THE ZEN COMMANDMENTS Lama Surya Das

I’VE SCALED THE HEIGHTS, and also fallen into crevasses. I’ve stumbled through the dark night of the soul, experimenting with drugs. I have seen friends go off the deep end, never to return. Now I understand the Biblical notion that no one can look upon the burning bush and live. There are risks if we try to ascend the spiritual peaks and plumb their depths. Yes, I have been to the top of the mount—and carved in stone there are the Zig Zag Zen Commandments.

The First Commandment is: “Take care. Watch your step. Be careful,” But don’t take these commandments too seriously—even stone is nothing but light, energy.

Zig zag reminds me of “roll your own,” as in cigarettes. But there are perils as well as opportunities on a zig zag/roll your own spiritual path. I have experienced some of them myself. That is why I prefer to walk an integrated, well-rounded, tried-and-true path of spiritual transformation—the Buddha’s Middle Way.

Whenever Western Dharma teachers get together, there is a White Rabbit in the room, an unmentioned subject of which we all are aware. This is our generation’s unexpected gateway to Dharma, or Buddhist wisdom, through opening the doors of perception with consciousness-altering drugs. For many of us, they facilitated our first experience of transcendence, about which we had only heard rumors from scriptures and mystics. Drug experience helped us discover that things are not what they seem, nor are we just who we thought we were. That is why the ancient Buddhist scripture, the Lankavatara Sutra, says: “Things are not what they seem to be; nor are they otherwise.” This is a mind-breaking conundrum we learned to chew over and reflect upon, until not only our teeth and jaws grew tired but also our heads came off. Then life began anew.

I don’t want to be a cheerleader for drugs. Drugs, both legal and illegal, can be addictive. I think the first question to ask ourselves is whether they are abused, or used well. Drugs can be dangerous. They can place your freedom and even your life in jeopardy. As a meditation teacher, I feel that on a more subtle level, the instant access to extraordinary mind states that mind-altering drugs can provide—with the surprisingly swift onset of expanded consciousness, and the equally quick comedown—can addict us to thrill-seeking and make us greedy for, and more attached to, mere phenomenal appearances and temporary mind states. This creates a karmic conditioning that limits our infinite conscious potential.

The intensity of drug-enhanced experiences can also stunt our ability to appreciate everyday spirituality, causing us to overlook the subtle luminosity amidst the less vivid, yet equally sacred and significant, nitty-gritty details of daily life. Intense drug-induced openings can, in certain cases, help temporarily crack open the ego-shell and break through a heavily guarded, stiff persona, providing nonconceptual mystical, sensual, emotional, visionary, heart-opening, and mind-expanding experience otherwise unavailable to ordinary consciousness. However, after being blown wide open so quickly, the ego’s defensive reaction is often to contract even more tightly in order to protect its domain. Thus the experience can become a hindrance rather than a boon.

Spirituality, which at its best combines truth and love, wisdom and compassion, is the best medicine. LSD is strong yogi medicine; an almost infinitesimal amount can deliver you to other worlds. It can propel deep self-inquiry and gnostic experience. It can also precipitate psychosis. Youthful curiosity definitely played a part, but my main purpose in taking it in the sixties and early seventies was a sacred vision quest: to free the mind and heart, not further entrap or obscure them. This is the true purpose of spirituality. Psychedelic experience provided me a glimpse of other realms of existence; other ways of perceiving; other lives and lifetimes—and a preview of the dream state and the passageways after death and before rebirth, known in Tibetan Buddhism as the bardo. This has helped me prepare for conscious dying as well as more conscious living. It has also expanded my sense of humor by unveiling the cosmic absurdity of life; and humor, as we all know, is a crucial spiritual quality. For if you don’t get the joke this time around, you will have to be reborn again and again until you do!

I have been concerned in recent decades about drugs in our culture. Drugs are a means, not an end in themselves. Consciousness-altering drugs are not a religion. Just as the Buddha said we need to let go of the raft once we have reached the other shore, we need to be able to relinquish the means and freely enjoy the end, or the next stage, of the journey. We don’t want to become stuck along the way, nor become chemical burnouts or psychedelic relics.

I find that the entire societal context of drug-taking is more complicated today than it was in the sixties and seventies. The increasingly young age of drug-takers, combined with the war on drugs’ severe sentencing, the involvement of criminal elements and other insalubrious strands of the underculture, as well as the unreliable quality of street drugs, all coincide to lend, for some, an atmosphere of risk, guilt, and paranoia that we did not suffer to such an extent at college campuses in the sixties. In that experimental age of innocence, we thought we were going to change the world. The social activism and spiritual consciousness of the peace movement and the counterculture helped support or bring about, if not a revolution, then at least significant societal and political changes—activism for civil rights and human rights, the environmental movement, and the women’s movement. This consciousness remains alive, at least to some degree, today. Mind-altering substances and Eastern spiritual practices were part of this evolving social change. But now when I am asked about the use of drugs for spiritual purposes, especially by young people in public, I usually just say no, or just say maybe. Meanwhile I’m thinking: read between the lines. Just notice my initials, Lama Surya Das. What can I say? I “just said no” for decades. Yet there remains within me an inner smile, like the Cheshire cat’s shit-eating grin.

So the Second Zig Zag Zen Commandment is: “Just say maybe.”

While I didn’t have these initials in the sixties, I certainly had that experience. Drugs were an unexpected gateway to spirituality for me. But I found that it is far easier to have a genuine theophany, a breakthrough spiritual experience, than to develop an authentic spiritual life.

When I was growing up in suburbia in the fifties, the religious atmosphere was quite stifling. There was not much room for questioning. When I asked about God, the answer was usually “Be quiet,” or “No one knows.” Spirituality was not spoken of at my synagogue or home, although we heard plenty about religion. So naturally enough, the best and brightest of my generation sought spiritual experience elsewhere.

By the time I was bar mitzvahed at thirteen, I no longer believed in God, Judaism, or any organized religions. However, by the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I came under the influence of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, the writings of Joseph Campbell and Teilhard de Chardin, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s experimental psychedelic research at Harvard. Many of us were reading books that bridged East and West, including those by Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Hermann Hesse, Ken Kesey, and Carlos Castaneda. Be-Ins were in. I went to Woodstock in 1969, and the following winter drove to Esalen in Big Sur in my first car, an old Mercury Comet convertible. I was nineteen, and well into my own psychedelic experiments. I wonder now how many brain cells it may have cost me!

My first teenage trip on mescaline was reality-shattering, and totally shook me out of my complacency. I realized things were not just what they seemed to be, nor was I who I thought I was. A year later at college came my first LSD trip. One fine spring day, I had my first glimpse of God, of what Meister Eckhart calls “the Great Emptiness,” the via negativa. I knew what the Christian mystic had meant when he said: “The eye through which I see God is the eye with which He sees me.” This epiphany, this spiritual breakthrough, was overwhelmingly moving. For a few hours I felt totally connected and loved, and at the same time as if dissolved. I disappeared, and yet I was connected to everything and everyone, graciously blessed with a profound sense of meaning, belonging, acceptance, and unconditional compassion for all living things. There was nothing more to do or undo, and all of reality seemed perfectly radiant, stainless, whole, and complete, just as it was.

My close friends and I tried to ingest psychedelics in a sacred manner, but like explorers—a half-baked combination of holy mystics and intrepid psychonauts. We tripped mostly in wilderness areas with best friends and lovers, rather than frivolously at rock concerts and movies. I found that the organic psychedelics, such as organic mescaline, peyote, and mushrooms, were softer and smoother than LSD, and thus more conducive to exploring the spiritual domain.

Peak experiences don’t happen with every drug trip. I had some hellish experiences too, including one in which I thought I was dying as I unexpectedly began to black out, and another in which I experienced firsthand what many religions call hell. Some of my friends dropped off along the zig zag highway, and I mean literally. I still miss them.

To say drug experience is unreal, and thus cannot provide an experience of reality, is nonsense. Mind-altering substances have been used throughout history by holy men and women, shamans, and spiritual seekers. In rites and rituals harking back thousands of years, India knew soma, the magic god-medicine, and amrita, the elixir of deathlessness. South American shamans still drink ayahuasca for their sacred rituals, gaining over millennia profound knowledge of plant medicines and more, while the Native American Church uses peyote in a legal as well as a sacred manner in the United States.

For me psychedelic experience opened an unexpected glimpse of the Ultimate. I had previously thought religion and God were just a matter of faith not experience. Then suddenly I had my own experience—I knew there was a “there” there. We may feel far from it, but it’s never far from us. “It,” by whatever name we call it, is still as sweet, and as near. As we say in Dzogchen, “Buddhahood in the palm of your hand.”

The question is: How can we access it? Paul Tillich said at Harvard: “The question our century puts before us is: Is it possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with the Holy, the dimension that cuts through the world of subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is not world but is the mystery of the Ground of Being?”

How to bring about spiritual insights, and sustain them, was the subject of many conversations that I would have with my gurus and friends along the path, including Ram Dass, Bhagavan Das, Dan Goleman, Krishna Das, Werner Erhard, Charles Berner, Joan Halifax, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Acharya Munindra, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, and with saints, Muktananda, Ananadamayi-ma, and Sathya Sai Baba. Many of us wondered how to bring Eastern teachings back to America, and how they would fit into our culture.

The Third Zig Zag Zen Commandment: “Find a way to have your own spiritual practice and experience.” Find a way to live in the sacred zone—not just visit.

Spirituality of all kinds requires honesty and sincerity, combined with curiosity, exploration, perseverance, questioning, and self-inquiry. Spirituality is a heroic journey, a grail quest.

After graduating from college I went to India, seeking just this kind of personal spiritual connection. I found it through meditation, yoga, fasting, chanting, ritual. I was amazed to find that my gurus regularly experienced what I had been seeking through drugs. Through their skillful means, I learned to access the same states more intentionally, more consciously, more reliably—and without the “accidental tourist” aspect of drugs, when you never know what you’re going to get—chemically, as well as experientially.

Having glimpsed the true nature of things—as it’s described in Dzogchen—or the true nature of heart and mind, the whole practice of continuing along the path is a matter of getting used to it, or experiencing it through and through, continuously, amidst ordinary reality, not just now and then through extraordinary drug-induced experiences. This is the secret of everyday mysticism or Dharma in daily life.

The Fourth Zig Zag Zen Commandment is: “Awaken your mind, open your heart; learn to see clearly and to love.”

One problem with glimpses from drug trips is that it’s easier to get enlightened than to stay enlightened. What you experience is not ultimate, final, unshakable, and irreversible. It’s not anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, perfect complete awakened enlightenment. It’s just a breakthrough, a satori, a single enlightenment experience. People may have glimpsed the completeness, but they don’t continue to feel complete. It’s like glimpsing the golden sun when it momentarily breaks through the clouds. Forever after, you know what “sun” means. You’ve seen it, yet you don’t see it all the time because it’s hidden behind the clouds of your own karmic obscurations. One downside of psychedelic experiences is that you may think you’re there when you’re not really there. I diagnose this as “premature immaculation,” a condition that can paralyze the further impetus of your spiritual journey. We have to keep going on the path, not just stop at the first beautiful view. Drug use generally decreases with the deepening of spiritual practice; moreover, chemically induced experiences produce more personal change and inner growth if done in the context of some form of spiritual practice.

It is a Buddhist precept to refrain from intoxicants that cause heedlessness. If we are heedless we may cause harm to others and to ourselves. However, I think taking certain drugs in a conscious, mindful manner—as a spiritual experiment, in a safe container, with a guide or a loved one—can be an important part of spiritual experience.

So the Fifth Zig Zag Zen Commandment is: “Go on this journey with a friend, even a guide, if possible.” Otherwise, we may be blown away, rather than just blow our minds and experience our true self, which is closer to the true goal.

I stopped taking drugs decades ago. Being a Buddhist monk with vows made that part easier. I had continual access to extraordinary states of consciousness, for some hours a day and I had guidance, with training, through the months and years of meditation practice.

I fondly remember my first guru, Neem Karoli Baba, taking three tabs of Ram Dass’s Sandoz Laboratory acid in the late sixties and then throughout the day asking Ram Dass if and when it was going to have some effect. It’s really Ram Dass who went on a trip that day. It didn’t seem to change Neem Karoli Baba’s consciousness much. Drugs opened up my cosmic sense of absurdity! I could see from another angle, like in the “Far Side” cartoons, and not get stuck thinking things are merely what they seem. My world turned upside-down and I could see the emptiness of things, the funny side of things, and open up to what we call in Dzogchen, The Twelve Laughs of the Primordial Buddha.

The Sixth Zig Zag Zen Commandment is: “Lighten up while enlightening up. Cultivate joy. Don’t take yourself too seriously, or it won’t be much fun.”

Once in 1971, I was with Lama Thubten Yeshe, the first lama in India to teach Westerners, at his hilltop monastery outside Kathmandu. I decided to leave the monastery to go trekking in the Himalayas. Those were my halcyon days; I was twenty-one years old, footloose, and feckless, with nary a care in the world—or even a ticket home. After several days of walking I sat down to meditate, with my T-shirt wrapped around my head for shade from the intense Himalayan sun. I took my last tab of mescaline.

I experienced my consciousness begin to radiate outward, dissolving, and then manifesting as infinite realms of light like Buddha-fields. All kinds of blessings, divinations, prognostications, Buddhas, dakinis, guardian angels, and Himalayan spirits came to life in my mind as I sat for hours under the shade of a tree. Upon my return to the monastery I was excited to tell Lama Yeshe what I had seen. He just said, “American boy’s dream! You too much. Have some tea.” He laughed, and we had tea.

So the Seventh Zig Zag Zen Commandment is: “See everything as impermanent and like a dream.”

Later that week I discussed my mescaline Buddha-fields experience with a friend, and she suggested I ask Lama Yeshe for refuge vows and tantric empowerment, so I could practice self-empowerment, rather than just waiting for some epiphany to break through the clouds of my obscuring mind once in a decade, or when I take some purple pills.

But my first winter in Bodh Gaya, in 1972, an American Dharma friend gave me half a purple tab of mescaline. I sat beneath the Bodhi Tree where the Buddha had become enlightened, and experienced an incredible vision of him still sitting there in meditation, radiant and comforting. This was similar to my previous experience in college, which I called my first glimpse of God. Although the iconography was different, the feeling of oneness and noneness, of infinity and luminous presence combined with compassion was the same.

My own last Dzogchen master, Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche (who died in 2000) was amazed how many Westerners seem to have had visions of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, mandalas and Buddha-fields. He felt they could develop all this good karma by practicing more meditation. Khenpo was part of the Crazy Wisdom Lineage. I was fortunate to be his main Western disciple, and spent several years with him as his attendant and close disciple. I invited him to America and hosted him, and we taught together many times in the early nineties. Students were starting to ask him about psychedelics and to recount the bardo experiences similar to those described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and visions similar to the togal visions of Dzogchen practice. Being a really open-minded lama and a truth-seeker, he asked if I could get him some. I’m not sure why, but it never happened.

Surely the attitude that most lamas and teachers have toward psychedelics is culturally based. I remember a lama in Darjeeling saying that drugs clog your psychic channels, energy paths, chakras, and nadis. On one occasion, he had everyone at his meditation center bring their stash and toss it into the campfire as an offering up of illusion. Yet, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche didn’t mind alcohol. High-mountain Tibetans need their lung capacity, and smoking was not a good thing for them, so perhaps alcohol was more acceptable. Whatever substance is being used, it should be used consciously and intentionally, and not mindlessly.

So the Eighth Zig Zag Zen Commandment is: “Be mindful. Be vigilant and intelligent about your experiments.” For if the wind changes, the altered state might stick, and you might never get home to Kansas again!

Allen Ginsberg once asked my late master Dudjom Rinpoche about his psychedelic visions and experiences, especially the terrifying ones. Dudjom Rinpoche said: “Whatever you see, good or bad, don’t cling to it.” Enlightened advice for all seasons!

So this is the Ninth Zig Zag Zen Commandment: “Don’t cling to anything.”

Some poets, including Rimbaud, Coleridge, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac, have written extensively while using drugs. I personally find it difficult to read and write clearly, or meditate under their influence. In the seventies, once I got into monastic training, I stopped using drugs and remember feeling a great clearing-out of my energy channels. Breathing exercises, in particular, clear out the cobwebs, psychic pollution, and spiritual sludge. Pranayama and other yogic breathing techniques are, like regular physical exercise, extraordinarily energizing, restorative, and healing. If you are concerned about the amount of drugs you have taken, and the aftereffects, the practice of Tibetan energy yoga can do a lot to restore the natural state of pristine clarity.

The unexpected psychedelic gateway to spirituality turned my heart and mind toward seeking my transpersonal aspect of being on a more consistent basis. When I began to meditate, I found that I was again being reconnected to my non-self. Through practice, I could get ever more continuous access to that underlying continuity that is like a string holding together all the bead-like experiences of our life in one beautiful rosary. Words are just like mere finger-painting. All language is a weak translation of this ineffable experience. As the Buddha said, according to Zen tradition: “I never uttered a word; yet everybody heard what they needed to hear.”

The Tenth Zig Zag Zen Commandment is: “Don’t rely on mere words and concepts.”

After having a psychedelic opening, you have to come back and live in the here and now. Otherwise, psychedelic revelations might paralyze the impetus toward deepening that glimpse. I try to integrate the Absolute and the Relative in my body, my feelings, my work, and in my own relations by making authentic connection in every contact in daily life. One of the best ways to abide in the non-dual is by practicing the Six Paramitas of the Bodhisattva Path, or principles of enlightened living: generosity, virtue, patience, diligence, concentration, and transcendental wisdom. The Middle Way means not falling into the ditch on either side. But the Middle Way is not like a narrow yellow line down the center of the road. It has plenty of lanes on either side for us to enjoy at our different speeds and in our different ways.

So an extra commandment, for good measure, is: “Be good and do good. There are no enlightened individuals; there is only enlightened activity.”

For some people, a psychedelic experience might be too much to handle, or out of the question. It might shake up an unstable ego structure too much, and therefore be unhelpful. You must develop a healthy, autonomous adult ego before you can genuinely transcend the ego. Or in Buddhist parlance, you must become somebody before you become nobody. It is not a commandment, but one would do well to realize one’s true self.

LAMA SAYS: Spiritual practice is perfect. Just do it.

To sum up my lighthearted Zig Zag Zen Commandments:

1. Take care. Watch your step. Be careful.
2. Just say maybe.
3. Find a way to have your own spiritual practice and experience.
4. Awaken your mind, open your heart; learn to see clearly and to love.
5. Go on this journey with a friend, even a guide, if possible.
6. Lighten up while enlightening up. Cultivate joy. Don’t take yourself too seriously, or it won’t be much fun.
7. See everything as impermanent and like a dream.
8. Be mindful. Be vigilant and intelligent about your experiments.
9. Don’t cling to anything.
10. Don’t rely on mere words and concepts.

And—the extra one—for good measure: Be good and do good.

There are no enlightened individuals; there is only enlightened activity.