PSYCHOACTIVISM David Chadwick

IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES at a meeting of fifty students at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the agenda had been covered and there we all were sitting around the dining room, enjoying the energy of being together. Our faces were highlighted by the flickering light from the kerosene lamps as someone broke the silence by asking “How many people here have taken LSD?” There was a moment of silent confusion followed by interest in the results of this sudden poll. Most hands shot up. The room filled with laughter.

It’s undeniable that psychedelics played a central role in the hippie counterculture revolution of the late sixties and early seventies, but sometimes we forget that the same is true of the influence psychedelics had during that same period on the emergence of Buddhism in America and a generation’s search for spiritual experience. To the uninitiated, the word “psychedelics” might conjure up media-inspired images of colorfully dressed, long-haired hippies adorned with flowers, beads, and blissed-out smiles tripping around Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, dancing kids taking a break from the responsible course of their lives, or worse, destroying themselves. One might think about the bad trips, the freak accidents when someone decided they could walk in front of traffic free from harm, or when Art Linkletter’s daughter died jumping from a building while on LSD. All of that may be true, but it’s a distorted image that neglects the sacramental role of these substances, and ignores the myriad of people who were encouraged on their spiritual journeys by one or more mind-expanding experiences with psychedelics, or entheogens, as they are often called by scholars these days.

After thirty-five years of being around a diffuse subculture of Buddhist, Hindu, shamanist, New Age, Sufi, Christian, and what-not enlightenment seekers, I am familiar with the formative role psychedelics has often played in their lives. This has been brought home again in the course of years of interviews while working on the biography of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Though many of the people I’ve known and interviewed have told me that their psychedelic experiences, like mine, were a prime factor in the early stages of their spiritual paths, most of them did not continue psychedelic use. Many people just mention it in passing, as in “I took LSD, read Alan Watts, and came to San Francisco looking for a spiritual community.” Recently, I received a letter in which a retired professor of English wrote: “I still think LSD saved my life—breaking me out of the Berkeley existential, druggie, deluded, fashionable despair of the Beats.” (The Beat writers were, of course, also major contributors to the West’s new openness to Buddhism and Eastern thought.) In a few cases I know of, an Asian priest tried LSD. One Japanese Zen priest who took LSD in the sixties called it “spiritual masturbation.” Another took it and kept taking it for years (until he got arrested in Japan) and calls it “powerful medicine.” Regardless of whether we view these psychoactives as helpful in the short or long haul, it’s clear they have been and continue to be pivotal catalysts in the spiritual journey of a multitude of seekers. They sure were for me.

I was unusual at the Zen Center in that I’d been brought up in a family whose religion had much in common with Buddhism. My parents were my first spiritual teachers. I was taught that God was not a being, but infinite and perfect mind. We didn’t use the word “God” a lot, but we were Christians. My father had been a reader in the Christian Science Church but dropped out because he felt that they elevated Jesus too much beyond being an extraordinary human who had realized his divine nature.

In Mexico at the age of twenty I discovered marijuana. It was an exciting, epiphanous year; there were endless insights. My friends and I thought that marijuana was the answer to all of the world’s problems and was all that was good. We liked to get stoned and ride the roller coaster in Mexico City, which I’d thoroughly enjoy as long as I didn’t start wondering about how well it was being maintained. At times I would get high, lie down, close my eyes, and look for the kernel of my self and sometimes I thought I’d found it. Then one day I ingested vile-tasting peyote with some friends, vomited, and went out walking on the streets. Everything was moving, alive, newborn, and I remember holding the galvanized pole of a traffic sign and saying that peyote had taken away all the cultural overlay and I could see the pole for what it was (I was studying anthropology at the time). I also discovered speed that year, in the form of Dexedrine and Benzedrine (which you could get in pharmacies without prescription) and took it quite a bit until it was clear that I had to stop. I observed my complexion worsening, a tendency to get manic, and the reluctance of people to listen to me. It was hard to stop taking it.

Thinking I’d gone about as far as I could with marijuana (though I didn’t stop smoking it), I was eager to plummet deeper into my being with the aid of LSD, which I’d heard so much about—both wondrous promises and dire warnings. On a return to the States I bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Harvard psychedelic pioneers Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later to become Ram Dass), and Ralph Metzner. To many, psychedelics were dangerous drugs that should be illegal, and those who promoted them were a scourge on society, Pied Pipers leading America’s youth into a bottomless pit of ruin. To lots of us though, those men brought good news, and were the voices of new possibilities who, through their books and lectures, actually suggested a responsible way to take psychedelics so as to avoid the pitfalls and awaken briefly to truths perennial. This was far more wonderful than the materialism and narrow worldview we were being home-, school-, and media-fed. I took the book back to Mexico, studied it carefully, and did not take any more speed.

A year later I went to San Francisco. In the carnival atmosphere I tripped around smoking grass and met lots of new people who’d taken the pilgrimage to that hub of the hippies. That summer I had to go back home to make an appearance for my draft induction physical, to convince the army they didn’t want me. I had an acid trip while in Texas at that time that was most powerful. I followed the advice in The Psychedelic Experience closely. The book was modeled after the Tibetan Book of the Dead; the point of both was to guide one toward an experience of the clear light. I had been told by people who’d been there, that to experience the clear light was to meet God, Buddha, ultimate truth, the absolute ground of being. I believed them. I still do. On that day I reread the book beforehand, fasted all day, meditated, and as the sun went down, took five hundred micrograms of LSD. There were two friends with me who served as guides. Their job was to be a reference to reality if I got paranoid or confused, and to remind me that we had an agreement to be quiet (my studies and prior experience had indicated that almost all the problems one encountered in a psychedelic experience were caused by social interaction). My friends were also to read me brief sections of the book when I showed an interest in communicating too much or needed to be gently nudged off a negative course.

This was not a frivolous event. I was trembling with anticipation and knew the gravity of what I was about to do. Leary said that he experienced the clear light on about half his weekly trips, but he also said that he descended into a hell realm (there are endless options there) about one out of five times. I knew from what I’d read, talking to others, and a few skirmishes with lower realms on prior trips that being in the grip of seemingly eternal, fantastically paranoid, hideous horror was a possibility that I faced. When the pill washed down my throat I knew my ego was about to die and gave in immediately. As the LSD started to come on strong, my friends played, at my prior request, the Beatles’ perfectly appropriate: “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream,” and then there was only the sound of the gentle waves of Lake Worth outside the screened porch as I lay on a cot, and I did float downstream, leave my friends, the bed, the waves, myself, and the universe as I had known it, and passed through progressive visions each more ecstatic, powerful, and subtle than the prior ones. The deeper I went, the more familiar and wonderful it was. I felt I was going to my eternal home.

Leary advised taking a strong dose under these types of controls for early trips because it got one quickly beyond the transitional states where problems could come up with one’s ego fighting to maintain control. I had not a stitch of a chance to fight or maintain any type of control. I died, it seemed, as completely as one can die and found myself at one with all that is, beyond space and time, birth and death, bathed in love—it was always changing—and then, the dualism even of this oneness gave way and mind opened to the experience of the clear light, of which, later, I could really say nothing but that the experience seemed to be the crowning glory of all that is and isn’t. I felt that I had experienced what a Hindu text described as greater than if ten thousand suns were to explode in the sky. I don’t know how I can say this because none of these experiences can be remembered any more than the Pacific Ocean can fit into a thimble, but I came back saying that the clear light was pure, unborn, ecstatic—things like that. On that evening I emerged from the clear light into a calmer, perfect, absolute, vast clarity with no sense of identity or physicality in it, a state not characterized by any mundane attributes such as existence, experience, or anything.

I remember some time later opening my eyes and seeing the stars through the screened porch, then realizing that I had returned to awareness of this universe, which seemed dreamlike compared to the powerful bliss I had died into. I thought, “oh yes, space, time, stars, and I’m on a planet—this sort of reality.” It seemed like one of an infinite number of possible dream places I could have landed, and it was beautiful. I soon realized I was there because I was tied in some way to a body which seemed to me like an idea which kept repeating itself, all this being experienced as a reflection in a mind beyond dimension—not located in space or time but that which imagined space and time.

I felt as if I’d just been born, didn’t remember anything about myself and didn’t know who the people were who were with me. I told them that if I was in the way they should feel free to dispose of me. They gently urged me to lie back down and read me a few lines which cleared my mind. I experienced spectacular visions gradually reentering into lower though still quite exalted, brilliantly colorful states of mind. Every now and then I’d sit up. I remember looking at my friends and seeing our bodies as energy fields which grew out of the same base, like we were fingers on a hand. I saw they thought they existed as independent beings and I told them, “We don’t exist in any way.” No wonder so many people were irritated by hippies.

In the days that followed I contemplated the experience I had had on the lake and knew that there could be no purpose in my life to compare with awakening to the essence of being I had kept company with that night. I also thought that taking more LSD or more of anything would not be the way to get there. I picked up some of the books I had on Buddhism and Hinduism and they made a lot more sense to me than before. I saw my normal state of mind as being tiny, confused, and filled with giant mountains that blocked knowledge of higher states. I knew LSD could evaporate these mountains but was sure that they’d just return. It seemed that books alone wouldn’t get me there either. I thought that I needed to learn to meditate so as to gradually wear the mountains down and thought that possibly there could be a breakthrough satori experience after they’d been well eroded. I decided to travel the world looking for a teacher and had some idea of finding a community to meditate with. So I was off—first stop, a return to California. Soon I was meditating regularly at the San Francisco Zen Center.

Ministers, priests, psychologists, and various types of spiritual teachers back in the sixties had an interesting situation to deal with. Lots of people were coming to them who’d had psychedelic experiences and who were looking for an explanation of what they’d experienced, or seeking a more grounded and lasting way to meet the vastness of higher consciousness. Many of these counselors had no idea what to say or summarily dismissed these experiences as bogus. Some, like Shunryu Suzuki, were more helpful. Suzuki had a way that worked well with such seekers. He told us that enlightenment was not a state of mind, was not contained in any experience, and he guided us away from trying to recreate past profound events and toward accepting ourselves as we were. He taught a disciplined life of zazen meditation, attention to the details of life, not wanting too much (especially another state of mind), and not getting too worked up. He said that people will have enlightenment experiences without spiritual practice, but only with such practice will their revelation continue and not come and go like psychedelic experiences. He made us feel confident that we could wake up to who we were without any chemical aids, and he did it without taking any strong stand against marijuana and LSD, though he really didn’t want his students taking them. He appreciated psychedelics as an initial impetus, but not as a way of life.

In the Buddhist circles I’m familiar with, psychedelics are mainly seen as something to forget about and move on from, and a story like the one I just told might elicit a been-there-done-that type of response. But I remember these substances fondly because they gave me what I felt was empirical evidence of the perennial goal of religion and philosophy and helped me to get on the path. And to think that what I did is now illegal.

To me, psychedelics are best used as a sacrament in an initiation ceremony which is what my experience seems to have been. It may be better for initiations to be conducted by elders or guides, but young people have for years been self-initiating because their elders or their society are not there for them in this way. Society seems mainly interested in shielding youth from anything that would challenge consensus reality, molding them into good workers and consumers, and chastising them if they get caught being too out of line. I know that my views on this are hopelessly astray from the norm, but I don’t think that I or others or the state should have the right to tell anyone whose body has pretty much stopped growing that they can’t do psychedelics or any psychoactives. It’s telling people that the government, which has not set a very high moral or spiritual example, can regulate spiritual inquiry and which states of mind are legal.

News of all the violence from the inner city turf wars over drugs, and people’s real or media-driven fear for their safety, help to fuel the war on drugs, whose propaganda lumps all illegal psychoactives together and goes after them in an uneven blitzkrieg. Alexander Shulgin, sometimes called the grandfather of Ecstasy, wrote that “the entheogens are the dolphins caught in the tuna net of the war on drugs.” Aside from all those incarcerated for narcotics and stimulants, there are lots and lots of people being arrested, prosecuted, and locked up for dealing and using Ecstasy, LSD, and especially marijuana.

I wonder sometimes why more people don’t come out against the war on drugs in its present form. It’s so extremely costly, ineffective, and causes more harm than the problem. A quick look online reveals interesting statistics about current US drug policies. One million people, almost entirely nonviolent offenders, are in the slammer for some psychoactive or other, representing about forty percent of all those incarcerated in the US. The NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) site tells that, according to government figures, seventy million Americans have smoked marijuana since 1972 and ten million of them have been arrested since then. That was the year the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse issued its recommendation to Congress to decriminalize marijuana. I couldn’t find how many people are in prison for life without possibility of parole for pot, but I read in Atlantic Monthly years ago that it was hundreds. Under President Clinton’s watch, marijuana arrests were up sixty percent—an arrest every forty-five seconds.

Funny thing is that there seems to be an epidemic of giving legal drugs to kids. A young woman I know tells of how her parents and doctor put her on Ritalin when she was six because she was considered hyperactive. By the time she was twelve she had developed ticks and nervousness to a degree that she was diagnosed with (and medicated for) Tourette’s syndrome. In high school she was on so many prescribed drugs that she was supplementing her allowance by dealing them at school. On her eighteenth birthday she announced to her parents, “No more of your drugs!” She tried drink and tobacco but didn’t take to them. She even found that coffee was too stimulating. Now she only smokes pot and takes Ecstasy or mushrooms occasionally and is glad to be free of all the legal drugs that made her so miserable. She is a libertarian and has absolutely no respect for authority. And now, because of the choices she’s made, she can get arrested.

Lots of people have no respect for authority because of how the powers that be are behind legal drugs and demonize all illegal drugs. There’s nothing quite as effective in undermining a young person’s respect for the law as when they try pot and find it to be benign and fun and at times profound.

The war on drugs also, in the eyes of many, makes criminals out of those in law enforcement, people who we want to respect and support. Steve Kubby, a past libertarian candidate for governor in California, and a leader in passing the state’s medical marijuana initiative of 1996, publicly opposes the war on drugs. It’s well known he has a prescription for medical marijuana. In 1998 twenty heavily armed officers invaded his home, arrested him and his wife, and terrified their three-year-old daughter. This type of thing is happening daily all over America. There’s an endless list of sickening statistics and horror stories. Citizens have had to choose between testifying against their spouses or going to jail and losing their children.

The war on drugs can be seen as a power drug the government is addicted to. I think it’s just old-fashioned persecution and the poor and disempowered are the main ones being persecuted. In the case of psychedelics, it’s religious persecution.

No one I know wants their kids or friends to take strong stimulants or narcotics, just like we don’t want them to be constantly stoned-out potheads or excessive drinkers. But a lot of us have done these things to some extent without robbing people or getting violent, and have grown out of it. It seems that in our eagerness these days to protect ourselves from worst-case scenarios, we have turned a blind eye to the suffering we’ve caused. I remember the cover of a Northern California weekly newspaper with a headline that read “Gulag California” above a photo of a long concrete hall overcrowded with depressed-looking prisoners milling about in and out of the cells. One point of the article was that many of those in jails and prisons are there just for possession of illegal drugs, and not for being violent, stealing, or breaking any other law. I gazed at the faces and could not believe that they were all dangerous people who should be locked up. I was reminded of the line from Bob Dylan’s song, “Chimes of Freedom:” “And for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail.”

Some engaged Buddhists currently work in the prisons, or with homelessness or other social problems, bringing them in touch with the victims of drugs and the war on drugs. I salute these active Buddhists, and non-Buddhists too, who are doing what they can to reduce all suffering and confusion. But most of us don’t know what to do and aren’t doing anything. We’ve got zazen at Auschwitz and peace ceremonies on Hiroshima Day; we remember these high-ticket items and nobly proclaim may it never happen again while all around us something very bad is happening now.

It’s a lovely day in late September. I sit outside and see the clear blue Northern California sky. I wish for such clarity in how American society deals with the use and abuse of psychoactives. I wish there was such clarity in my mind about what, if anything, I could do. I pray to be alert for any opportunities that present themselves. I doze off and dream. My nightmare is Gulag America, the war on drugs finally won by turning this shining land into one giant prison where we are all born and die, never to know there ever existed any such things as privacy or personal rights. My sweet dream is that I fly around the country miraculously freeing all those who’ve lost their freedom to drugs and prisons, and on the day following this gallant act of psychoactivism we all celebrate together in harmony, enjoying our natural minds and the good earth’s fresh air and sunshine.