Pani: Women, Drugs and Kathmandu shows the global reach of the opioid crisis and the courage of drug users who strive to overcome their addiction. In Kathmandu, where women’s drug use and addiction is taboo, life is hard for female opioid addicts. Shunned by society and with limited access to rehabilitation services, many turn to sex work and petty crime to survive. This documentary offers unique access into the lives of eight brave women who strive to recover against heavy odds and the former users who help them along the way. Evoking empathy, understanding, and compassion for those affected, it uncovers the impact of a worldwide epidemic on Nepali society.

Rated PG-13; includes graphic depictions of drug use. 

This film will be available for streaming until midnight on Saturday, October 5th.

To learn more, visit https://www.panidocumentary.com/

Related: Download the Tricycle Teachings e-book Addiction, a collection of Buddhist wisdom and advice on addiction and recovery.

The post Pani: Women, Drugs and Kathmandu appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At a trendy meditation studio in Manhattan, a seemingly distracted desk attendant pointed me to three vials of CBD oil and a jar of tiny spoons. I took one eyedropper full and headed to a colorful room to lie down and listen to a guided meditation that told me to imagine myself floating above the Earth, looking down from my spaceship. And I thought, why do I need a spaceship to imagine myself in space? I soon realized this was not a good fit for me.

The plan had been to look into the growing trend of CBD oil use in meditation. Online testimonials said that the stress-relieving qualities of CBD and meditation could work in concert to melt away the anxieties of the modern world. But I wasn’t seeing it.

Cannabidiol, or CBD, is one of more than 60 cannabinoid compounds found in a marijuana plant, which includes the substance most commonly associated with the “stoned” effect, THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). CBD is legal, to varying degrees, in 46 states. New York legalized it in 2014, in part due to the efforts of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who argued at the time that it would be a mistake to outlaw the substance that had been shown to be one of the few ways of treating cases of medication-resistant childhood epilepsy. (He also viewed the hemp industry as a way to bring new jobs to the economically hard-hit Southern Tier region.)

Since then, multiple studies have found that CBD offers many of the benefits long touted by proponents of legal marijuana without the psychotropic effects. In other words, it doesn’t get you high. Even better, researchers have found few side effects associated with CBD use. Among its purported benefits, CBD studies have found promising results for its anti-anxiety and anti-inflammatory qualities.

That’s why many meditation and yoga studios in New York have turned to CBD as a way of catering to their stressed out and aching clientele. With classes offering CBD oil springing up across the city, I was left wondering why my experience at the trendy Manhattan one was so lackluster.  

According to Yoga Haven founder Betsy Kase, the reason was that I was going about it all wrong.

Kase sells CBD oil at her Westchester studios and takes it herself, and yet she told me she “doesn’t understand” why yoga and meditation studios offer doses before class.

“I’m sort of blown away that yoga studios are doing it,” she said.

Besides the fact that it takes around 15 minutes to feel the effects of CBD and ingesting it right before a 40-minute class is inefficient, Kase said that CBD oil should not be used to enhance an experience but should be part of a holistic self-care routine.

“We could all sit in the lobby and get high before we meditate,” she said. “But why are we doing that? What is that about? They’re making a novelty out of it.”

Instead, Kase argues that CBD can treat symptoms such as pain or anxiety that for some people can be a barrier to establishing a meditation practice. Adding CBD to her own yoga and meditation practice, Kase said, has helped her reduce the anxiety that she has been addressing with prescription pharmaceuticals for years.

“I’m 54 years old, and I’ve been trying to meditate since I was 13,” she said. “I’ve tried all different kinds of meditation, and I could not sit. It’s like I’m jumping out of my skin. If somebody feels like they’re jumping out of their skin continually, is it that they’re not trying hard enough? I don’t believe that. We should give somebody a little help. It’s like how in yoga, we have props that we didn’t have 30 years ago. If sitting in meditation without back support causes back pain, should that be the only way everybody should sit? No! Give them a chair or a block. These are all aids to help us do the practice.”

Kase says that students, friends, colleagues, and family have had positive results with CBD oil, including her father, who suffers from an autoimmune disease and has been using CBD to treat severe inflammation, which has allowed him to take a lower dose of steroids.

But Kase acknowledges that her CBD suggestions should not be confused with medical advice. Much like with her yoga instruction, she says that she is only sharing what has worked for her in the hopes that it will help others. “I don’t say, ‘I recommend and advise that you take ten drops, three times a day,’” she explained. “I say, ‘This is the particular brand that I use. You could try it and see if it helps.’ And people have told me that it does.”

So perhaps CBD and mediation can work well together. But does it align with Buddhist teachings and practice? The debate around the Buddhist view of drugs has a long history, and recently, a Tricycle article took a new look at the issue of using psychedelics to work with the mind. While some Buddhists encouraged the behavior within a safe environment, others argued that drug use violated the fifth precept against intoxicants or denounced it as a shortcut to a certain experience that was unrelated to the Buddhist path.

When it comes to the experience-oriented approach to CBD oil, the psychedelics arguments seem to apply. But with the treatment approach, the comparison between CBD and psychedelics is less clear. For practitioners suffering from extreme anxiety or pain, CBD would not be a shortcut to meditation, but a way of getting them onto the cushion at all. And since CBD is not psychoactive, it is more akin to caffeine or pain medicine than a mind-altering substance like LSD. If caffeine were a violation of the fifth precept, then Zen master Joshu would be in big trouble for his constant instruction to “go drink tea.”

Zen teacher Brad Warner, an outspoken critic of psychedelics use, agreed that CBD was a different issue. In an email to Tricycle, Warner explained that he had once tried taking CBD oil to treat “frequent and severe headaches,” but, “it had very little effect on me as far as relaxation. Chamomile tea is far more potent to me. Chamomile tea practically knocks me out, by the way. Maybe I’m strange.

“Buddhism in Asia has a long history of tea drinking to help people stay awake,” he continued. “And I wouldn’t begrudge anyone taking something that eases bodily aches while sitting—although I think you shouldn’t do too much of that stuff because you can end up becoming dependent on it. If the pain is really bad, though, I’d take pain relievers. I have, in fact, done that myself.”

However, Warner warned against using CBD to enhance a meditation experience. “To me, one of the great benefits of meditation is how it can enable a person to discover their own innate ability to not react to stress in a habitual way,” he explained. “That skill takes time and effort to develop. But it’s very rewarding because it’s something you can call upon any time, any place, regardless of whether there’s a source of CBD (or Chamomile tea) nearby. CBD-enhanced meditation would never allow you to find that innate ability. By adding CBD to the meditation, you’re taking away one of the greatest and most useful aspects of meditation.”

With Kase’s advice and Warner’s warning in mind, I wanted to try meditation with CBD again to see if I could catch a glimpse of what all the fuss was about. So why didn’t the CBD meditation class work for me? One possible reason was that I did not ingest the proper dose of CBD or give it enough time to take effect. Another reason was the meditation itself: the audio-guided visualization practice was nothing like the quiet breath-counting Zen meditation I am accustomed to. I decided to try again on my own terms.

I picked up a bottle of CBD oil at the place nearest to my apartment that sold it—a shop called Vape Kingz, which despite its ostentatious name had a delightfully helpful salesman. He explained the differences in price, taste, and concentration between brands, and I opted for the cheapest one—30ml of tincture that contained 500mg CBD oil.

The clerk told me that I should take one dropper of oil a day for a standard dose. He was half right. The approximately 15mg dose was standard, but since I weigh around 125 lbs, it would be above average for me. This sort of well-intended misinformation is an issue for many similar “alternative” treatments. St. John’s wort, Ginseng, and other often potent herbal remedies can be taken in excess or adversely combined with other medications because they’re not regulated as well as pharmaceuticals.

It is no surprise that CBD suffers from the same drawbacks, considering the legal grey area it occupies. Betsy Kase unwittingly waded into that territory when she started selling the oil at Yoga Haven. After she started listing the product on her website in September 2018, the credit card processing company that she had been using for the past six years dropped her as a client, and PayPal froze her account.  

“Even though I took it right off my website, they wouldn’t take me back on,” Kase said. Even though CBD is legal in New York, she explained that it is considered “a risky product, in the same category as marijuana.” After a few months of searching, Kase eventually found a new credit card processing company, but, she said, “It already had a huge impact on the functioning of my business.”

These barriers are part of the reason why I purchased my bottle at Vape Kingz instead of a pharmacy and was instructed to take a large dose by a well-meaning man in an oversized T-shirt.

The 15mg dose made me fall asleep within the hour. Higher quantities of CBD tend to have that effect, and many people use it for that purpose. Once again, I failed to see how it would help me meditate. So I adjusted the dose, starting with a low amount and slowly dialing it in over time. When I felt I had hit a good middle ground, I tried taking it before meditating again.

The effect was subtle. I noticed that I was able to work my way into the meditation a little more easily and access states of tranquility a little more readily. But, as a Zen teacher once told me, the practice of meditation is not the calm state of mind but the continuous exercise of returning to the practice itself. From that perspective, there’s nothing to be gained from making meditation easier—unless it is so difficult for someone that they cannot even begin, which is not the case for me. So I did not find it to be a panacea for stress relief or a meditation enhancer.  

The experience is likely different for each person, but unfortunately, for now, anecdotal evidence is all we have when it comes to learning about meditating with CBD. There has been virtually no research published on effects of CBD and meditation, according to Jennifer Whitney, a psychology PhD candidate at the New School, in New York City, who specializes in meditation research and who also teaches meditation in the mixed Vipassana and Zen tradition of the late Buddhist psychotherapist Michael Stone. She said that the recent interest in CBD is “too new” for researchers to have completed the peer-review process.

“I am sure all the people are researching it now,” Whitney said, “but the process of doing research and getting an article published generally takes around two years.” It will take even longer before we have definitive studies on the long-term effects of CBD use, she added.

As a researcher, Whitney does not think the evidence is strong enough yet to fully support the claims of CBD’s benefits, but in her capacity as a meditation teacher, she said students and colleagues have reported similar anecdotes about CBD’s ability to reduce anxiety.

“With CBD, they’re finding a certain level of anxiety and stress reduction that other things hadn’t afforded them or a similar effect but without the side effects,” she said. “My concern is about the potential reliance on the CBD doing the job for you rather than actually doing the meditative work. So maybe it could be like a boost that you could eventually let go of, instead of doing CBD plus meditation for the rest of your life.”

But Whitney said that few people report that anxiety has prevented them from developing a meditation practice. “It’s more that they don’t have the time,” she said. “That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from finishing any of the intervention studies.”

In the end, CBD has not become a regular part of my meditation practice (though I have continued to use it as a sleep aid). I find that sitting with anxious thoughts can be helpful, and the anxiety does not feel overwhelming for me like it does for some. But self-care regimens are different for everyone. I remember one woman emerging from the same trendy guided meditation with a big smile on her face, letting out deep breaths of relief. If she found a program that works for her, then I don’t see any more harm in it than somebody drinking Chamomile every night. All I can say is that it’s not my cup of tea.

The post Can CBD Give Your Meditation a Boost? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Dick Dorworth is working on a typewriter, cross-legged on a thin mattress inside a handmade redwood slide-in truck camper. The year is 1974. Sheets of paper are stacked beside him, and woven tapestries hang from the open back doors. A pair of leather hiking boots is tucked in the truck bed beside camping gear. Dorworth’s dark hair and beard fall past his shoulders; his glasses are tight against his face. In the background, ponderosa pine boughs hide Yosemite Valley’s sheer granite walls.

National Geographic photographer Galen Rowell took this image of Dorworth, singularly focused on the work in front of him: Night Driving. This seminal coming-of-age tale is a window into the 1960s and ’70s counterculture fringe of climbers, skiers, and vagabonds and the drugs, drinking, and sex they imbibed. Mountain Gazette published all 100 pages of it in 1975, alongside a short essay by Edward Abbey, the two pieces taking up an entire issue.

“It became an instant cult classic, a talisman and a benchmark for those who fancied themselves hardcore,” wrote fellow climber, writer, and Buddhist Jack Turner, in an introduction to a later edition.

Night Driving was based on the real thing. Dorworth, who turned 80 in October, broke the world speed skiing record in 1963, going 106 miles an hour on metal skis and leather lace-up boots on an icy Chilean mountainside. He went on a 6,000-mile road trip from California to Argentina to climb Cerro Fitz Roy in 1968; his team—among them Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins, founders of Patagonia and The North Face, respectively—made the third ascent of the 11,020-foot rock spire. And between 1957 and 1971, Dorworth fathered five sons by five different women. He didn’t meet or know about two of those sons until he was nearly 60. I first met Dorworth in 2006 at Practice Rock, a climbing area south of Bozeman, Montana, where I live and he spends summers with his partner, Jeannie Wall. Since then, we’ve become friends. They winter near Sun Valley, Idaho, where Dorworth—a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame—still skis six days a week.

In mountain towns such as ours, Dorworth is a living legend known both as the madman he once was and the kind, loving Zen philosopher he is today. He is a child of his generation, his story one of redemption as well as contradiction. Never chasing commercial success or fame like some of his contemporaries, Dorworth followed his own path. It always led to the mountains.

There, and later in the zendo, Dorworth shifted his way of being in the world. One foot in front of another, one breath at a time, he found peace.

When he was 7, Dorworth and his parents moved to the south shore of Lake Tahoe, Nevada, to work for his aunt and uncle, who owned Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino. His mother was a cook, waitress, and change girl, and his father did bookkeeping and odd jobs. After class at the Zephyr Cove one-room schoolhouse, Dorworth would strap on his wooden skis and sidestep up the hill behind their house, lapping it until dark. He leapt off jumps, practiced slalom technique on a race course made of willows he’d cut and stripped with an axe, and toured the hills above the cove.

“I learned to cope with and then cherish solitude in action on skis, and those times were among the happiest of my childhood,” he wrote in The Only Path, a memoir self-published in 2017.

A natural athlete, he found joy in skiing—in the movement, in the discipline of practice, and in the mountains. It was also an escape from his parents’ difficult marriage.

While Dorworth’s father was deployed with the Navy during WWII, he had an affair with a woman who then died while he was overseas. He returned to a wife and 6-year-old son, living at home with resigned acceptance. Dorworth’s mother never forgave her husband. Dorworth himself didn’t find out where the resentment came from until he was almost 50.

His parents dulled their misery with alcohol, often drinking until dawn in casinos and bars around Tahoe, Reno, Carson City, and Las Vegas. Dorworth spent those nights in the back seat of the family car.

“Sometimes it was cold,” he wrote. “Always it was lonely. Sometimes it was scary. And I always hated it.”

When sober, his parents were caring and affectionate. They bought him ski gear they couldn’t afford and drove him to races around the West. Herself a fan of pop fiction and mysteries, Dorworth’s mother gave him the essays of the 16th-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, crime novels by Mickey Spillane, and everything by Mark Twain and Jack London.

Dorworth finished Reno High School and entered the University of Nevada, Reno in 1956, a time he has described as “an insipid era of saccharine shallowness and sterile hypocrisy that the ’60s would none too soon strip naked.” He studied English and journalism, ski raced, partied, and read Faulkner, Snyder, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Hemingway. He graduated in 1963 with a BA in English.

“Skiing and the mountains gave me a place to put my anger about my family dynamics and the disruption in life caused by WWII,” Dorworth told me. “[Both] were the beginning and the path of spiritual searching, which eventually took me to Zen.”

Although he was an all-American college ski racer and a member of the first U.S. National Development Team, Dorworth never made it to the top of that game, in part because he hated the politics and favoritism of sanctioned ski racing. The niche pursuit of speed skiing, on the other hand, had none of that. It was pure. All he had to do was survive.

“He was a very bright, intuitive, creative guy,” said C.B. Vaughan, a racer who spent three months preparing the speed course in Chile with Dorworth and, incredibly, tied the record that same day. “He was always interested in everything and anything.”

After he retired from racing in 1965, Dorworth began a 30-year career as ski coach and instructor, which included a winter coaching the U.S. Men’s Ski Team and four as director of the Aspen Mountain Ski School in Colorado. In 1966, at age 28, Dorworth started graduate school. The plan was to become an English professor, but he left after a year, bored and exasperated. The country’s fault lines were spreading amid Vietnam and civil rights protests. Dorworth was still lugging around angry childhood baggage. He’d been dropping lots of acid. He needed something to believe in.

He found climbing.

In spring of 1968, he visited Yosemite Valley at the invitation of Jim Bridwell, whom Dorworth had instructed for free that winter in Squaw Valley. King of Yosemite’s climbing scene, Bridwell was the visionary behind Yosemite’s most cutting edge routes at the time. After a month in Bridwell’s tutelage, Dorworth loaded into a Ford Econoline van headed for Argentine Patagonia.

The crew—Dorworth, Chouinard, Tompkins, and Lito Tejada-Flores, who made a film about the adventure—called themselves the Fun Hogs. They surfed their way south, picking up British ex-pat Chris Jones in Peru, and then skied two Chilean volcanos, Llaima and Osorno. On Fitz Roy, they spent 31 days in snow caves waiting out storms. Photos show Dorworth carrying a massive pack across a glacier; journaling in a snow cave, brow furrowed; and holding a red “VIVA LOS FUN HOGS” banner on the summit with Tompkins and Chouinard, surrounded by sky and clouds.

“He was great to have on the trip because he’s a storyteller,” Chouinard told me, adding that although Dorworth had very little experience as a climber at the time, he was an asset to the team. “He was a great athlete. He had no fear. We’d tell him what to do and he’d do it exactly, and really safe.”

Over the next three decades, Dorworth established first ascents from the sheer 2,200-foot northwest face of Half Dome in Yosemite to Idaho’s City of Rocks; climbed in Europe, Asia and the Americas; and guided around the Western United States.

And he wrote about it. One of the first to explore human relationships on the vertical stage—and not just the facts of a climb or the glory of a summit—Dorworth became an influential thinker in the ’60s and ’70s, Chouinard said. “[Night Driving] kind of broke the mold.”

Some of Dorworth’s work is so visceral, I still feel it years after I’ve read it. In this extract from The Straight Course, one of his five books, he describes breaking the world speed skiing record:

Acceleration like a rocket launched in the wrong direction. The sound of endless cannons, moving closer. Irreversible commitment.

The soles of my feet said this was the one. My eyes saw the transition and peaceful flat, far, far away. My body, appalled at the danger in which it had been placed, acted automatically, reluctantly perhaps, but with an instinct and precision that preceded the mind which put it there. My naked mind had finally gotten hold of the big one that had always gotten away.

A social critic influenced by the 1960s New Journalism genre, Dorworth asks big, existential questions, his long-winded prose unconstrained by linear time. Although he is pessimistic about the current state of the planet, a rhythm—unmistakably Beat and more powerful than his words—runs beneath his writing, tapping out a reverence for nature and resolute belief in the human spirit.

Dorworth wrote for magazines including SKI, Powder, and Mountain Gazette, and his topics ranged across the skiing world. He profiled filmmaker Warren Miller, in whose films Dorworth starred; reported on a 1982 avalanche that killed seven people in Alpine Meadows, California; and wrote a brutally honest account of the personal dynamics on a 1981 expedition to ski 24,757-foot Mustagh Ata, in China. At home in Sun Valley, he worked as both reporter and columnist for the Idaho Mountain Express for 20 years before switching to the Weekly Sun, where he’s been for nearly a decade.

In the zendo, Dorworth shifted his way of being in the world. One foot in front of another, one breath at a time, he found peace.

Dorworth had the chops to make it big, but he never promoted himself or schmoozed, and he wasn’t interested in being edited. Instead, just as he did everything else in life, he wrote on his own terms.

An old rumor is still kicking around around mountain towns about a Sun Valley bumper sticker that supposedly read: “Honk If You’re Dick Dorworth’s Son.” While the sticker never actually existed—it was just an offhand joke by a ski buddy—the story stuck, much to Dorworth’s chagrin.

The sons, on the other hand, are flesh and blood. Three were born before he was 22, although he only knew about one, Scott, born in 1960 to Dorworth’s first wife. The couple had almost broken up but decided to make a go of it when she became pregnant. With a leg badly broken in a ski racing crash, Dorworth took a job in Stanford’s Sociology Department. But, as he wrote, he was unable to “pay in the coin of conformity.” When Scott was 3 months old, Dorworth’s wife drove her husband to South Lake Tahoe and left him beside Highway 50 with a suitcase, a typewriter, and less than $100.

The only son Dorworth helped raise was the youngest, Jason, who was 2 when he came to live with his father. They stayed in the old redwood truck camper at first but soon moved to a cabin in the pines above Truckee, California. Dorworth wrote:

Being a single parent is challenging for the most organized, grounded, stable and socially responsible person. At the time, finding these personal attributes in me was as much a challenge as raising an energetic, bright young boy; and, of course, not finding them in his father was a challenge and frustration for my son.

They spent many days at the crag and ski mountain. When a teacher suggested putting Jason on Ritalin, Dorworth refused, incredulous about the irony of a hippie fighting conservative administrators to keep his kid off drugs.

“He was always kind to me, even if he was firm,” said Jason, now division chief with the Santa Cruz, California, fire department. “He has a pretty fixed ideology about what is right and wrong. I think when he was younger, it got exposed as self-righteousness, but now it’s more self-awareness.”

Today, Dorworth is close with three of his sons and their children, and he is friendly with another. One son won’t speak to him. Married four times but never for long, he acknowledges his absence from his sons’ childhood lives, and their mothers’ umbrage.

“I recognize the positive changes he’s made, and yet it’s sometimes still painful and hard to let go of resentment over some of the things that happened,” said Jason’s mother, Jane Badeaux, who married Dorworth when she was 20 and he was 33.

For his part, Dorworth doesn’t dwell on the past, especially on events before he got sober. “A lot of people don’t like it, and I understand that, but that’s their problem,” he said.

When he was 46, something happened that allowed Dorworth to let go: his father told him about the affair. “All of a sudden,” Dorworth said, “this thing I’d been holding, this anger, it simply wasn’t there anymore.” Then, on January 31, 1987, sitting in his kitchen in Albany, California, Dorworth twisted open a bottle of Rainier Beer, drank it, brushed his teeth, and went to bed. He hasn’t had a drink or a drug since.

“Had I been able to let go of all my anger at 20 rather than 48, my life would have been different, but neither would I have learned the lessons I learned. One cannot redo the past or even worry about it.”

A couple of years later, at age 50, he came down with Pott’s Disease, tuberculosis of the spine that required major surgery. While recovering, he joined a Tibetan Buddhist meditation group in Aspen, Colorado, and when a climbing expedition to Bhutan fell through, he attended a 10-day retreat at the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center in California. With the same intensity and discipline he’d applied to skiing, writing, and climbing, Dorworth dove into Zen. Practicing at the center in Sonoma, he studied under Jakusho Kwong Roshi, a successor in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi.

Buddhism had long been knocking at his door. In high school, he kept a gold-painted ceramic Buddha on his dresser, having no idea what it was; after slaughtering and eating a lamb in Patagonia, he swore off meat at age 30; and in 1980 he had a spiritual encounter in Beijing, during which, he says, statues in a Buddhist temple came to life before his eyes. When Dorworth took his Soto Zen vows two years after the first retreat, it felt like coming home.

But eight years later, a few months after serving as shuso, or head student, at his fifth 30-day ango (training period), Dorworth left the Zen center to practice on his own. Hesitant to describe the details of his departure, he instead points to Soto teacher Reb Anderson’s book Being Upright: “‘Some people, particularly those in the United States, don’t like to be labeled an “ist”: Communist, capitalist, or Buddhist,’” Dorworth quotes. “‘Other people don’t want to get caught up in the institution.’ When you’re a member of an institution, you’re at the call of the leader of that institution. I couldn’t get caught up in the institution. It violated my nature.”

Letting go of the past and practicing Zen created profound change for Dorworth, both immediately and over time. It has allowed him to find love and connect with family in a way that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible.

When he was 56, Dorworth received a letter from a man named Richard McFarland, who explained over six pages why he thought Dorworth was his father. Later, the men spent a week together at Dorworth’s home ski mountain, Sun Valley, Idaho. Even before a DNA confirmation, they were sure of the connection. Overnight, Dorworth was a grandfather.

Soon after, Richard, who now goes by McFarland-Dorworth, helped locate another son, Jeff. “It’s a very unusual family constellation,” said Richard, who was 37 when he met Dorworth and describes him as a mentor figure. Richard said his sons have a more conventional relationship with Dorworth. “They know who their grandfather is, and it helps them make sense of their lives and who they are.”

And then there’s Jeannie Wall, the only woman Dorworth has been with since sobering up: Dorworth both adores Wall and says she’s his karma. A former US Ski Mountaineering Champion and a top outdoor clothing consultant, she climbs and skis 150-plus days a year, leading a life not unlike Dorworth’s own earlier pattern of peripatetic adventure. Despite a 29-year age gap, they’ve been partners more than 15 years and describe each other as soulmates.

At Wall’s home south of Bozeman, a post-and-beam stucco, Dorworth boils water for a cup of Earl Grey and then settles on the couch in half lotus to talk with me for this story. Out the bay window, across the pond, is a view of the Bridger Range. A copy of The Atlantic is open on the coffee table. Dorworth leans in, glance steady as he tells me about climbing with Wall that morning at Spire Climbing Center. Then he shows me his fingers, which are gnarled and bent by a hand deformation called Dupuytren’s contracture. Because of it, he can climb only the moderate grade of 5.8, he says, while Wall still cranks 5.11.

“It’s sad and frustrating to me that we aren’t able to share physical adventure anymore,” Wall said, “but I appreciate the adventures of the mind we still share.” Dorworth pushes her to get outside her mind, she added. “He reminds me to think about things differently, and often—to stop thinking so hard at all.”

Dorworth still travels, both with Wall and to see family and friends, but otherwise he mostly writes, runs, skis, and meditates.

“He lives a simple life, which a lot of us try hard to emulate,” said Yvon Chouinard.

For the past five years, Dorworth has practiced with the Bozeman Zen Group, sitting for an hour at noon five days a week, and attending a weekly Zen meeting.

“I was curious about what drives someone to be in precarious circumstances that require so much concentration and presence of mind but also relaxation,” said Karen DeCotis, who leads the group, speaking about climbing. “That’s just like sitting. You have to make this supreme effort. You have to be attentive, relax, and not know what’s next.”

Dorworth’s dharma name, Sankatsu, embodies that sense of not knowing. Given to him by Kwong Roshi, it comes from a poem by Suzuki Roshi’s son and means “mountain bone.”

“When the clouds dissipate, you see a mountain ridge,” Dorworth explains. “The message of that dharma name is: The clouds between us and reality—when those dissipate, you will see mountain bone.”

One morning after he’s taken a morning trail run, I ask what life questions he still has. He laughs, and then looks at me with playful seriousness.

“Who am I?” he asks. The answer, as Dorworth knows, is in the mountains.

Climbing Mountains in the Zendo

Writing by Dick Dorworth

During my first ango [training period] I was dealing with a recent personal and professional betrayal by an old friend, and I was having a difficult time letting go of my anger, sadness, confusion, and disappointment. I sat on my zafu in a half lotus with a straight back, relaxed posture, hands in dhyana mudra [a meditation gesture], following my breath as well as possible, but inside I was far from peaceful, unattached, or forgiving. I was pissed, and it must have showed.

During one of the breaks Dave Haselwood, who was shuso [head student], came over to me and said with a smile, “It looks like you’re climbing some really hard mountains in the zendo.”

A moment of insight (enlightenment?) lit up my mind, the first awareness of the climbing dharma, so eloquently expressed by Sir Edmund Hillary: “It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” Yes, on the mountain and the zafu cushion and with each breath of daily life, and you can’t take another breath until you exhale the last one, nor can you make another move until the last one is completed.

—2018

The post Ski. Climb. Write. appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

People get mad when I say it’s not right for drugs to be promoted as Buddhism. But that’s OK with me. Sometimes you have to make people mad.

When a recent spate of articles espousing drug use as dharma practice appeared in popular Buddhist magazines, like this one, they required a strong rebuke from someone with the proper credentials to say, “No, it isn’t.” I knew no one else was going to step up. So I did.

I was mean and ornery. I frothed at the mouth. I called people bad names. I said they were charlatans. It was ugly. But I felt like it had to be done.

A lot of people look to Buddhist magazines for guidance and support. Then the Buddhist magazines tell them things like “For some Buddhists, experiences of selflessness induced by hallucinogens are tools for practice” or “Ayahuasca can accelerate a type of spiritual growth that we need on the planet right now.” Or they quote others who say things like “We know that psychedelics are a valid doorway to dharma practice” and “When I took psychedelics, I actually experienced what before was only a philosophical concept.”

These glowing endorsements of drug use have an effect. I know they do, because they had an effect on me.

When I was in my teens, I started wondering hard about the nature of reality. It was urgent to me because I had just found out that a devastating genetic disorder ran in my family. At 16, I learned that I could be rendered fully incapacitated by this illness by the time I reached my thirties. I got my mid-life crisis early.

I wanted answers, and I wanted them quick. I didn’t know how much time I had left. Luckily, there was already a body of leftover literature from the druggy heyday of the sixties waiting for me at discount prices at every used bookstore in town. I devoured the works of Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and John Lilly. Then I started asking around about where I could get my hands on some acid.

I eventually found some. I bought it from an aging hippie who kept the blotter stored on top of a layer of frost in his filthy roach-infested kitchen. I popped it in my mouth and let him drive me home, sitting in the bed of his rusty pick-up truck as it sped along Interstate 76.

The drug didn’t kick in until we reached my place. That’s when I became convinced that all my teeth had disappeared. Pretty soon I was seeing pretty colors everywhere and watching trails form behind my arm when I waved it in front of me. It was pretty far out, man!

But I didn’t take LSD to try to relive the sixties. I took it in the spirit of consciousness exploration and self-discovery. I took it because I thought it would open the doors of perception and free my mind to experience true reality.

Only it didn’t. The best I can say for LSD is that it confirmed for me that there were radically different ways of perceiving. I had suspected that before, but after taking acid, I knew for certain. I could’ve read that in a book, though.

My final acid trip was a waking nightmare of epic proportions. I lost the concept of time. I remember trying to tell myself that I’d be sober in a couple of hours. But the idea of hours meant absolutely nothing to me. I didn’t know if two hours was a short time or if it was eternity. I tried to close my eyes for some kind of relief. But the insides of my eyelids were flashing at me like neon signs. I spent the entire trip in a state of concentrated terror that felt like it would literally never end.

That was more than 30 years ago, and I can still return to the horror I felt that endless night. I don’t even like writing about it now.

I discovered zazen [Zen meditation] not too long after that. My teacher told me that it was the kind of practice that doesn’t show its effects for a very long time. This didn’t make me happy. But I’d seen what happens when you try to jump into this stuff too fast, and I knew that was never going to work. So I was stuck with the slow lane.

There’s a popular cliché that says drugs are like taking a helicopter to the top of a mountain rather than climbing it. You get the same breathtaking view as someone who has climbed the mountain, they say. But they’re wrong. It’s not the same view. Not at all.

Let’s say you met a veteran mountaineer with over a quarter century of climbing experience, a person who has written books on mountain climbing and routinely personally instructs others in the art of climbing. And let’s imagine what would happen if you tried to convince this guy that people who take helicopters to the tops of mountains get everything that mountain climbers get and get it a whole lot easier.

To the mountain climber, the guy in the helicopter is just a thrill seeker who thinks the goal is simply to reach the top of the mountain and that climbing is an inefficient way to accomplish this goal. He just doesn’t get it. At all.

The helicopter guy misses out on the amazing sights on the way up. He doesn’t know the thrill of mastering the mountain through his own efforts. He doesn’t know the hardships and dangers involved in making the climb. And he’ll never know the awesome wonder of descending down the mountain back into familiar territory. All he’s done is given some money to a person who owns a helicopter. When there are no helicopters around, the poor guy is helplessly grounded.

Enjoying the pretty view at the top is just one small part of the experience. It may not even be the best part. To a mountain climber, every view from every point on the mountain is significant and wonderful.

Meditation involves every single moment of life. “Peak experiences” can be fun. But they no more define what life is about than so-called mundane experiences. In fact, life is mostly about mundane experiences. When you start thinking that only your most thrilling experiences are significant, you have already lost the most precious thing in life, the ability to fully immerse yourself in every experience.

The idea that psychedelic drugs can somehow enhance Buddhist practice makes no sense to me at all. How is my real experience of life in the present moment enhanced by messing with the chemistry of my brain?

For having this attitude, I’ve been labeled a “fundamentalist” and a “puritan.” But look. I’ll be honest. If I believed there was any possibility of better understanding the fundamental nature of reality by ingesting some substance that would open wide the doors of perception and allow me a glimpse of the Godhead, I’d ditch Buddhism in a second and go get me some of the “good stuff.”

I’m not so attached to the idea of being a Buddhist that I’d pass over a better way if I thought there was one. If it were a choice between being a good Buddhist or getting a deeper glimpse into the nature of reality through some other method that was incompatible with Buddhism—like using drugs—then I’d definitely look into it.

But I’ve done them both myself, and I can see the difference. It boggles my mind that some people cannot seem to make that distinction. It’s like cookies and soap. If you can’t tell the difference, there’s something wrong with you.

Then there’s all this talk these days about “consciousness hacking.” What does that even mean? I’m not interested in trying to tailor my consciousness to fit some idea I have about how it ought to be. What do I know about how it ought to be? I’m more interested in what it actually is.

That’s because mundane life, just exactly as it is, with no enhancements or hacks at all, is incredible. How is this supposedly “ordinary world” I find myself living in even possible? There isn’t anything even remotely like planet Earth for at least 25 trillion miles. That’s the distance to Alpha Centuri, the nearest star. (And it’s probably not even that close!) Maybe there is nothing even remotely like this astonishing place anywhere else in the cosmos.

The life I am living right here and right now, “mundane” as it often seems, is an inconceivable, improbable, unfathomable, deeply wondrous and mysterious thing. I have no interest at all in trying to make my experience of it any murkier than it already is.

Besides all of that, as a Buddhist teacher, I have a responsibility to the people who look to me to tell them what Buddhism is about. I don’t know who is out there listening to my stuff. But I do know that for a lot of people, sobriety is a very fragile thing. They’re looking for any excuse at all to get back into the drugs. I can’t say anything positive about drug use and still maintain a clear conscience. Maybe some people can—with their caveats about being responsible and having guidance. But I can’t.

And when lots of Buddhists start rambling on about how drugs can be a doorway to deeper practice or accelerate spiritual growth, I feel like there are people out there who need someone with the authority to do so to tell the truth, they need someone to say clearly and unambiguously that that is a lie.

The post It’s the Journey, Not the Trip appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Nearly ten years ago, in the middle of a monthlong meditation retreat, Spring Washam had a sobering experience. Far from entering one of the blissful states of concentration that often mark the jhanas, the progressive stages of meditative absorption outlined in Theravada Buddhism, she entered a state of trauma.

An experienced Buddhist practitioner and teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Washam insists that the Buddhist teachings were not at fault. It was the form of the practice—being silent, being still, being alone—that unraveled unconscious levels of pain to an unbearable degree.

“What I realized there,” she recalled, “was that the form of sitting in silence wasn’t alleviating the symptoms; it was making it worse.”

Washam later explored pairing her Buddhist practice with a different spiritual calling: the ceremonial drinking of ayahuasca, a plant-based hallucinogen brewed by Amazonian indigenous communities. Her story became a precursor to what has, over the last few years, become a widespread surge of interest in the psychological and spiritual effects of psychedelics, namely LSD (“acid”), psilocybin (think “magic mushrooms”), and DMT, the psychoactive chemical in ayahuasca.

Buddhist interest in psychedelics has been around for a long time. To emphasize their spiritual value, many seekers have referred to them since 1979 as “entheogens,” a word derived from the Greek adjective entheos, which translates roughly as “God-inspired” and is the root of the English word “enthusiasm.” Almost a quarter-century ago, Tricycle published a special section titled “Psychedelics: Help or Hindrance?” to address Western Buddhists’ somewhat behind-the-scenes fascination with these substances. But today, backed by widespread interest among accredited researchers, the willingness to explore them has gone more public.

In 2015, Synergetic Press published a new edition of Zig Zag Zen, a collection of essays and conversations on the combination of Buddhism and psychedelics first edited in 2002 by Tricycle contributing editor Allan Badiner. One year later, Columbia University Press released Douglas Osto’s Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality in America.

Mainstream interest in psychedelics got a boost in 2017 when Ayelet Waldman, a novelist and the author of a best-selling collection of essays on motherhood, offered a personal account of her experiences taking microdoses of LSD in A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Microdosing—the consumption of minute amounts of psychedelics to enhance creativity and focus—has gained traction to such a degree, particularly among professionals in Silicon Valley, that New York Magazine published its own “Microdosing Guide and Explainer” this spring.

Following this wave was food journalist Michael Pollan’s May bestseller How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. This “new science” refers to a series of studies conducted over the last decade at major institutes, particularly the medical schools at Johns Hopkins University and New York University, that show startling success rates for treating major psychological maladies with LSD and psilocybin.

For people like Chris Kelley, a New School religious studies professor who is also a Buddhist practitioner and self-identified “consciousness hacker,” the release of Pollan’s book represents a major leap forward for those able to benefit from psychedelics—Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. The book, despite its once-taboo topic, is making its rounds: since its release, it has spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and Pollan has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher and other media outlets.

The respect accorded to Pollan’s name, Kelley told Tricycle, “legitimizes the topic and makes it safe for people who would otherwise be a little bit spooked to buy that book.”

A section of Pollan’s book about the brain’s “default mode network” may draw particular attention from Buddhist practitioners. Citing the work of Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist at the Imperial College in London, Pollan describes the network in the brain that forms a critical locus of neural activity. Because it filters the rest of the brain’s vast sensory and emotional overload into a cohesive lifestory, the default mode network is often referred to as the CEO of the brain. Many also attribute to it the functioning of the ego and the creation of a self-versus-other duality.

After treating subjects separately with psilocybin and LSD, Carhart-Harris found that the default mode network became “quieter,” meaning that its levels of oxygen consumption and blood flow were reduced. The more those levels went down, the more likely the volunteer was to express a loss of sense of self. “The psychedelic experience of ‘non-duality’ suggests that consciousness,” Pollan writes, “survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think.”

This proposal will likely sound familiar to Buddhists. According to Chris Kelley, the default mode network “makes perfect sense . . . and resetting it seems to be a good idea. What you do after that is a different project.”

That’s why Kelley, Washam, and other Buddhists argue that chemically induced states should be coupled with Buddhist methods for training the mind to witness its own selflessness. But some dharma teachers and practitioners, unswayed by this position, remain committed to Buddhism’s fifth precept: to abstain from intoxicants.

Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey, the resident teacher at Vipassana Hawai’i, suggests that Buddhist practitioners become attached to “marvelous states of being” when they use psychedelics “under the guise of spiritual exploration.”

“It is the wanting of things to be other than they are that is the heart of our imprisonment,” Vega-Frey told Tricycle. “Changing the colors, textures, and flavors of the prison doesn’t lead us to freedom.”

A significant portion of early American Buddhist converts were first drawn to Buddhism through eye-opening experiences with entheogens. Roshi Joan Halifax, the founder and abbot of Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was one of them. Many of her peers, she said, graduated from psychedelics because they were dedicated to cultivating a mental stability and insight through meditation alone.

Halifax agreed that there are dangers to using psychedelics. “But,” she said, “there are dangers to gardening. There are dangers to meditation.” Halifax will steer students away from experimenting with entheogens if she knows that the individual is unstable or won’t take the substance in an appropriate setting. “Frankly, I wouldn’t prescribe what I experienced for anybody. I was able to integrate my experience by having a strong Buddhist practice, by having a lot of grit and determination.”

Washam, too, admits that psychedelics are controversial in Buddhist circles. But she has found that entheogens like ayahuasca function as spiritual accelerants and can actually reduce addiction to intoxicants. Since her own traumatic episode in retreat, Washam has started facilitating two-week retreats in Peru (where ayahuasca’s preparation and consumption are legal)at which Buddhist mindfulness techniques are combined with indigenous shamanic ayahuasca ceremonies. She reports that the program, led by Lotus Vine Journeys, an organization that she founded, has attracted many people with backgrounds in all Buddhist traditions, and a recent effort to target her advocacy for plant-based medicine to a larger Buddhist audience through interviews and podcasts has met with increased interest.

“I’m still a Buddhist,” Washam said, describing ayahuasca ceremonies as a type of “ultimate meditation” that can enhance Buddhist practice and provide personal insights into global interconnectedness. “Through the lens of the dharma,” she added, people who try ayahuasca can “accelerate a type of spiritual growth that we need on the planet right now.”

Washam reported seeing a recurring pattern at American dharma centers: students expressing dissatisfaction with their practice. “Many people complain that they’ve plateaued,” Washam said. “They go to retreat after retreat after retreat, get more blessings by more rinpoches, and they’re like, ‘I’m not fundamentally feeling like I’m changing anymore.’” This problem is one of the reasons why Washam thinks more Buddhists may be willing to explore entheogens.

In the American culture at large, psychedelics seem to be transcending the stigma created by the “war on drugs” campaign, and Washam and Kelley both have high hopes for the future.

“I look over at my 11-year-old daughter,” Kelley said, “who’s reading the children’s version of The Omnivore’s Dilemma [a previous Michael Pollan bestseller], and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, my kid is being assigned homework in Michael Pollan’s book.’ It’s such a huge leap forward from where I was when I was growing up and what we were reading. I couldn’t help but think that the next generation is going to be reading How to Change Your Mind.”

Among Buddhists, for whom the ingestion of intoxicants, including psychedelics, carries the risk of violating deep personal commitments, the consensus on entheogens has yet to be written. In the meantime, Roshi Halifax offers a view of moderation.

“The point of Buddhism is not to get high,” she said. “The point of Buddhism is to see clearly into the nature of mind. The nature of mind, in its fundament, is not separate from this very moment as it is. If we get a peek into that through the use of entheogens, then wonderful.”

The post Psychedelics’ Buddhist Revival appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This spring, Robert Wright teaches Beyond Tribalism: How Mindfulness Can Save the World, a six-week Tricycle Online Course about the psychology of tribalism and the ancient Buddhist tools that can make us happier and less reactive. To learn more and sign up, visit learn.tricycle.org.

♦

At the risk of overdramatizing the human condition: Have you ever seen the movie The Matrix? It’s about a guy named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), who discovers that he’s been inhabiting a dream world. The life he thought he was living is actually an elaborate hallucination. He’s having that hallucination while, unbeknownst to him, his actual physical body is inside a gooey, coffin-size pod, one among many pods, rows and rows of pods, each pod containing a human being absorbed in a dream. These people have been put in their pods by robot overlords and given dream lives as pacifiers.

The Matrix is sometimes said to be a “dharma movie” because it allegorically captures the human predicament as Buddhism depicts it: Life as ordinarily lived is a kind of illusion, and you can’t be truly free until you pierce the illusion and look into the heart of things. Until you “see it for yourself,” as one character explains to Neo, you will remain in “bondage.”

That robot overlords are behind the illusion afflicting Neo is in one sense a blessing. They give him something to rebel against—and rebellions are energizing! An oppressive enemy focuses the mind and steels you for the struggle ahead.

That would come in handy with the Buddhist struggle against illusion, because meditation, a big part of that struggle, can be hard to sustain—getting on the cushion every day, even when you don’t feel like it, and then carrying the insights from meditation into everyday life. Too bad that in Buddhism there’s no evil perpetrator of delusion to fight!

In traditional Buddhism, actually, there is: the Satan-like supernatural being named Mara, who unsuccessfully tempted the Buddha during the epic meditation session that led to his great awakening. Mara, though, has no place in the more secular Buddhism that has been spreading through the west in recent years. Kind of disappointing.

But there’s good news on this front. If you would like to think of meditation practice as being a rebellion against an oppressive overlord, there’s a way to do that: just think of yourself as fighting your creator, natural selection.

Related: Tricycle Talks: Why (Science Says) Buddhism is True 

After all, natural selection created the human brain. If the Buddhist premise is true, if there are illusions so deeply embedded in us that it takes concerted effort to dispel them, then maybe they were put there by natural selection. I believe that’s the case: that the very illusions Buddhism warns us against are products of our evolutionary past.

Fully explaining what I mean by that would take a whole book (and, in fact, I just published that book!) But the basic idea is pretty simple.  

The starting point is that natural selection “cares” about only one thing. (I put “cares” in quotes because natural selection is a blind process, not a conscious designer.) And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation. Genetically based traits that do a good job of that will spread through a species. Those can include mental traits, such as feelings and patterns of thought and ways of perceiving things.

The previous paragraph isn’t news—it’s Evolutionary Biology 101—but it has one rarely noted implication: the kinds of thoughts and perceptions and feelings that the brain encourages aren’t necessarily the kind that give us an accurate picture of reality. They may give us an accurate picture of reality. In fact, they often do. But if particular misperceptions helped get the genes of our ancestors into the next generation, then genes that foster those misperceptions can become part of our species. And that seems to have happened.

A trivial example is that people tend to overestimate the speed of approaching objects. From natural selection’s point of view, this misperception is presumably a feature, not a bug: better to get out of the way of a charging animal, or a spear-wielding human, too soon than too late.

A less trivial example is the tendency, so emphasized in Buddhism, to not fully see and reckon with the impermanence of things. Perhaps the clearest example of this is our frequent failure to reckon with the fleetingness of pleasure.

From natural selection’s point of view, that fleetingness, the evaporation of the gratification we feel after eating food, say, or having sex, is a good thing. After all, if the gratification didn’t evaporate, we wouldn’t get busy pursuing more nourishment and more sex; and animals that don’t stay nourished and don’t reproduce prolifically won’t get many genes into the next generation.

Another thing that’s good, from natural selection’s point of view, is for us to have what you might call an unbalanced view of this gratification. We tend to focus intently on the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of some goal like food or sex, but not to focus on the fact that the pleasure will vanish shortly after we reach the goal, and perhaps will give way to a restless longing for more. After all, keeping in mind how fleeting pleasure is could dull our pursuit of it! Natural selection seems to “want” us to not see, or at least to not fully see and fully consider, this impermanence.

Note that natural selection here demonstrates an indifference not only to the clarity of our vision, but to our happiness. In engineering the brain so that gratification would evaporate, it engineered us to be recurringly discontented. No wonder suffering is, as the Buddha noted, such a common part of life as ordinarily lived.

Indeed, dukkha, the ancient term typically translated as “suffering,” is sometimes translated as “unsatisfactoriness.” This translation makes a lot of sense in light of evolution. Natural selection “wants” us to be recurringly unsatisfied, to keep seeking a bit more of the things that in the hunter-gatherer environment of our evolution helped spread genes: more food, more sex, more status. And the less we get the picture, and the less we see how short-lived the ensuing thrills will be, the more ardently we’ll pursue them. We’ll be driven by craving (tanha, in Buddhist terminology) to stay on what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill,” pursuing the ever-receding horizon of lasting gratification.   

All this may make our predicament sound a bit absurd, but you haven’t heard the half of it. In a modern environment, so different from the environment that we evolved in, brains designed to help spread our genes, sometimes at the expense of happiness and clear vision, don’t even succeed in helping us spread our genes! When you’re surrounded by junk food, drugs, and online enticements ranging from video games to pornography, following the drive for sensory gratification isn’t a ticket to prolific reproduction. (And of course, we have contraception, so even when people get their sexual pleasure via real sex, not porn, the sex is, from natural selection’s point of view, in vain.)

So in one sense, we’re not slavishly adhering to natural selection’s agenda. Or at least we’re not adhering to it as slavishly as our ancestors did, because the environment we’re living in sometimes thwarts that agenda. Even so, if you ask what it is that’s deluding us, and in some sense enslaving us, it is still fair to single out natural selection as the culprit. After all, it built the equipment that’s doing the deluding and enslaving. To be addicted to drugs or to porn or to junk food or to video games is to follow the biochemical lures natural selection built into the brain, to blindly accept the guidance of the feelings that are natural selection’s levers of control.

Besides, even if we’re not toeing natural selection’s bottom line (not spending each day doing things that will get our genes spread), we’re still often serving values natural selection embedded in us: acting as if we and our kin (that is, the carriers of our genes) are more important than other people, as if the welfare of people unrelated to us matters little if at all. Indeed, we try to actively undermine the welfare of some people, such as our rivals, and our view of them is distorted accordingly. As the Buddha put it, our senses so warp our judgments that all our “rivals rank as ‘sorry, brainless fools.’”

Related: Hacking My Way to Consistent Meditation 

If you look at the full array of tools natural selection uses to get us to serve its values, you start to see how this could explain some of the most fundamental illusions that Buddhist philosophy emphasizes: illusions about the “self” that we see as being at our core and illusions about the “essences” we tend to see at the core of other people and things.

I won’t here elaborate on these illusions, or explain why it makes sense to see them as products of natural selection. But, as I explain in the aforementioned book, Why Buddhism Is True, there is good reason to believe that this is the case. Evolutionary psychology, the study of how natural selection shaped the human mind, gives strong support to the Buddhist diagnosis of the human predicament.

What evolutionary psychology doesn’t do is offer a way to pierce our illusions, and so to lessen our suffering and the suffering we cause others. Buddhism, though, does. It offers meditative practice that, in the context of Buddhist teaching, helps us start to see through the distortions that natural selection built into our brains. Mindfulness meditation, for example, can make us more aware of the feelings that natural selection used to shape our thought and action and can help us choose whether to accept their guidance. It offers weapons with which to rebel against our “creator.”

Of course, our creator did, in a sense, pave the way for this insurrection. The brains it built make us capable, in principle, of perceiving the illusions it instilled in us and fighting our way toward clarity. So if you want to pepper your struggle against natural selection with the occasional expression of gratitude, feel free. But don’t give up the fight.

[This story was first published in 2017] 

The post Why Buddhism is True (And Why You Can Blame Natural Selection for Your Suffering) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Several years ago a friend of mine, like me an ex-Buddhist monk, invited me to come hear Michael Stone speak at a yoga studio in Victoria, British Columbia. I knew of Michael, and while I disagreed with the way he interpreted some of the ancient texts of the Buddha, as well as Patanjali, an ancient Indian yogi, I appreciated his values of social and ecological justice, intimate engagement with the world, a psychologically sensitive approach to spirituality, and self-transformation.

I went to the talk and was impressed by him personally—he seemed calm, kind, centered. My friend introduced us afterward. One thing led to another, and before long I was working as his research assistant on a book about the Buddha’s teachings on social justice (it never materialized). During our work together we had repeated disagreements: he had some beliefs about the Buddha I thought were unfounded, and I sometimes wrote extensive critiques of his positions, which he accepted graciously, humbly, and warmly. I became even more impressed with him.

A friendship developed, and when he visited Vancouver we would grab coffee or a meal. I attended a hatha yoga daylong retreat with him and was blown away by his precision as a teacher of physical yoga as well as his black humor and ironic wit, something I hadn’t seen in his public teachings before. Over the years we drifted away from each other—he had his partner, Carina Stone, his children, and an extensive teaching and writing schedule, with books and an expanding presence in the worldwide Buddhist community.

Then, just three weeks after my own mother, who had struggled with alcoholism for decades, suddenly succumbed to a drinking binge after a year of self-control and wonderfully sane behavior, I opened my Facebook feed to see that Michael had been admitted to the hospital after collapsing in downtown Victoria under mysterious circumstances. The similarities to my mother’s story were striking: as she had attempted to withdraw from alcohol again, she had suffered a seizure, then cardiac arrest and brain damage. She never woke up, and after 10  days we removed her from life support. Michael, too, had brain damage. He was to be taken off life support that night. I shared the shocking story with my wife, Miriam, and thought of him throughout the night and into the next morning. But the biggest shock was to come.

Related: Buddhist Teacher Michael Stone’s Family Said He Likely Died from Opioid Overdose

On July 20, Carina released a statement written together with senior students Erin Robinsong and Rose Riccio detailing the “complex and heartbreaking” story of what had led to his death. It turns out that Michael had bipolar disorder, and had struggled for years to control his extreme mental states. He had tried a host of medicines and supports both mainstream and alternative. As Carina wrote, “As versed as Michael was with the silence around mental health issues in our culture, he feared the stigma of his diagnosis. He was on the cusp of revealing publicly how shaped he was by his disorder and how he was doing.”

“In the silencing he hid his desire for relief,” she continues. “This spring his mania began to cycle more rapidly.” Michael’s psychiatrist increased his medication, and he expressed privately a wish for a safe, nonaddictive prescribed natural form of opium. On the day of his collapse, on a routine trip into Victoria from the gulf island where he lived, Michael apparently tried to get a safe, controlled drug to self-medicate from a substance abuse and addictions pharmacy but didn’t qualify. After a haircut, exercise, and some errands, he bought an unknown street drug that contained opioids and Western Canada’s deadly scourge, fentanyl. He didn’t come home.

Michael’s death has left a sudden vacuum. Aside from leaving his partner and children, he had thousands of students on multiple continents and was the lynchpin for more than one dharma community. He was an admired, trusted guide for many, many people.

What are we to make of his tragic struggle and death, particularly in the light of his daily practice for many years of dharma disciplines believed to reduce suffering and stabilize the mind?

Michael is certainly not the first dharma practitioner to struggle with mental illness or the self-destructive use of a substance. Many before him have succumbed to alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, mental disintegration, and even suicide. When this happens, the usual takeaway is a call to clear away the stigma surrounding mental illness. That is important and needs to be said. But I want to focus on a different, if related, lesson: the myth of the heroic self.

Michael Stone, from a Buddhist perspective, was a flow of conditions, a dance of factors and facts that he didn’t choose or control. There was no “essential Michael” who could have resisted his impulses or heroically chosen differently. Dogen taught in the Genjokoan that just as the reflection of the moon does not break the drop of water it is reflected in, enlightenment does not erase the personality of the practitioner. Michael, like all of us, contained not only the whole moon of buddhanature but also the whole rain-filled sky. He was a manifestation of the universe—an expression of all that he met, which includes a world of contradictions, a world of beauty as well as suffering.

This was true for my mom as well, and thankfully I had a chance to tell her that before her death, while I held her in my arms as she trembled from alcohol withdrawal. It is true for all of us. This is one reason that our attempts to understand ourselves and others must always make room for complexity and come with a healthy dose of forgiveness. The Buddhist understanding of no-self always leads to compassion, because it reveals the truth that none of us is in control. None of us is a static person responsible for our lives, failures when we do not heroically master them.

Not that Michael didn’t master his life. In a significant way, he did. Here was someone who suffered from bipolar disorder for years and in the midst of that wrote books, loved people, brought children into the world and cared for them, and shared the riches of hatha yoga and the dharma with thousands of people. Michael eased the suffering of untold numbers of people and inspired spiritual activism throughout his communities.

Threaded through the dark tangle of our misery are strings of light. We are no more responsible for the light than for the dark, but surely it is wise to celebrate the beauty of the light that has manifested in and through us. Let’s remember and celebrate that in Michael, and in ourselves, and let’s put to rest the myth of the heroic self, of the one who finally gets it all right. Let’s let ourselves off the hook and then see what small bodhisattva activity we can get up to today in our crazy and imperfect lives where death waits behind an unknown door.  

The post Putting to Rest the Myth of the Heroic Self appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

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Bill Plotkin has led thousands of people into the woods, the mountains, and canyons. Far from casual beer-and-sunscreen camping trips, these adventures are crafted to facilitate “the descent to soul.” They help participants find out what is most unique about themselves and what will benefit their communities when they return to everyday life.

A psychologist and wilderness guide, Plotkin, 66, is the author of three books, most recently Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche. He also founded Colorado’s Animas Valley Institute, an organization that offers multi-day immersions in remote wilderness areas and at retreat centers on the edge of wild places. Programs have names like “Becoming Earth: Discovering Soul as Ecological Niche” and “Winter Desert Quest.”

While Plotkin’s work is broadly spiritual, as opposed to narrowly religious, there are many Buddhist undertones. He believes, for instance, along with many people who meditate daily, that change at the personal level—in an individual’s heart and mind—ripples out to impact the broader world. As we spoke, I kept thinking that time alone in nature, when approached from a certain angle, can be much like time “on the cushion.”

I met Plotkin for this interview at his home near the Animas River on the outskirts of Durango, Colorado. It was an autumn morning, crisp and bright, with snow dusting the nearby San Juan Mountain’s highest peaks. We talked for two hours beside a crackling fireplace, pausing only to add more logs to the blaze.

You lead people on pan-cultural vision fasts. What are these?
It’s a practice found in many cultures around the world, including early Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist traditions, as well as ancient and current native traditions of the Americas. It involves going out into the wild alone for three or four days to fast and seek a revelation of soul-infused life purpose. It’s designed to help people uncover their greatest gift, and I mean “gift” not only in terms of what is most unique about them, but also in terms of what they can offer to their people.

Within any human community there are limited resources for maintaining a community’s vitality. From time to time people need to get away from the village, not just physically, but psychologically and spiritually. They need to move beyond what we call “village consciousness” to find something that doesn’t yet exist within the village. All cultures need this ongoing dialogue between the wild and the civilized.

An individual’s deepest fulfillment comes through service. I emphasize this because the Western world tends to be narcissistic. Our psychotherapy is all about fixing “me,” and we’re obsessed with our own personal development. So part of the vision fast ceremony is the reminder that we’re searching for something that will help us serve our people, and that by serving our people we will be fulfilled.

Do we also end up helping the more-than-human community?
Yes. The vision always comes from soul, and soul is an aspect of nature. If the vision is true and we embody it well, we embody our place in the more-than-human world. Doing so always serves the greater web of life.

I don’t mean soul in any religious or New Age sense. To put it simply, soul is our ecological identity. You might say it’s like a niche. A moose has a specific way of belonging to the earth, as does a cottonwood tree, as does a human.

The goal of the vision fast is something completely different from what we call vocational guidance. We’re not seeking a job or a social role. We’re asking what did earth birth me to be in this life?                

The answer to that question is communicated to us by the soul or by earth in the form of a nature-based metaphor or image. It seems that our human consciousness evolved to enable us to appreciate a deep resonance with the natural world. If we can quiet our consciousness during four days of being alone and fasting, our awareness will be drawn to a process or a creature or an event.

A true vision reveals a metaphor that is so emotionally resonant that it brings us to our knees. We look into the mirror of nature and see the deepest version of our self reflected back.

Can you tell me about your first wilderness fast?
In my late 20s, I was a psychology professor in Albany, New York. I ran a research laboratory that studied nonordinary states of consciousness. I mentored graduate students and was publishing research papers in psychology journals. But I often wondered whether this was a fitting life path for me.

In the winter of 1978, I drove up to the Adirondacks to do a solo ascent of one of the peaks. When I reached the summit, I looked out over a vast panorama of mountains, everything so still and quiet. Way down below in one valley, the bend of a river was shining. The moment I saw that shining water, an intense emotion that seemed to be both grief and hope rose up from my belly. In that moment I realized that everything—my job, my community, my home—had to be left behind. I had to go off wandering until I found that shining thing in some distant valley.

And this experience put you on the path toward a vision fast?
Yes, this was my experience of what the mythologist Joseph Campbell spoke of as the call to spiritual adventure. I resigned from my position in Albany and not long after, found myself in Oregon training as a psychotherapist, offering early versions of what has since come to be called “ecotherapy,” which is basically therapy conducted outdoors and deepened by the human-earth relationship. That year, a friend told me about Steven Foster and Meredith Little, who were bringing the pan-cultural tradition of the vision fast back to the Western world. I felt very drawn to what they were doing.

In August of 1980, with guidance from Foster and Little, I took myself into the high peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. I hiked to an alpine lake just below the treeline and fasted for most of five days. Throughout the fast I communed with one particular spruce, and by the fourth day I began to see it as a monk dressed in a green robe facing the lake. I also got to know a community of pika [small furry mammals related to rabbits] who lived within the talus fields.

It was sometime during that fourth day, as I was focusing on the life of the pikas, that I noticed the monk move his branch-hand. He gestured to his left where I saw a large yellow butterfly. The butterfly flew toward me, brushed the side of my face, and I heard the words “cocoon weaver.”

Honestly, this first felt like a distraction; I was really more interested in the pikas. But moments later, another one of those intense feelings rose up from my belly. I began weeping. I realized I’d just been given an image, or metaphor, that struck at the very core of my psyche. I had no idea what it meant; I just knew it was real.       

After the fast was over I spent the following months thinking about this image of weaving cocoons. What does it mean? How will I go about it? My spiritual and vocational path began there. Ever since, I’ve been supporting others to weave cocoons of transformation for themselves.

Monk trees? Talking butterflies? What’s your response to somebody who thinks what you’re describing is insane?
For nature-based peoples whose traditions are still intact, it’s the most common experience to be in communication with the local habitat; everything is animate, breathing, speaking, and connecting. This sensibility is consistent with our innate human psyche, regardless of our culture.

Look at children. No matter the culture, children experience the world as alive and their imagination as real. In the Western world we think the things we imagine are not real, but in fact nothing in life can be fully experienced without a vibrant, deep imagination. It’s not possible to cook well or make love well without imagination. It’s not possible to really engage a pebble or a mountain without imagination. Children have strong imaginations and live in an animate world.

I’ve guided thousands of people on vision fasts and many other ceremonies, and I’ve noticed that for many Westerners these outings are their first visceral experience of the world as fully alive. It’s as if Western culture has built a wall around every one of us. But this wall will often crumble when a person spends four days alone fasting.

Vision fasts are often said to involve a descent and a death. Why would the ego risk its own obliteration?
We’re willing to risk our significance because we know that no matter how much we love the life we have now, it’s only two-dimensional compared to what’s possible. We might say that the call to spiritual adventure feels mystical to us at first, kind of like falling in love.

When we fall in love, it feels like the life we’ve been living is at-risk. But here’s the amazing thing: Most people don’t have a whole lot of qualms about going for it. The romantic allure can be so strong that we say yes despite the danger to our current life and identity. We know if we really surrender and allow ourselves to fall in love—to lose ourselves to the gravity of love—everything will change, and we’re OK with that. This is very much like the relationship with soul, which, in many traditions, is called the great romance.

To play the devil’s advocate: Why should I find my soul? Can’t I get by without it? In a world of mouths to feed and jobs to work, isn’t it a luxury to spend my days in search of soul?
Yes, you can get by without it, and honestly there’s no good reason for you to try and find it. The person asking these kinds of questions is making it clear, just by asking them, that they’re not yet prepared for the quest. Any guide, elder, or therapist who urges that person forward will be doing them a disservice.

The second part of your question has to do with the class aspect, people who are struggling to keep their family fed and perhaps to care for their elderly parents. Everyone needs a “survival dance.” Isn’t the journey toward soul a kind of privilege? Well, yes, it is. But it’s a privilege available to everyone because, as I’ve said, the pull toward soul is innate—we were made for it. In mainstream Western society, however, some groups of people are so oppressed that they rarely get the chance to reach beyond survival mode.

Actually, Western society is designed to keep all people from going on the psycho-spiritual journey toward soul. I think if there were even a large minority of people experiencing vision fasts, the industrial growth society would collapse overnight.

Why?
Because most of the mainstream social and vocational roles wouldn’t be of interest to people whose creativity is fully activated. Money, security, power—all these enticements would lose their appeal. Fulfillment is all about participating in the world in a beneficial way, and this alone undermines our capitalist consumer economy. Also, healthy adolescents, adults, and elders are people who experience themselves as members of the more-than-human world; they wouldn’t engage in activities and practices that endanger the health of ecosystems.

What role does wandering play in the journey toward soul?
Wandering is essential to discovering our soul identity, our true place. The poet Mary Oliver says you must “stride deeper and deeper into the world, determined to save the only life you can save.” That’s the life of our soul. To save it we must leave the comfort of our familiar adolescent identity and wander into the mysteries of both psyche and nature. 

Your own wandering has led you to various religions. What’s that been like?
I was born into Judaism, my family’s religion. Our temple had lost its roots with not only nature, but with anything remotely mystical. From the beginning, there was no life in Judaism for me.   

But I didn’t give up. I kept saying to myself: the spiritual has got to be somewhere. In college I studied Zen Buddhism and meditated daily at a local zendo. Another discipline at that time was the use of hallucinogens, though I prefer the term “entheogens.” Entheogen means “to generate the experience of the divine within oneself.” In college, I also became a student of Kundalini yoga, with its very intense practices for shifting consciousness. And then, while in graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I spent my summers as a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Tibetan Buddhism at Naropa University.

All these spiritual disciplines profoundly altered my sense of the world, but I also felt something essential was missing. These disciplines open our consciousness to what I’ve since learned to call the “upperworld” dimension of spirituality. It’s the experience of being connected to everything else, of being part of the cosmos.

Both the upperworld and underworld spiritualities are transpersonal—meaning beyond the individual ego—but they take us to very different places. The upperworld spiritualities usher us into the universal, whereas the underworld spiritualities guide us into what is most unique about us. We need both. Either one alone is incomplete.

As I became aware that the journey toward what is most mystically unique about us is every bit as spiritual as the journey toward the universal, I noticed that the former journey is entirely missing from the mainstream Western world. If an initiated adult would not have any interest in participating in the capitalistic, life-destroying system, then for that system to exist the journey to soul has to be suppressed. And that’s exactly what’s happened. Upperworld spiritualities are not nearly as threatening to or transformative of consumer culture.

How do we make the shift toward soul if there are so many forces holding us back?
Guides are crucial—people who recognize when someone is hearing the call and say to them: “Don’t worry, you’re not going crazy.” Unfortunately, our psychiatric and psychological system is designed to keep people from asking the bigger questions. When the soul begins to show up, it’s like a weed coming through the concrete. Quick, we need to get you to a psychotherapist to make you a functioning cog again! Quick, swallow this medication! Medication is like a pesticide. Just as a richer life is beginning to crack through the pavement, it gets sprayed.

What does it mean to be a human these days? How do we understand ourselves?
We’re stuck in a number of small stories right now. One story says we’re here to amass as much wealth and as many toys as possible—to have a good time, to be properly entertained and never bored. This story is part of another, larger story about our ecological place in the world, in which we believe that everything was put here for our use; the world is a warehouse and a dumping ground for our waste. Another small story is the shallow religious one that tells us we’re here to do good deeds so we can get to heaven later. These are conformist stories: you’re here to learn the roles and to obey them.

But there are many bigger stories that give us far more agency. I like the story that we’re animals with the capacity to recognize and praise creation. We see this in the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, for example. I also like the version that my partner Geneen Marie Haugen tells, that humans are meant to be the forward-seeing imagination of the planet. As far as we know, we have a capacity that other beings don’t—to imagine possible futures and make them real.

The point is not to settle on one answer, but to look beyond the confines of the story we’ve been given—to stretch our story to see how beautiful and affirming it can get. That reminds me of one more story: We are as natural as anything else on the planet. We emerged from the earth, will enhance life on the earth, and will return to the earth. This becomes clear to us when the walls come down. We just need to remove the obstructions so this ancient human intuition can come flooding back in.

The human ecologist Paul Shepherd has a line: “We can go back to nature because we never left.”
Yes. We’re still native humans. We’ve got an overlay of Western culture’s beliefs, but it’s very thin. The core of us is much older.

Echoing the Tao te ching [an ancient Chinese text], you’ve written that it’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. What is possible?
What’s possible is belonging to the world in your own unique way. If enough of us find and offer our own gift, the world will change so dramatically that we might end up saying the world has been saved. But really, the world won’t be saved. The world will change. It’s changing as we speak. And we’re participants in and agents of this changing world.

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As I approached Burning Man’s Black Rock City from the air, the clouds cleared in a flash to reveal a large, intricate crescent in the sand. With a population of nearly 70,000, the temporary settlement for the annual art and music festival springs into being from the dust for a week before every vestige of it vanishes in flames. I was struck by how similar this almost-perfect circle of a city was to a Tibetan sand mandala, and how its fiery fate resonated so strongly with the ancient and artful message of impermanence.

Low tolerance for desert heat, strong aversion to unruly crowds, and an abject hatred for dust are just a few reasons why I never planned to go to Burning Man, where thousands gather each year in 110-degree heat smack in the middle of a petrified Nevada lake bed (called the “playa”) for a week of psychedelic-fueled festivities. In fact, I planned never to go. Black Rock evangelists once dragged me to a San Francisco “Decompression,” a post–Burning Man party. Not partial to indulgent costumed affairs and immodest displays, after two hours of this cacophonous chaos I longed to see any evidence of normality. Another problem was what I imagined to be the widespread, indiscriminate use of hallucinogens, empathogens, and alcohol at the festival. I recognize the value of many varieties of psychedelics, provided that they are used mindfully, as a sacrament, with the specific intent of having a spiritual experience—but I was not at all sure that this was what the annual legions of scantily clad Burners had in mind.

Burning Man dates back to 1986, when solstice bonfire gatherings were hosted on Baker Beach in San Francisco. The credit for the original Burning Man bonfire is given to Larry Harvey, Jerry James, and their friends, who burned an 8-foot-tall wooden sculpture said to represent past romantic involvements. Harvey described his mission as “creating a place that would give people permission to act on their dreams.” These two overarching themes—freedom and creativity—are still central to the festival, and you are ostensibly free to do and create as you like as long as you aren’t hurting anyone else in the process. In addition, Harvey articulated ten core principles at the heart of Burning Man: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, participation, immediacy, and leaving no trace.

Since the ’80s, Burning Man has grown from about 20 people to 68,000, turning through the years from a small gathering of friends into a giant costume party with awe-inspiring pyrotechnic displays, not to mention a reputation for debauchery—and the presence of law enforcement. Despite its third core principle of decommodification, it is now a $23-million operation, mainstream enough to attract all kinds of celebrities, especially top Silicon Valley players. The entire executive team at Google has been to Burning Man, and this year Mark Zuckerberg helicoptered in for a day and handed out grilled cheese sandwiches. His nemeses, the Winklevoss twins, were also in attendance, along with everyone from rapper Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and actress Susan Sarandon to Michael Levitt, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics.

This unexpected journey to Burning Man had its roots in London. My interest in the intersection of Buddhism and modern problems and my book Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (2002) had rendered me, for better or worse, the default speaker on the subject of dharma and drugs. I was invited to be a panelist at this year’s Breaking Convention, a biennial conference on psychedelic consciousness, along with many others, including Rick Doblin, the visionary founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), who dreams unshakably of US government–approved psychedelic medicines, and Katherine MacLean, a Buddhist researcher at Johns Hopkins University who is conducting clinical trials with psilocybin and meditation. As we chatted after our respective talks, Rick and Katherine both turned to me suddenly and said, “Hey! You have to join us at Zendo Project at Burning Man and look after people who need support!”

Related: Tricycle Talks: Buddhism and Psychedelics 

The Zendo Project, they explained, began as a portable space for meditation made from 5,000 pounds of recycled corrugated cardboard, designed by the Zen architect Paul Discoe and funded by the Austrian Zen teacher Vanja Palmers. MAPS undertook the job of turning the space into a kind of psychedelic emergency room, in part to demonstrate how the Burner community can care for its own. Psychedelic experiences can seem dangerous, but police or doctors are not always necessary when there are compassionate, attentive, and well-trained community members available to help. As Brandy Doyle, a MAPS staffer, said frankly, “Psychedelics, while not used by everyone—or even by most—are, for many, part of the festival’s celebration of free expression and pushing the limits of possibility.”

It was enticing to step out of character, get over myself, and consider doing something I had dismissed for so long. Imagining myself at Burning Man purposefully, providing a useful service, made the prospect of attending seem less hedonistic and more like a pilgrimage. I had associated Burning Man only with self-indulgent pleasure-seeking, but now I was wondering whether it could be something more. Intrigued with the Zendo Project, which I imagined to be a Buddhist outpost for harm reduction amidst a chaotic scene of unrestrained decadence, I decided to go.

“Psychedelics, while not used by everyone—or even by most—are, for many, part of the festival’s celebration of free expression and pushing the limits of possibility.”

On the ground of Black Rock City, I was met by a welcome team, embraced, and greeted with a hearty “Welcome Home!”—a salutation I found at once charming and presumptuous. The flat terrain was covered with a thick layer of white alkaline powder, and dust storms were frequent. The city was one big construction zone clustered around a 100-foot effigy of The Man, a crude wooden statue rigged with lighting and explosives. Going up all around it was an ocean of tents of different sizes and colors, geodesic domes, yurts, and stories-tall steel sculptures all organized into camps with exotic names. I found my trailer at the edge of the Fractal Planet camp, dropped my bags, and took a bicycle (handily left for me in the trailer) out on the town for a look around the city where I’d be living for the next week.

The best light and temperature at Burning Man is in the late afternoon through early evening, when the heat has subsided and the cold night air has not yet arrived. Amber light floods the city, and human skin takes on a mesmerizing glow. I panicked when I realized I had left my wallet in the trailer, but it was a fast recovery to remember that financial instruments like cash and credit cards were useless here. Unless you wanted to get ice or coffee at the Center Camp, there was nothing for sale. Burning Man operates as a “gift economy.” Food, drinks, and other provisions are available for free, but for the most part you are supposed to bring everything you need, along with gifts to offer to others.

Usually one feels vulnerable or incomplete without any legal tender, but here I felt a novel sense of liberation from my financial persona. This alone was a significant experience—to no longer have any need to compare or rank your economic self in relation to others. The concept that all people are equal takes on a visceral truth here, and alternative ways to express abundance and self-worth become evident: by stepping down from judgment (of yourself and everyone around you), by the ideas you hold, by the laughter you share, by the desire to create or appreciate beauty, and by the love in your heart. I have rarely felt as free as I did riding those dusty streets, exchanging smiles with all who passed me, and admiring the amazing and surreal art projects going up everywhere. The “mutant vehicles,” or whimsical art cars, were spectacularly creative, ranging from a giant flame-throwing octopus to a wide oriental carpet seemingly flying over the sand.

The next morning, I went to the Zendo Project’s all-day training for volunteers, scheduled compassionately for eleven o’clock. Linnae Ponte, the Zendo Project manager, provided a warm and informative introduction to the practice of Harm Reduction. Sheelo Bohm, a holotropic breath teacher, offered specifics on how to care for those having difficult psychedelic experiences, while Sara Giron, another volunteer, told us how to work with the body, deal with trauma, and take care of ourselves along the way.

Annie Oak, who ran a teahouse on the opposite side of the playa (an art car was designed to shuttle back and forth between the two posts), pointed out that like it or not, thousands of people will come to Burning Man and use psychedelics outside of supervised medical contexts, many of them for the first time. It’s not rare for first-time users, especially with high doses and inadequate preparation or guidance, to have uncomfortable experiences. But as Annie said, “a difficult psychedelic experience is not necessarily a bad one.” They can be frightening, but are also among the most valuable experiences someone can have.

Zendo volunteers are expected to embrace a code of ethics while providing service. They must be rested, calm, compassionate, and alert—and of course, sober—as they hold space for guests, treating them with care and dignity. This includes asking their permission before any kind of counseling or touching, and sticking with them until they leave the Zendo. No sexual advances should be made, and any such advances from guests are to be tactfully deflected. One of the primary issues during the training was how, where, and whether to touch those who have placed their trust in us while in a vulnerable state. Volunteers also have to keep their attention on potential changes in the state of their guests, and ask senior volunteers for help if needed. During the break, I recalled a tweet from Thich Nhat Hanh sent right before I left for the event: “The noblest aspiration is to help people suffer less.” The pre-training for Zendo volunteers felt like a class in a bodhisattva finishing school.

I reported for duty at the Zendo for the Saturday night shift. Within a few short few hours, the Zendo Project came to life, replete with Chinese lanterns, Tibetan rugs, air-conditioning, a table full of snacks and beverages, and lots of pillows and blankets. A network of people in places where there were sure to be high amounts of drug use, such as massive dance gatherings, had been informed about the service and asked to make referrals. Yet even as it neared midnight, few clients had yet found their way to us.

Suddenly, a troubled young woman dressed tribally in the style of Mad Max appeared in the door covered in fine white sand and needing hydration. New clients continued to arrive, and suddenly we were very busy. My first client was a 20-year-old male from upstate New York who was having his first experience with LSD. It was not going well. Everything looked dark to him, and strange hallucinations were persistently intruding into his field of vision. He was scared and wanted to hear that this was all temporary. I reassured him that his discomfort would be short-lived, bringing him water and extra pillows. I wanted him to know that I was available to witness what he was going through. I listened to him talk about his life, relationships, dreams, and fears. Then he fell asleep, freeing me to assist a female volunteer across the room. She was working with a 23-year-old male who had probably mixed a variety of substances (including alcohol) in unknown doses and was panicked that he wasn’t going to survive. At the same time, he was making uncomfortable advances toward her. His hand moved closer to my associate; I took hold of his wrist and asked him if I could help. I held his arm gently but firmly at his side while speaking softly into his ear, telling him that he shouldn’t worry. Despite my antipathy for his behavior, I found I was willing to be his protector. The on-duty medic noticed his movements and took his pulse, which was alarmingly high. To be safe, arrangements were made to transfer him to a local hospital. He took my hand as the medics prepared his gurney and asked, “Am I going to die?” I said no, that he’d be back on the playa in a few hours.

Related: A High History of Buddhism 

At Burning Man, three in the morning is still early in the evening, as being asleep is the best way to get through the long, hot mornings and early afternoons. It felt good to have made myself useful, and it was time for some entertainment. A few fellow Burners and I set out on our bikes to explore the musically jubilant and psychedelically illuminated playa. You practically needed sunglasses to dim the brilliant kinetic lights on the Esplanade, a phosphorescent- and LED-boulevard of wonders. Deep whooshes of bursting propane fire would shoot up randomly as part of a large art installation, sending chills down my spine. As we crossed into the deep playa, the open desert extending beyond The Man, it became visually obvious how vast this city of light and sound really was.

Soon, the Temple of Whollyness came into view, standing out as a stunning jewel of geometry against the barren playa. A pyramid built entirely without nails, screws, or other hardware, the Temple is spiritual ground zero at Burning Man. A basalt sculpture representing a human being dominated the center hall, and throngs of people were keeping a hand on it as if it might recharge their lives, giving the scene a Mecca-like vibe. The people of Burning Man endowed it with their memories, prayers, and tributes, attaching pictures and writing notes directly on the walls and beams of the Temple.

Circumambulating inside the pyramid, I reflected on the power of pilgrimage, of seeking the grace to live one’s life in a new way. Now that I had radically removed myself from the habitual patterns of everyday life, serendipity and synchronicity rushed into my experience. I found myself running into old friends whom I had never expected to see at Burning Man, and it was amusing to see the same thing happening to others. As the sun came into its dreamlike glory, we biked over to the nearby Abraxas, a massive art car in the shape of a golden dragon, for some soft dancing, Zen aerobics, sky worship, and one final chance to socialize before bedtime.

Traveling the playa, experiencing scenes from the fantastic to the crudely immature and everything in between, I found more improbable resonance creeping into my awareness between this artsy hi-tech desert ritual and Buddhist ways of being. From the generosity, nonjudgment, and eightfold path-like principles practiced by Burners to the sacred geometry of the city’s layout to everyone’s acceptance that it would all disappear in a matter of days, the playa was permeated with a Buddhist view of life.

And while Burning Man is of an entirely different character, it did have its similarities to a Zen retreat: attendees are hoping for a shift in their perspectives; people are, for the most part, on their best interpersonal behavior; and they take on new names, sleep less, and have amazing insights. Unlike the program at a Zen retreat, many people simply come to dance all week, make love, or blow their minds open with psychedelics. But everyone has permission to follow their dreams and pursue what makes them happy, without judgment. And while some found happiness in pursuing sense pleasures, others took solace in yoga, meditation, and intellectual inquiry. The vast variety of intentions and possibilities don’t seem to separate Burners from one another; rather, it unites them. On the playa, a playful attitude and an open mind are required—and rewarded.

The evening after The Man burned, I made one last visit to the Temple. I arrived just as the ushers started asking people to leave, so I quickly photographed some of the most striking of the messages and mementos that adorned every inch of reachable space. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man in his fifties drop to his knees on the soft playa floor and begin to cry out loudly. His moans of pain were heart-wrenching and relentless. I wondered how to move around him without appearing disinterested or unaffected by his suffering. Then a strange impulse came over me. I walked slowly toward him, knelt down, and put my hand on his back. I was afraid that I was thrusting myself uninvited into his situation, that my gesture might seem arrogant, aggressive, or awkward. As my thoughts continued down that track, a young man kneeled beside me and placed his hand on the other side of the man’s back. Moments later, another man lent a hand to his shoulder. Then a woman came to his other side with her hand outstretched.

For a few minutes that seemed much longer, the four of us held him in his space and witnessed his repeated cries. Suddenly, the man stopped. It occurred to me how hard it must be to stay focused on your suffering when others were physically demonstrating their compassion for you. After another half-minute we all slowly rose to our feet and hugged each other, one by one, including the man, who now appeared to feel somewhat better. The temple bells began to ring, hastening our departure. We had to leave before the Temple burned.

To growing numbers of people, Burning Man has become a new culture, even a surrogate religion. My friend, the New Age author Daniel Pinchbeck, likes to say that Burning Man is “hedonism with spiritual overtones.” But he also pointed out that is still has no truly ethical or liberating imperative: “The wealthy and privileged can now undergo the annual psychedelic apocalypse in the desert, but it doesn’t transform their values or lead them to use their life energy for the benefit of the downtrodden, or to sustain the planetary ecology as a whole.”

Still, for those who understand its deeper purpose, Burning Man remains a major catalyst and cultural accelerator. As one longtime Burner, Parker Johnson, explains: “No, the event and organization does not have a mandate or a plan to transform or liberate mankind, but it does provide a container—a living ritual—for people to touch into a part of themselves and of the collective, which can be wholly transformative.” As I prepared to leave the playa, I reflected on the greeting that begins every social encounter at Burning Man: “Welcome Home.” My spirit did feel at home here. The dust and heat notwithstanding, I was a Burner now, and the other Burners were my sangha.

The next day began the tear-down process, marked by the arrival of the Playa Restoration All-Star team. Within just a few days, 45 city blocks would disappear under their feet, and in the end there would be no trace left of Burning Man in the ancient Lahontan lake bed.  

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