics, hypothermia, and sleeplessness. But those left standing have had an experience of self-overcoming unknown to humanity outside ancient Sparta—and they can be sure that everyone else with whom they will serve in combat has survived the same ordeal.
One of the first things one learns in practicing meditation is that nothing is intrinsically boring—indeed, boredom is simply a lack of attention. Pay sufficient attention, and the mere experience of breathing can reward months and years of steady vigilance. Every guru knows that drudgery can be a way of testing the strength of this insight. And, needless to say, this truth about the human mind can be exploited. The journalist Frances FitzGerald recounts meeting many well-educated disciples of Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)—doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors—doing years of uncompensated menial labor at his Oregon commune.3 All appeared quite happy with the work, presumably viewing it as an exercise in self-overcoming. Indeed, abandoning one’s worldly ambitions to do menial labor—attentively and joyfully—can be an exercise in self-overcoming. Here, two truths apparently collide: A person can be exploited and still learn something valuable in the process.
But one must draw the line somewhere, and I think consent should be the governing principle. SEALs in training can drop out at any time, and they are continually encouraged to do so. The inner voice that says they might not have what it takes to be a SEAL is deliberately amplified by their instructors—often by bullhorn—so that those who don’t have what it takes will leave the program. That is what distinguishes SEAL training from actual torture. Cults, by contrast, often violate the principle of consent in many ways. I don’t deny that a truly enlightened man or woman—that is, one who has fully and permanently unraveled the conventional sense of self—might awaken his or her students by violating certain moral or cultural norms. But extreme examples of such unconventional behavior—often referred to in the literature as “crazy wisdom”—seem to produce the desired result only in the literature. Every modern instance of these shenanigans has seemed far more crazy than wise, attesting to nothing so much as the insecurities and sensual desires of the guru in question. Ancient tales of liberating violence, as in the Zen parable above, or of enlightening sexual exploits seem like literary teaching devices, not accurate accounts of how wisdom has been reliably transmitted from master to disciple.
It is usually easy to detect social and psychological problems in any community of spiritual seekers. This seems to be yet another liability inherent to the project of self-transcendence. Many people renounce the world because they can’t find a satisfactory place in it, and almost any spiritual teaching can be used to justify a pathological lack of ambition. For someone who has not yet succeeded at anything and who probably fears failure, a doctrine that criticizes the search for worldly success can be very appealing. And devotion to a guru—a combination of love, gratitude, awe, and obedience—can facilitate an unhealthy return to childhood. In fact, the very structure of this relationship can condemn a student to a kind of intellectual and emotional slavery. The writer Peter Marin captured the mood perfectly:
Obedience to a “perfect master.” One could hear, inwardly in them, the gathering of breath for a collective sigh of relief. At last, to be set free, to lay down one’s burden, to be a child again—not in renewed innocence, but in restored dependence, in admitted, undisguised dependence. To be told, again, what to do, and how to do it. . . . The yearning in the audience was so palpable, their need so thick and obvious, that it was impossible not to feel it, impossible not to empathize with it in some way. Why not, after all? Clearly there are truths and kinds of wisdom to which most persons will not come alone; clearly there are in the world authorities in matters of the spirit, seasoned travelers, guides. Somewhere there must be truths other than the disappointing ones we have; somewhere there must be access to a world larger than this one. And if, to get there, we must put aside all arrogance of will and the stubborn ego, why not? Why not admit what we do not know and cannot do and submit to someone who both knows and does, who will teach us if we merely put aside all judgment for the moment and obey with trust and goodwill?4
A relationship with a guru, or indeed with any expert, tends to run along authoritarian lines. You don’t know what you need to know, and the expert presumably does; that’s why you are sitting in front of him in the first place. The implied hierarchy is unavoidable. Contemplative expertise exists, and a contemplative expert is someone who can help you realize certain truths about the nature of your own mind.
Unfortunately, the link between self-transcendence and moral behavior is not as straightforward as we might like. It would seem that people can have genuine spiritual insights, and a capacity to provoke those insights in others, while harboring serious moral flaws. It is not always accurate to call such people “frauds”: They aren’t necessarily pretending to have spiritual insights or to be able to produce such experiences in others. But depending on the level of their practice their insights may be an insufficient antidote to the rest of their personalities. The resulting problems can be accentuated by cultural differences. For instance, what is the age of consent for sex? One wouldn’t necessarily get the same answers in Bombay and Boston. Certain schools of Buddhism focus on compassion, kindness, and nonharming to an unusual degree, and this offers some protection against abuses of power. But even here one occasionally finds a venerated master with the ethical intuitions of a pirate.
Consider the case of the late Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was an inspired teacher but also an occasionally violent drunk and a philanderer. As guru to Allen Ginsberg, Trungpa attracted many of America’s most accomplished poets into his orbit. Once, at a Halloween party for senior students—where W. S. Merwin, the future poet laureate of the United States, and his girlfriend, the poet Dana Naone, were guests—Trungpa ordered his bodyguards to forcibly strip a sixty-year-old woman of her clothing and carry her naked around the meditation hall. This made Merwin and Naone more than a little uncomfortable, and they thought it wise to return to their room for the rest of the night. Noticing their absence, Trungpa asked a group of devotees to find the poets and bring them back to the party. When Merwin and Naone refused to open their door, Trungpa instructed his disciples to break it down. The resulting forced entry led to chaos—wherein Merwin, who was then famous for his pacifism, fought off his attackers with a broken beer bottle, stabbing several in the face and arms. The sight of blood, and his horror over his own actions, apparently collapsed Merwin’s defenses, and he and Naone finally allowed themselves to be captured and brought before the guru.
Trungpa, who was by then quite drunk, castigated the pair for their egocentricity and demanded that they take off their clothes. When they refused, he ordered his bodyguards to strip them. By all accounts, Naone became hysterical and begged someone among the crowd of onlookers to call the police. One student attempted to physically intervene. Trungpa himself punched this Samaritan in the face and then ordered his guards to drag the man from the room.
Predictably, many of Trungpa’s students viewed the assault on Merwin and Naone as a profound spiritual teaching meant to subdue their egos. Ginsberg, who had not been present at the time, offered the following assessment in an interview: “In the middle of that scene, to yell ‘call the police’—do you realize how vulgar that was? The Wisdom of the East was being unveiled, and she’s going ‘call the police!’ I mean, shit! Fuck that shit! Strip ’em naked, break down the door!”5 Apart from having produced a perfect jewel of hippie moral confusion, Ginsberg exposed the riddle at the heart of the traditional guru-devotee relationship. No doubt Merwin and Naone’s preference to not dance naked in public had more than a little to do with their attachment to their own privacy and autonomy. And it isn’t inconceivable that a guru could operate in such a coercive and seemingly unethical way out of a sense of compassion. In fact, it may have been conceivable to Merwin and Naone themselves, even in the aftermath of this humiliating ordeal, because they remained at Trungpa’s seminar for several more days to receive further teachings. However, judging from the effect that Trungpa’s wild behavior had on both himself (he apparently died from alcoholism) and his students, it is very difficult to view it as the product of enlightened wisdom.
The scandals surrounding Trungpa’s organization did not end there. Trungpa had groomed a Western student, Ösel Tendzin, to be his successor. Tendzin was the first Westerner to be honored in this way in any lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. His appointment as “Vajra Regent” had even been approved by the Karmapa, one of the most revered Tibetan masters then living. As it happens, Tendzin was bisexual, highly promiscuous, and rather fond of pressuring his straight male devotees to have sex with him as a form of spiritual initiation. He later contracted HIV but continued to have unprotected sex with more than a hundred men and women without telling them of his condition. Trungpa and several people on the board of his organization knew that the regent was ill and did their best to keep it a secret. Once the scandal broke, Tendzin claimed that Trungpa had promised him that he would do no harm as long as he continued his spiritual practice. Apparently, the virus in his blood didn’t care whether he did his spiritual practice or not. At least one of his victims later died of AIDS, having spread HIV to others.
What one encounters in a person like Trungpa is a mind impressively free of shame. This can be a good thing, provided that one happens to also be committed to the well-being of others. But shame serves a crucial social function: It keeps us from behaving like wild animals. Believing in one’s own perfect enlightenment is rather like driving a car without brakes—not a problem if you never need to stop or slow down, but otherwise a terrible idea. The belief that he could live beyond conventional moral constraints is explicitly put forward in Trungpa’s teaching:
[Morality] or discipline is not a matter of binding oneself to a fixed set of laws or patterns. For if a bodhisattva is completely selfless, a completely open person, then he will act according to openness, [and] will not have to follow rules; he will simply fall into patterns. It is impossible for the bodhisattva to destroy or harm other people, because he embodies transcendental generosity. He has opened himself completely and so does not discriminate between this and that. He just acts in accordance with what is. . . . If we are completely open, not watching ourselves at all, but being completely open and communicating with situations as they are, then action is pure, absolute, superior. . . . It is an often-used metaphor that the bodhisattva’s conduct is like the walk of an elephant. Elephants do not hurry; they just walk slowly and surely through the jungle, one step after another. They just sail right along. They never fall nor do they make mistakes.6
The state of freedom and effortless goodwill that Trungpa describes here undoubtedly corresponds to an experience that certain people have and to a perception (whether true or not) that others can form about them. But boundless compassion is one thing; inerrancy is another. The notion that one is incapable of making mistakes poses obvious ethical concerns, no matter what one’s level of realization. Anyone who has studied the spread of Eastern spirituality in the West knows that these elephants often stumble—even stampede—injuring themselves and many others in the process.
A person’s eyes convey a powerful illusion of inner life. The illusion is true, but it is an illusion all the same. When we look into the eyes of another human being, we seem to see the light of consciousness radiating from the eyes themselves—there is a glint of joy or judgment, perhaps. But every inflection of mood or personality—even the most basic indication that the person is alive—comes not from the eyes but from the surrounding muscles of the face. If a person’s eyes look clouded by madness or fatigue, the muscles orbicularis oculi are to blame. And if a person appears to radiate the wisdom of the ages, the effect comes not from the eyes but from what he or she is doing with them. Nevertheless, the illusion is a powerful one, and there is no question that the subjective experience of inner radiance can be communicated with the gaze.
It is not an accident, therefore, that gurus often show an unusual commitment to maintaining eye contact. In the best case, this behavior emerges from a genuine comfort in the presence of other people and deep interest in their well-being. Given such a frame of mind, there may simply be no reason to look away. But maintaining eye contact can also become a way of “acting spiritual” and, therefore, an intrusive affectation. There are also people who maintain rigid eye lock not from an attitude of openness and interest or from any attempt to appear open and interested but as an aggressive and narcissistic show of dominance. Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact.
Whatever the motive behind it, there can be tremendous power in an unwavering gaze. Most readers will know what I’m talking about, but if you want to witness a glorious example of the assertive grandiosity that a person’s eyes can convey, watch a few interviews with Osho. I never met Osho, but I have met many people like him. And the way he plays the game of eye contact is simply hilarious.7
I confess that there was a period in my life, after I first plunged into matters spiritual, when I became a nuisance in this respect. Wherever I went, no matter how superficial the exchange, I gazed into the eyes of everyone I met as though they were my long-lost lover. No doubt, many people found this more than a bit creepy. Others considered it a stark provocation. But it also precipitated exchanges with complete strangers that were fascinating. With some regularity people of both sexes seemed to become bewitched by me on the basis of a single conversation. Had I been peddling some consoling philosophy and been eager to gather students, I suspect that I could have made a proper mess of things. I definitely glimpsed the path that many spiritual imposters have taken throughout history.
Interestingly, when one functions in this mode, one quickly recognizes all the other people who are playing the same game. I had many encounters wherein I would meet the eyes of a person across the room, and suddenly we were playing War of the Warlocks: two strangers holding each other’s gaze well past the point that our primate genes or cultural conditioning would ordinarily countenance. Play this game long enough and you begin to have some very strange encounters.
I don’t remember consciously deciding to stop behaving this way, but stop I did. Nevertheless, it is worth paying attention to the type of eye contact one makes. As I already noted, the discomfort one feels when meeting another’s gaze seems like nothing more than a ramification of the very feeling of being a self. For this reason, open-eyed meditation with another person can be a very powerful practice. When one overcomes the resistance to staring into another person’s eyes, the absence of self-consciousness can be especially vivid.
Eye Contact Meditation
1. Sit across from your partner and simply stare into each other’s eyes. (Depending on how far apart you sit, you might have to pick one eye to focus on.)
2 Continue to hold each other’s gaze, without speaking.
3. Ignore laughter and other signs of discomfort.
This practice can be combined with the other techniques described in this book, especially mindfulness of breathing and Douglas Harding’s inquiry into “headlessness.”
Witnessing the misadventures of supposedly enlightened adepts and their devotees can be depressing. But it can also be amusing. I wrote about one such instance in my first book, The End of Faith:
I know a group of veteran spiritual seekers who, after searching for a teacher among the caves and dells of the Himalayas for many months, finally discovered a Hindu yogi who seemed qualified to lead them into the ethers. He was as thin as Jesus, as limber as an orangutan, and wore his hair matted, down to his knees. They promptly brought this prodigy to America to instruct them in the ways of spiritual devotion. After a suitable period of acculturation, our ascetic—who was, incidentally, also admired for his physical beauty and for the manner in which he played the drum—decided that sex with the prettiest of his patrons’ wives would suit his pedagogical purposes admirably. These relations were commenced at once, and endured for some time by a man whose devotion to wife and guru, it must be said, was now being sorely tested. His wife, if I am not mistaken, was an enthusiastic participant in this “tantric” exercise, for her guru was both “fully enlightened” and as dashing a swain as Lord Krishna. Gradually, this saintly man further refined his spiritual requirements, as well as his appetites. The day soon dawned when he would eat nothing for breakfast but a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream topped with cashews. We might well imagine that the meditations of a cuckold, wandering the frozen-food aisles of a supermarket in search of an enlightened man’s enlightened repast, were anything but devotional. This guru was soon sent back to India with his drum.8
Ice cream for breakfast. That may tell us everything we need to know. And yet there is no way around the fact that in spiritual matters, as in all others, we must seek instruction from those whom we deem to be more accomplished than ourselves, and the signs of accomplishment are not always clear. With spirituality, the subject matter and the apparent distance between teacher and student seem to create the perfect conditions for self-deception—and thus for misplaced and exploited trust. It is possible, however—with a bit of luck and discrimination—to bypass such problems while still receiving teachings from those who are wiser and more experienced in these matters than oneself.
I offer my own case as a not entirely unusual example. Throughout my twenties, I studied with many teachers who functioned as gurus in the traditional sense, but I never had a relationship with any of them that I find embarrassing in retrospect or that I wouldn’t currently recommend to others. I don’t know whether to attribute this to good luck or to the fact that there was a line of devotion I was never tempted to cross. Traditionally, one is admonished to view one’s guru as perfect. I confess that I could never take this advice seriously—other than in the trivial sense that consciousness itself might be considered perfect in some way, or that a perfect realization of its intrinsic freedom might be possible. Despite how impressive many of my teachers were, they were undoubtedly human and susceptible to the same cultural biases and physical infirmities that define the lives of ordinary people.
For instance, when it came time for Poonja-ji to marry off his niece, he could think of nothing more enlightened than to publish her picture in the singles section of the local newspaper, after having paid a photographer to lighten the color of her skin by several shades. This practice was ubiquitous in India at the time and considered entirely normal. To my eye, however, it was at once deceitful, demeaning, and expressive of bigotry toward people with dark skin. I could only conclude that either enlightenment failed to clear the mind of such cultural residues or Poonja-ji had yet to achieve full enlightenment. In either case, I couldn’t view his solution to the problem of marriage as “perfect.”
The gurus I have met personally, as well as those whose careers and teachings I have studied at a distance, range from crooks who could be quickly dismissed to teachers who were brilliant but flawed, to those who, while still human, seemed to possess so much compassion and clarity of mind that they were nearly flawless examples of the benefits of spiritual practice. This last group is of obvious interest, and these are surely the people one hopes to meet, but the middle group can be helpful as well. Some teachers about whom depressing stories are told—men and women whose indiscretions may seem to discredit the very concept of spiritual authority—are, in fact, talented contemplatives. Many of these people get corrupted by the power and opportunities that come from inspiring devotion in others. Some may begin to believe the myths that grow up around them, and some are guilty of ludicrous exaggerations of their own spiritual and historical significance. Caveat emptor.
Of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. A history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal; thus, the spiritual opinions of Joseph Smith, Gurdjieff, and L. Ron Hubbard can be safely ignored. A fetish for numbers is also an ominous sign. Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition—and numerology is where the intellect goes to die. Prophecy is also a very strong indication of chicanery or madness on the part of a teacher, and of stupidity among his students. One can extrapolate from scientific data or technological trends (climate models, Moore’s law), but most detailed predictions about the future lead to embarrassment right on schedule. Anyone who can confidently tell you what the world will be like in 2027 is delusional. The channeling of invisible entities, whether broadcast from beyond the grave or from another galaxy, should provoke only laughter. J. Z. Knight, who has long claimed to be the mouthpiece for a 35,000-year-old entity named Ramtha, is the ultimate example of how you don’t want your teacher to sound. And any suggestion that a guru has influenced world events through magic should also put an end to the conversation. Sri Aurobindo and his partner, known as “the Mother,” apparently claimed to have decided the outcome of World War II with their psychic powers.9 (In that case, one wonders why they weren’t held morally responsible for not having ended it sooner.) Yet another reason to ignore Aurobindo’s long, unreadable books.
Generally speaking, you should head for the door at any sign of deception on the part of a teacher. Admittedly, you might want to make certain allowances for cultural differences and for the harmlessness of the lie. On one occasion, a very great Dzogchen master—truly one of the most inspiring people I have ever met—declared that a certain day of our retreat would be one of vegetarian austerity (which, from a Tibetan point of view, is an actual sacrifice). Sometime after lunch I entered his room and caught him in flagrante delicto, furtively eating a steak out of tinfoil. The moment he saw me, this devilish old lama wadded the foil into a ball and chucked it to his wife like a quarterback delivering a lateral pass. She then hurled it across the room, where it made a distinctly moist thud in the back of a closet. Needless to say, we all had a very good laugh over these machinations, and it was not the sort of deception that seemed calculated to manipulate students or to falsely elevate the status of the teacher. In fact, this teacher did not elevate himself at all—a quality that can compensate for many other sins.
I have never encountered a spiritual teacher who I thought was fully enlightened in the sense that many Buddhists and Hindus imagine is possible—that is, stably free of the illusion of self and endowed with clairvoyance and other miraculous powers. While I remain open to evidence of psi phenomena—clairvoyance, telepathy, and so forth—the fact that they haven’t been conclusively demonstrated in the lab is a very strong indication that they do not exist. Researchers who study these things allege that the data are there and that proof of psi can be seen in departures from randomness that occur over thousands of experimental trials.10 But people who believe that their guru has supernormal powers aren’t thinking in terms of weak, statistical effects. They believe that a specific person can reliably read minds, heal the sick, and work other miracles. I have yet to see a case in which evidence for such abilities was presented in a credible way. If one person on earth possessed psychic powers to any significant degree, this would be among the easiest facts to authenticate in a lab. Many people have been duped by traditional evasions on this point; it is often said, for instance, that demonstrating such powers on demand would be spiritually uncouth and that even to want such empirical evidence is an unflattering sign of doubt on the part of a student. Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe (John 4:48). A lifetime of foolishness and self-deception awaits anyone who won’t call this bluff.
But one need not believe in psychic powers to cut through the illusion of the self. Accomplishing this can be elusive enough. If I’ve met a person who has done so perfectly, I am unaware of it. I have studied with several people who were assumed to be fully enlightened in that sense, and even some who made the claim explicitly. But as far as I can tell, this added nothing of value to their teachings, while introducing a distracting note of grandiosity into the conversation. Whether or not it’s possible for someone to have a permanent experience of self-transcendence, a student’s conviction that a teacher is fully enlightened seems superfluous—and it is usually cast in doubt by something silly the teacher says or does in any case.
Once again, I believe that too much can be made of the failures of specific spiritual teachers or of the pathologies found among their followers, as though such pratfalls discredit the guru-disciple relationship in principle. One might draw a useful analogy to marriage here: Examples of bad marriages, or at least unenviable ones, are everywhere to be seen, and few seem to live up to the institution’s promise. Focusing on scenes of domestic misery, one might easily conclude that the very idea of marriage is flawed and that human beings should find a better way to arrange themselves and to raise children. I think this conclusion would be reckless. Although I have yet to find a spiritual community that appeared worth joining, and signs of trouble are very easy to spot, I have known many people who learned a great deal by spending extended periods of time in the company of one or another spiritual teacher. And I have learned indispensable things myself.
All this may raise a concern about whether the ideal of enlightenment is a false one. Is true freedom even possible? It certainly is in a momentary sense, as any mature practitioner of meditation knows, and those moments can increase in both number and duration with practice. Therefore, I see no reason why a person couldn’t perfectly banish the illusion of the self. However, just the ability to meditate—to rest as consciousness for a few moments prior to the arising of the next thought—can offer a profound relief from mental suffering. We need not come to the end of the path to experience the benefits of walking it.
One cannot travel far in spiritual circles without meeting people who are fascinated by the “near-death experience” (NDE). The phenomenon has been described as follows:
Frequently recurring features include feelings of peace and joy; a sense of being out of one’s body and watching events going on around one’s body and, occasionally, at some distant physical location; a cessation of pain; seeing a dark tunnel or void; seeing an unusually bright light, sometimes experienced as a “Being of Light” that radiates love and may speak or otherwise communicate with the person; encountering other beings, often deceased persons whom the experiencer recognizes; experiencing a revival of memories or even a full life review, sometimes accompanied by feelings of judgment; seeing some “other realm,” often of great beauty; sensing a barrier or border beyond which the person cannot go; and returning to the body, often reluctantly.11
Such accounts have led many people to believe that consciousness must be independent of the brain. However, these experiences vary across cultures, and no single feature is common to them all. One would think that if a nonphysical domain were truly being explored, some universal characteristics would stand out. Hindus and Christians would not substantially disagree—and one certainly wouldn’t expect the after-death state of South Indians to diverge from that of North Indians, as has been reported.12 It should also trouble NDE enthusiasts that only 10 to 20 percent of people who approach clinical death recall having any experience at all.13
But the deepest problem with drawing sweeping conclusions from the NDE is that those who have had one and subsequently talked about it did not die. Indeed, many of them appear to have been in no actual danger of dying. And those who have reported leaving their bodies during a true medical emergency—after cardiac arrest, for instance—did not suffer a complete loss of brain activity. Even in cases where the brain is alleged to have shut down, its activity must return if the subject is to survive and describe the experience. In such cases, there is generally no way to establish that the NDE occurred while the brain was offline.
Many students of the NDE claim that certain people left their bodies and perceived the commotion surrounding their near death: the efforts of hospital staff to resuscitate them, details of surgery, the grief of family members. Some subjects even say that they learned facts while traveling beyond their bodies that would otherwise have been impossible to know—for instance, a secret told by a dead relative, the truth of which was later confirmed. Reports of this kind seem especially vulnerable to self-deception, if not deliberate fraud. There is another problem, however: Even if true, such phenomena might suggest only that the human mind possesses powers of extrasensory perception (clairvoyance or telepathy, for example). This would be an astonishing discovery, but it wouldn’t demonstrate the survival of death. Why? Because unless we could know that a subject’s brain was not functioning when the impressions were formed, the involvement of the brain must be presumed.14
What is needed to establish the mind’s independence from the brain is a case in which a person has an experience—of anything—without associated brain activity. From time to time, someone will claim that a specific NDE meets this criterion. One of the most celebrated cases in the literature involves a woman, Pam Reynolds, who underwent a procedure known as “hypothermic cardiac arrest,” in which her core body temperature was brought down to 60 degrees, her heart was stopped, and blood flow to her brain was suspended so that a large aneurysm in her basilar artery could be repaired. Reynolds reports having had a classic NDE, complete with an awareness of the details of her surgery.
Her story presents several problems, however. The events in the world that Reynolds claims to have witnessed during her NDE occurred either before she was “clinically dead” or after blood circulation had been restored to her brain. In other words, despite the extraordinary details of the procedure, we have every reason to believe that Reynolds’s brain was functioning when she had her experiences. Also, her case wasn’t published until several years after it occurred, and its author, Dr. Michael Sabom, is a born-again Christian who had been working for decades to substantiate the otherworldly significance of the NDE. The possibility that experimenter bias, witness tampering (however unconscious), and false memories intruded into this best of all recorded cases is painfully obvious.
The latest NDE to receive wide acclaim was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine: “Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience of the Afterlife.” The great novelty of this case is that its subject, Eben Alexander, is a neurosurgeon who, we might presume, is competent to judge the scientific significance of his experience. Alexander also wrote a book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, which became an instant bestseller. As it happens, it displaced one of the bestselling books of the past decade, Heaven Is for Real, yet another account of the afterlife, based on the near-death adventures of the four-year-old son of a minister. Unsurprisingly, the two books offer incompatible views of what awaits us beyond the prison of the brain. (Colorful as his account is, Alexander neglects to tell us that Jesus rides a rainbow-colored horse or that the souls of dead children must still do homework in heaven.) At the time of this writing, Alexander’s book is ranked #1 on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, and it has been on the list for fifty-six weeks. The psychologist Raymond Moody, who coined the phrase “near-death experience,” called Alexander’s account “the most astounding I have heard in more than four decades of studying this phenomenon. [He] is living proof of an afterlife.”15 Well then, prepare to be astounded.
Once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. While immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him but for all of us, and for science as a whole. According to Alexander, his experience proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that heaven exists—complete with the usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant dress. Our current understanding of the mind “now lies broken at our feet,” for, Alexander declares, “what happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.”16
As should be clear from the preceding chapters, unlike many scientists and philosophers, I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. There are good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine—my worldview would not be overturned. I know that we do not understand consciousness, and nothing that I think I know about the cosmos or about the patent falsity of most religious beliefs requires that I deny this. So, although I am an atheist who can be expected to be critical of religious dogma, I am not reflexively hostile to claims of the sort Alexander has made. In principle, my mind is open. (It really is.)
However, almost nothing about Alexander’s account withstands scrutiny—and this is especially insidious, given that he claims to be a scientist. Many of his errors are glaring but immaterial. In his book, for instance, he understates the estimated number of neurons in the human brain by a factor of 10. Others are utterly damning to his case. Whatever his qualifications on paper, Alexander’s evangelizing about his experience in coma is so devoid of intellectual sobriety, to say nothing of rigor, that I would see no reason to engage with it—if not for the fact that his book has been read and believed by millions of people. One of the greatest obstacles I see to our fashioning a rational approach to spirituality is to have religious superstition and self-deception masquerade as science. Hence, it is worth considering Alexander’s case in detail.
First, there are some troubling signs that the good doctor is just another casualty of American-style Christianity, for though he claims to have been a nonbeliever before his adventures in coma, he offers the following self-portrait:
Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.
What it means to be a “faithful Christian” without “actual belief” is not spelled out, but few nonbelievers will be surprised that our hero’s scientific skepticism proves no match for his religious conditioning. Most of us have been around this block often enough to know that many “former atheists,” like Francis Collins, spent so long on the brink of faith and yearned for its emotional consolations with such vampiric intensity that the slightest breeze would send them hurtling into the abyss. For Collins, you may recall, all it took to establish the divinity of Jesus and the coming resurrection of the dead was the sight of a frozen waterfall. As we will see, Alexander seems to have required a ride on a psychedelic butterfly. In either case, it’s not the perception of beauty we should begrudge but the utter absence of intellectual seriousness with which the author interprets it.
Everything in Alexander’s account rests on his repeated and unwarranted assertion that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” He claims that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like science.
Unfortunately, the evidence Alexander offers—in the article, in a subsequent response to my public criticism of it, in his book, and in multiple interviews—suggests that he doesn’t understand what would constitute compelling evidence for his central claim of cortical inactivity. The proof he offers is either fallacious (CT scans do not measure brain activity) or irrelevant (it does not matter, even slightly, that his form of meningitis was “astronomically rare”)—and no combination of fallacy and irrelevancy adds up to sound science. Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that this is the sort of evidence necessary to support his case. The impediment to taking Alexander’s claims seriously can be simply stated: There is no reason to believe that his cerebral cortex was inactive at the time he had his experience of the afterlife. The fact that Alexander thinks he has demonstrated otherwise—by continually emphasizing how sick he was, the infrequency of cases of E. coli meningitis, and the ugliness of his initial CT scan—suggests a deliberate disregard of the most plausible interpretation of his experience.
Apparently, Alexander’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so whatever structural damage appeared on CT could not have been “global.” Otherwise he would be making the quite crazy claim that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back. Coma is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity in any case. In fact, neuroimaging studies show that comatose patients (like patients under general anesthesia) have 50 to 70 percent of the normal level of cortical activity.17 And to my knowledge, almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of what happens in the cortex.
Why doesn’t Alexander know these things? He is, after all, a neurosurgeon who now claims to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of angels. Even if his entire cortex did truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours after its functions returned? The very fact that Alexander remembers his NDE suggests that the cortical and subcortical structures necessary for memory formation were active at the time. How else could he recall the experience?
Not only does Alexander appear ignorant of the relevant science, he doesn’t realize how many people have experienced visions similar to his while under the influence of psychedelics such as DMT or anesthetics such as ketamine. In fact, he has said that any suggestion of similarity between the effect of such compounds on the brain and his experience is “not even in the right ballpark.” But here is Alexander’s description of the afterlife (as told in an interview):
I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them. . . . [There were] waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors, and above there were these arcs of silver and gold light and beautiful hymns coming down from them. Indescribably gorgeous hymns. I later came to call them “angels,” those arcs of light in the sky. I think that word is probably fairly accurate. . . .
Then we went out of this universe. I remember just seeing everything receding and initially I felt as if my awareness was in an infinite black void. It was very comforting but I could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would expect, impossible to put into words. I was there with that Divine presence that was not anything that I could visibly see and describe, and with a brilliant orb of light. . . .
They said there were many things that they would show me, and they continued to do that. In fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse was this incredibly complex corrugated ball and all these lessons [were] coming into me about it. Part of the lessons involved becoming all of what I was being shown. It was indescribable.18
“Not even in the right ballpark”? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball. Everything that Alexander describes about his experience, including the parts I have left out, has been reported by DMT users. The similarity is uncanny. Here is how Terence McKenna described the prototypical DMT trance:
Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.
The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there—the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naïvely call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.
This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension—frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find.19
Alexander believes that his brain could not have produced his visions because they were too “intense,” too “hyper-real,” too “beautiful,” too “interactive,” and too drenched in significance for a brain to conjure. He also thinks that his visions could not have arisen in the minutes or hours during which his cortex (which surely never went off) switched back on. But he has simply ignored what people with working brains experience under the influence of psychedelics. And he does not appear to know that visions of the sort that McKenna describes, although they may seem to last for ages, require only a brief span of biological time. Unlike LSD and other long-acting psychedelics, DMT alters consciousness for only a few minutes. Alexander would have had more than enough time to experience a visionary ecstasy as he was coming out of his coma (whether or not his cortex was rebooting).
Alexander knows that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter. Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? In his book, he discounts this possibility by reiterating the unfounded claim upon which his entire account rests: DMT would require a functioning cortex upon which to act, whereas his cortex “wasn’t available to be affected.” Similar experiences can be had with ketamine, a surgical anesthetic that is occasionally used to protect a traumatized brain. Did Alexander by any chance receive ketamine while in the hospital? Did he have some other anesthetic that might produce a similar spectrum of effects at low doses? Would he even think it relevant if he had? His assertion that a psychedelic like DMT or an anesthetic like ketamine could not “explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding” he experienced is perhaps the most amazing thing he has said since returning from heaven. Such compounds are universally understood to do the job. And most scientists believe that the reliable effects of psychedelics indicate that the brain is at the very least involved in the production of visionary states of the sort Alexander is talking about.
The knowledge of the afterlife that Alexander claims to possess also depends upon some extraordinarily dubious methods of verification. While in his coma, he saw a beautiful girl riding beside him on the wing of a butterfly. We learn in his book that he developed his recollection of this experience over a period of months—writing, thinking about it, and mining it for new details. It would be hard to imagine a better way to engineer a distortion of memory.
Alexander also tells us that he had a biological sister he never met, who died some years before his coma. Seeing her picture for the first time after his recovery, he judged this woman to be the girl who had joined him for the butterfly ride. He sought further confirmation of this by speaking with his biological family, from whom he learned that his dead sister had, indeed, always been “very loving.” QED.
As I’ve said throughout this book, I have spent much of my life studying and seeking experiences of the kind Alexander describes. I haven’t contracted meningitis, thankfully, nor have I had an NDE, but I have experienced many phenomena that often lead people to believe in the supernatural. For instance, I once had an opportunity to study with the great Tibetan lama Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche in Nepal. Before making the trip, I had a dream in which he seemed to give me teachings about the nature of the mind. The dream struck me as interesting for two reasons: The teachings I received were novel, useful, and convergent with what I later understood to be true, and I had never met Khyentse Rinpoche, nor was I aware of having seen a photograph of him. (This preceded my access to the Internet by at least five years, so the belief that I had never seen his picture was more plausible than it would be now.) I also recall that I had no easy way of finding a picture of him for the sake of comparison. But because I was about to meet the man himself, it seemed that I would be able to confirm whether he had really been in my dream.
First, the teachings: The lama in my dream began by asking who I was. I responded by telling him my name. Apparently, this wasn’t the answer he was looking for.
“Who are you?” he said again. He was now staring fixedly into my eyes and pointing at my face with an outstretched finger. I did not know what to say.
“Who are you?” he said again, continuing to point.
“Who are you?” he said a final time, but here he suddenly shifted his gaze and pointing finger, as though he were now addressing someone just to my left. The effect was quite startling, because I knew (insofar as one can be said to know anything in a dream) that we were alone. The lama was pointing to someone who wasn’t there, and I suddenly noticed what I would later understand to be an important truth about the nature of the mind: Subjectively speaking, there is only consciousness and its contents; there is no inner self who is conscious. The sense of looking over one’s own shoulder, as it were, is an illusion. The lama in my dream seemed to dissect this very feeling of being a self and, for a brief moment, removed it from my mind. I awoke convinced that I had glimpsed something quite profound.
After traveling to Nepal and encountering the arresting figure of Khyentse Rinpoche instructing hundreds of monks from atop a brocade throne, I was struck by the sense that he really did resemble the man in my dream. Even more apparent, however, was the fact that I couldn’t know whether this impression was veridical. No doubt, it would have been more fun to believe that something magical had occurred and that I had been singled out for some sort of transpersonal initiation—but the allure of this belief suggested only that the bar for proof should be raised rather than lowered. And even though I had no formal scientific training at that point, I knew that human memory is unreliable under conditions of this kind. How much stock could I put in the feeling of familiarity? Was I accurately recalling the face of a man I had met in a dream, or was I engaged in a creative reconstruction of it? If nothing else, the experience of déjà vu proves that one’s sense of having experienced something previously can jump the tracks of genuine recollection. My travels in spiritual circles had also brought me into contact with many people who seemed all too eager to deceive themselves about experiences of this kind, and I did not wish to emulate them. Given these considerations, I did not believe that Khyentse Rinpoche had really appeared in my dream. And I certainly would never have been tempted to use this experience as conclusive proof of the supernatural.
I invite the reader to compare this attitude to the one that Dr. Eben Alexander will most likely exhibit before crowds of credulous people for the rest of his life. The structure of our experiences was similar: We were each given an opportunity to compare a face remembered from a dream/vision with a person (or photo) in the physical world. I realized that the task was hopeless. Alexander believes that he has made the greatest discovery in the history of science.
Again, nothing can be said against Alexander’s experience. And such ecstasies do tell us something about how good a human mind can feel. The problem is that the conclusions Alexander has drawn from his experience—as a scientist, he continually reminds us—are based on flagrant errors in reasoning and misunderstandings of the relevant science.
The enthusiastic reception Alexander has enjoyed also suggests a general confusion about the nature of scientific authority. Much of the criticism I have received for dismissing his account focuses on what appear to be his impeccable scientific credentials. However, when debating the validity of evidence and arguments, the point is never that one person’s credentials trump another’s. Credentials merely offer a rough indication of what a person is likely to know—or should know. If Alexander were drawing reasonable scientific conclusions from his experience, he wouldn’t need to be a neuroscientist to be taken seriously; he could be a philosopher—or a coal miner. But he simply isn’t thinking like a scientist, and so not even a string of Nobel Prizes would shield him from criticism.20
Such is the perennial problem with reports of this kind. Some people are so desperate to interpret the NDE as proof of an afterlife that even those whom one would expect to have a strong commitment to scientific reasoning toss their better judgment out the window. The truth is that, whatever happens after death, it is possible to justify a life of spiritual practice and self-transcendence without pretending to know things we do not know.
THE SPIRITUAL USES OF PHARMACOLOGY
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.
Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these categories only partially intersect. Some drugs of extraordinary power and utility, such as psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well tolerated, and yet one can be sent to prison for their use—whereas drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth. There are other points on this continuum: MDMA, or Ecstasy, has remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and some evidence suggests that it can be neurotoxic.21
One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting and for what purpose and which are not. The problem, however, is that we refer to all these biologically active materials by a single term, drugs, making it nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the psychological, medical, ethical, and legal issues surrounding their use. The poverty of our language has been only slightly eased by the introduction of the term psychedelics to differentiate certain visionary compounds, which can produce extraordinary insights, from narcotics and other classic agents of stupefaction and abuse.
However, we should not be too quick to feel nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960s. Yes, crucial breakthroughs were made, socially and psychologically, and drugs were central to the process, but one need only read accounts of the time, such as Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, to see the problem with a society bent upon rapture at any cost. For every insight of lasting value produced by drugs, there was an army of zombies with flowers in their hair shuffling toward failure and regret. Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out is wise, or even benign, only if you can then drop into a mode of life that makes ethical and material sense and doesn’t leave your children wandering in traffic.
Drug abuse and addiction are very real problems, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should these medicines be made illegal? Of course not. But people need to be informed about their hazards, and addicts need treatment. And all drugs—including alcohol, cigarettes, and aspirin—must be kept out of the hands of children.
I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith, and my thinking on the subject has not changed. The “war on drugs” has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers, rapists, and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.)
I have two daughters who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that they choose their drugs wisely, but a life lived entirely without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. I hope they someday enjoy a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If they drink alcohol as adults, as they probably will, I will encourage them to do it safely. If they choose to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation. Tobacco should be shunned, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer them away from it. Needless to say, if I knew that either of my daughters would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or heroin, I might never sleep again. But if they don’t try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.
This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear below, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug. It has been many years since I took psychedelics myself, and my abstinence is born of a healthy respect for the risks involved. However, there was a period in my early twenties when I found psilocybin and LSD to be indispensable tools, and some of the most important hours of my life were spent under their influence. Without them, I might never have discovered that there was an inner landscape of mind worth exploring.
There is no getting around the role of luck here. If you are lucky, and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened (or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible). If you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane. While I do not recommend the latter experience, it does increase one’s respect for the tenuous condition of sanity, as well as one’s compassion for people who suffer from mental illness.
Human beings have ingested plant-based psychedelics for millennia, but scientific research on these compounds did not begin until the 1950s. By 1965, a thousand studies had been published, primarily on psilocybin and LSD, many of which attested to the usefulness of psychedelics in the treatment of clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol addiction, and the pain and anxiety associated with terminal cancer. Within a few years, however, this entire field of research was abolished in an effort to stem the spread of these drugs among the public. After a hiatus that lasted an entire generation, scientific research on the pharmacology and therapeutic value of psychedelics has quietly resumed.
Psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and mescaline all powerfully alter cognition, perception, and mood. Most seem to exert their influence through the serotonin system in the brain, primarily by binding to 5-HT2A receptors (though several have affinity for other receptors as well), leading to increased activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Although the PFC in turn modulates subcortical dopamine production—and certain of these compounds, such as LSD, bind directly to dopamine receptors—the effect of psychedelics appears to take place largely outside dopamine pathways, which could explain why these drugs are not habit-forming.
The efficacy of psychedelics might seem to establish the material basis of mental and spiritual life beyond any doubt, for the introduction of these substances into the brain is the obvious cause of any numinous apocalypse that follows. It is possible, however, if not actually plausible, to seize this evidence from the other end and argue, as Aldous Huxley did in his classic The Doors of Perception, that the primary function of the brain may be eliminative: Its purpose may be to prevent a transpersonal dimension of mind from flooding consciousness, thereby allowing apes like ourselves to make their way in the world without being dazzled at every step by visionary phenomena that are irrelevant to their physical survival. Huxley thought of the brain as a kind of “reducing valve” for “Mind at Large.” In fact, the idea that the brain is a filter rather than the origin of mind goes back at least as far as Henri Bergson and William James. In Huxley’s view, this would explain the efficacy of psychedelics: They may simply be a material means of opening the tap.
Huxley was operating under the assumption that psychedelics decrease brain activity. Some recent data have lent support to this view; for instance, a neuroimaging study of psilocybin22 suggests that the drug primarily reduces activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in a wide variety of tasks related to self-monitoring. However, other studies have found that psychedelics increase activity throughout the brain. Whatever the case, the action of these drugs does not rule out dualism, or the existence of realms of mind beyond the brain—but then, nothing does. That is one of the problems with views of this kind: They appear to be unfalsifiable. Physicalism, by contrast, could easily be falsified. If science ever established the existence of ghosts or reincarnation or any other phenomenon that placed the human mind (in whole or in part) outside the brain, physicalism would be dead. The fact that dualists can never say what might count as evidence against their views makes this ancient philosophical position very difficult to distinguish from religious faith.
We have reason to be skeptical of the brain-as-barrier thesis. If the brain were merely a filter on the mind, damaging it should increase cognition. In fact, strategically damaging the brain should be the most reliable method of spiritual practice available to anyone. In almost every case, loss of brain should yield more mind. But that is not how the mind works.
Some people try to get around this by suggesting that the brain may function more like a radio, a receiver of conscious states rather than a barrier to them. At first glance, this would appear to account for the deleterious effects of neurological injury and disease, for if one smashes a radio with a hammer, it will no longer function properly. There is a problem with this metaphor, however. Those who employ it invariably forget that we are the music, not the radio. If the brain were nothing more than a receiver of conscious states, it should be impossible to diminish a person’s experience of the cosmos by damaging her brain. She might seem unconscious from the outside—like a broken radio—but, subjectively speaking, the music would play on.
Specific reductions in brain activity might benefit people in certain ways, unmasking memories or abilities that are being actively inhibited by the regions in question. But there is no reason to think that the pervasive destruction of the central nervous system would leave the mind unaffected (much less improved). Medications that reduce anxiety generally work by increasing the effect of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, thereby diminishing neuronal activity in various parts of the brain. But the fact that dampening arousal in this way can make people feel better does not suggest that they would feel better still if they were drugged into a coma. Similarly, it would be unsurprising if psilocybin reduced brain activity in areas responsible for self-monitoring, because that might, in part, account for the experiences that are often associated with the drug. This does not give us any reason to believe that turning off the brain entirely would yield an increased awareness of spiritual realities.
However, the brain does exclude an extraordinary amount of information from consciousness. And, like many who have taken psychedelics, I can attest that these compounds throw open the gates. Positing the existence of a Mind at Large is more tempting in some states of consciousness than in others. But these drugs can also produce mental states that are best viewed as forms of psychosis. As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to draw conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences—no matter how profound they may seem.
One thing is certain: The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed.
Many people wonder about the difference between meditation (and other contemplative practices) and psychedelics. Are these drugs a form of cheating, or are they the only means of authentic awakening? They are neither. All psychoactive drugs modulate the existing neurochemistry of the brain—either by mimicking specific neurotransmitters or by causing the neurotransmitters themselves to be more or less active. Everything that one can experience on a drug is, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has seen or felt after ingesting LSD is likely to have been seen or felt by someone, somewhere, without it.
However, it cannot be denied that psychedelics are a uniquely potent means of altering consciousness. Teach a person to meditate, pray, chant, or do yoga, and there is no guarantee that anything will happen. Depending upon his aptitude or interest, the only reward for his efforts may be boredom and a sore back. If, however, a person ingests 100 micrograms of LSD, what happens next will depend on a variety of factors, but there is no question that something will happen. And boredom is simply not in the cards. Within the hour, the significance of his existence will bear down upon him like an avalanche. As the late Terence McKenna never tired of pointing out, this guarantee of profound effect, for better or worse, is what separates psychedelics from every other method of spiritual inquiry.23
Ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket without a guidance system. One might wind up somewhere worth going, and, depending on the compound and one’s “set and setting,” certain trajectories are more likely than others. But however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis. Hence the terms psychotomimetic and psychotogenicI are occasionally applied to these drugs.24
I have visited both extremes on the psychedelic continuum. The positive experiences were more sublime than I could ever have imagined or than I can now faithfully recall. These chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of nature itself is a mere simulacrum. It is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant redwood and amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. It is quite another to spend an apparent eternity in egoless communion with it. Positive psychedelic experiences often reveal how wondrously at ease in the universe a human being can be—and for most of us, normal waking consciousness does not offer so much as a glimmer of those deeper possibilities.
People generally come away from such experiences with a sense that conventional states of consciousness obscure and truncate sacred insights and emotions. If the patriarchs and matriarchs of the world’s religions experienced such states of mind, many of their claims about the nature of reality would make subjective sense. A beatific vision does not tell you anything about the birth of the cosmos, but it does reveal how utterly transfigured a mind can be by a full collision with the present moment.
However, as the peaks are high, the valleys are deep. My “bad trips” were, without question, the most harrowing hours I have ever endured, and they make the notion of hell—as a metaphor if not an actual destination—seem perfectly apt. If nothing else, these excruciating experiences can become a source of compassion. I think it may be impossible to imagine what it is like to suffer from mental illness without having briefly touched its shores.
At both ends of the continuum, time dilates in ways that cannot be described—apart from merely observing that these experiences can seem eternal. I have spent hours, both good and bad, in which any understanding that I had ingested a drug was lost, and all memories of my past along with it. Immersion in the present moment to this degree is synonymous with the feeling that one has always been and will always be in precisely this condition. Depending on the character of one’s experience at that point, notions of salvation or damnation may well apply. Blake’s line about beholding “Eternity in an hour” neither promises nor threatens too much.
In the beginning, my experiences with psilocybin and LSD were so positive that I did not see how a bad trip could be possible. Notions of “set and setting,” admittedly vague, seemed sufficient to account for my good luck. My mental set was exactly as it needed to be—I was a spiritually serious investigator of my own mind—and my setting was generally one of either natural beauty or secure solitude.
I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasant until they weren’t, but once the doors to hell opened, they appeared to have been left permanently ajar. Thereafter, whether or not a trip was good in the aggregate, it generally entailed some excruciating detour on the path to sublimity. Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it.
On my first trip to Nepal, I took a rowboat out on Phewa Lake in Pokhara, which offers a stunning view of the Annapurna range. It was early morning, and I was alone. As the sun rose over the water, I ingested 400 micrograms of LSD. I was twenty years old and had taken the drug at least ten times previously. What could go wrong?
Everything, as it turns out. Well, not everything—I didn’t drown. I have a vague memory of drifting ashore and being surrounded by a group of Nepali soldiers. After watching me for a while, as I ogled them over the gunwale like a lunatic, they seemed on the verge of deciding what to do with me. Some polite words of Esperanto and a few mad oar strokes, and I was offshore and into oblivion. I suppose that could have ended differently.
But soon there was no lake or mountains or boat—and if I had fallen into the water, I am pretty sure there would have been no one to swim. For the next several hours my mind became a perfect instrument of self-torture. All that remained was a continuous shattering and terror for which I have no words.
An encounter like that takes something out of you. Even if LSD and similar drugs are biologically safe, they have the potential to produce extremely unpleasant and destabilizing experiences. I believe I was positively affected by my good trips, and negatively affected by the bad ones, for weeks and months.
Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably shouldn’t spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one’s own skin and suffering less there.
As I discussed in The End of Faith, I view most psychedelic experiences as potentially misleading. Psychedelics do not guarantee wisdom or a clear recognition of the selfless nature of consciousness. They merely guarantee that the contents of consciousness will change. Such visionary experiences, considered in their totality, appear to me to be ethically neutral. Therefore, it seems that psychedelic ecstasies must be steered toward our personal and collective well-being by some other principle. As Daniel Pinchbeck pointed out in his highly entertaining book Breaking Open the Head, the fact that both the Mayans and the Aztecs used psychedelics, while being enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice, makes any idealistic connection between plant-based shamanism and an enlightened society seem terribly naïve.
The form of transcendence that appears to link directly to ethical behavior and human well-being is that which occurs in the midst of ordinary waking life. It is by ceasing to cling to the contents of consciousness—to our thoughts, moods, and desires—that we make progress. This project does not in principle require that we experience more content. The freedom from self that is both the goal and the foundation of spiritual life is coincident with normal perception and cognition—though, as I have already said, this can be difficult to realize.25
The power of psychedelics, however, is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. William James said it about as well as anyone:26
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.27
I believe that psychedelics may be indispensable for some people—especially those who, like me, initially need convincing that profound changes in consciousness are possible. After that, it seems wise to find ways of practicing that do not present the same risks. Happily, such methods are widely available.
This chapter has taken us along the edge of a precipice. There is no question that novel and intense experiences—whether had in the company of a guru, on the threshold of death, or by recourse to certain drugs—can send one spinning into delusion. But they can also broaden one’s view.
The aims of spirituality are not exactly those of science, but neither are they unscientific. Search your mind, or pay attention to the conversations you have with other people, and you will discover that there are no real boundaries between science and any other discipline that attempts to make valid claims about the world on the basis of evidence and logic. When such claims and their methods of verification admit of experiment and/or mathematical description, we tend to say that our concerns are “scientific”; when they relate to matters more abstract, or to the consistency of our thinking itself, we often say that we are being “philosophical”; when we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests “historical” or “journalistic”; and when a person’s commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he is being “religious.”
The boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more than university budgets and architecture. Is the Shroud of Turin a medieval forgery? This is a question of history, of course, and of archaeology, but the techniques of radiocarbon dating make it a question of chemistry and physics as well. The real distinction we should care about—the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude—is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones. Spirituality requires the same commitment to intellectual honesty.
Once one recognizes the selflessness of consciousness, the practice of meditation becomes just a means of getting more familiar with it. The goal, thereafter, is to cease to overlook what is already the case. Paradoxically, this still requires discipline, and setting aside time for meditation is indispensable. But the true discipline is to remain committed, throughout the whole of one’s life, to waking up from the dream of the self. We need not take anything on faith to do this. In fact, the only alternative is to remain confused about the nature of our minds.
Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life. It is all that can be seen and that which does the seeing. No matter how far you have traveled from the place of your birth, and however much you now understand about the world, you have been exploring consciousness and its changes. Why not do so directly?
I. These terms refer to substances that seem to mimic or cause the symptoms of psychosis.