What happens when you administer psilocybin to experienced Zen meditators? To understand how psychedelics reveal the nature of consciousness, psychiatrist Franz Vollenweider and Zen master Vanja Palmers guide experienced meditators—who have never used psychedelics before—through a ground-breaking scientific experiment on the majestic Mount Rigi in Switzerland. Descending the Mountain takes viewers on a journey of mystical revelations, experienced through meditation and psilocybin.

Read a review of the film from Tricycle’s Spring 2022 issue.

This film will be available to stream until 11:59 p.m. ET on Friday, December 30, 2022. 

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Images © Global Inside

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Since its founding in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Naropa University—previously The Naropa Institute—has been a beacon for Buddhist studies in the United States, attracting students and teachers from around the world. Now it’s aiming to become one of the leaders in the growing effort to train psychedelic therapists.

On March 14, Naropa launched its new Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies program, a 200-hour training program that will unfold over the course of ten months in both an online and retreat-based setting. The course is being offered to “advanced professionals working in relevant therapeutic areas, including mental health counseling, psychiatry, chaplaincy and social work,” according to Naropa’s website. It’s a “non-degree Certificate,” which means it will provide foundational training without actually licensing participants to begin working with patients in a clinical setting. 

Blending Buddhism, contemplative practices, Western psychotherapy, and an emphasis on ethics, inclusivity, and “Right Use of Power” (a guide to the ethical use of personal and professional power), the new program from Naropa appears to be well situated for the task at hand. In fact, many within the Naropa community have long been urging the university to become more involved in the burgeoning psychedelic space. “A lot of my colleagues and a lot of students have really been pushing Naropa to consider ways of doing more training in this area,” says Dr. Sara Lewis, co-director of the Naropa Center for Psychedelic Studies (NCPS), which will be spearheading the training program. “A huge number of our students are coming to train at Naropa. . . specifically because they want to do psychedelic-assisted therapy. So it was sort of natural, given Naropa’s history and mission and the things that we tend to be up to. . . that we would move into this training.”

The new training program is a collaboration with the San Jose, California-based  Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, more commonly known as MAPS. In addition to being widely regarded as a leading organization in the modern psychedelic movement, MAPS also specializes in the training of psychedelic therapists. It’s also one of the leading funders of clinical trials involving psychedelics; and as it happens, in Boulder, not far from the Naropa campus, the organization is working on a phase III clinical trial (the final step before FDA approval) with 3,4-Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine (MDMA) for the treatment of PTSD. The collaboration between MAPS and Naropa, says Dr. Jamie Beachy, another co-director at NCPS, “makes for a really beautiful partnership between people that are doing research in the field in a very relevant way and the training program.”

MDMA, thanks in large part to MAPS, could receive FDA approval for certain therapies as soon as next year. For that reason, Naropa’s new training program will focus largely on MDMA-assisted therapy, using the MAPS training model as its foundation. Fully half (100 hours) of the program will be focused on MDMA-assisted therapy, including a segment in which trainees will watch video footage from MDMA-assisted therapy sessions. Other, shorter segments of the program will be focused on psilocybin and ketamine. (Ketamine is an FDA-approved anesthetic; in 2019, the FDA approved a version of ketamine called esketamine for treatment-resistant depression.) But Beachy says there’s also an ethical reason for the program’s emphasis on MDMA-assisted therapy: “MDMA so clearly demonstrates potential for people with severe PTSD, [and] in the program we’re committed to offering training that has. . . potential to relieve human suffering. Really, that’s the guiding ethos for the program, [and] these therapies are demonstrating this incredible potential to relieve suffering.”

This isn’t the first time that MAPS and Naropa have collaborated. The two organizations also teamed up in 2020 to launch a course in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, led by Marcela Ot’alora and Bruce Poulter, two therapists with long histories of working with psychedelics who are leading the MAPS phase III trial currently taking place in Boulder.

The new program arrives during a high point for the modern psychedelic movement. Over the past thirty-some years, a growing body of research has proven that some psychedelics—administered in the appropriate settings—can produce profound and enduring relief from a wide variety of debilitating conditions, including addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and the severe anxiety that can accompany a terminal diagnosis. Clinical trials have advanced rapidly, often with stunning results. One oft-cited 2016 study from researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for example, found that “psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety” for patients with life-threatening cancer.  The Hopkins researchers also note that after six months “these changes were sustained, with about 80 percent of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety.”

Oregon decriminalized psilocybin (the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms) in 2020, and states like Texas and Pennsylvania are already well along the path to making some psychedelic-assisted therapies available to some citizens. Psychedelic advocates don’t need rose-colored glasses to feel optimistic about the future.

And yet, the shadow of the past looms large. Most of the professionals working in this space today are keenly aware of the fact that our society has, to some extent, been down this road before. The first wave of psychedelic enthusiasm washed over our culture beginning in the mid-twentieth century after the synthesis and widespread distribution of “classic psychedelics” like LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. That promising early era of research eventually fell under the shadow of the counterculture movement of the 1960s, which in turn led to full-scale moral panic and the prohibition of psychedelics. The field, promising though it may have looked at the outset, entered into a kind of “Dark Ages.” While enthusiasm right now is generally high, so too is a sense of caution. The modern psychedelic community is like a team of mountaineers trying to reach the peak of a mountain atop a sheet of unstable snow; one misstep—in the form of a highly publicized bad trip, say, or a new-age Timothy Leary—and the whole, fragile edifice could come avalanching down. 

The training of psychedelic guides has become a key step toward ensuring that such a calamity never happens again. It isn’t easy to see successful outcomes as a  psychedelic therapist. Psychedelics are notoriously mercurial—their effects can be mapped out and predicted to some degree, but at the end of the day there’s no telling exactly what’s going to happen over the course of a psychedelic-assisted therapy session, even after rigorous scientific controls have been applied. “I’ve done this work for over 20 years,” says Ot’alora, “and I’ll still be in a session with a participant where I’ll think, ‘Oh my gosh, I have never been in this position before, how do I hold this space? How do I keep this person safe?’ It’s always going to be something different, [because] everybody’s different.” So in some sense, the skillset of the psychedelic therapist must be as dynamic as the drug itself. She must be patient, empathetic, focused, and grounded. She must be willing and able to sit beside someone, often for many hours on end, as the patient vividly relives traumatic moments. She must also check her ego if and when her subject emerges from the psychedelic journey reporting a mystical-type experience. It can be easy to start mistaking one’s role as a therapist for the effects of the drug itself. 

In a very real sense, psychedelic therapists are the gatekeepers to the profoundly transformative experiences that the drugs themselves can occasion; they serve as intermediaries between the scientists in the labs and the people who are seeking care. Proper training for therapists is arguably one of the best defenses against the onset of a second Dark Age for the psychedelic community. 

The new training program from Naropa will apply “an explicitly feminist, anti-oppression, and social justice lens.” One of the goals of this approach, says Beachy, is to train therapists who have “deeply considered power dynamics and the risk involved with. . . the non-ordinary state experience [which] creates a lot of vulnerability in the therapeutic relationship.” Beachy and her colleagues have also designed the program with a reverential nod to the ancient roots of psychedelic healing rituals; they intend to honor “matrilineal traditions,” and they aim to focus “on indigenous rights and reciprocity, to really weave the conversation throughout the program with people who have thought deeply about this and [who] represent those communities.”

Mindfulness and contemplative training will also appear at various points throughout the ten-month program. “Naropa will weave contemplative practice throughout our training sessions in small and large groups, and trainees will complete a compassion meditation training led by Naropa’s Center for Contemplative Education (CACE),” says Dr. Beachy. “Contemplation is built into the core curriculum.” Introspection, according to Ot’alora, should be a key component in any therapist’s training: “You need to do your own work,” she says. “The way to not be afraid of someone’s suffering is to not be afraid of your own.”

As it looks toward the future, Naropa aims to become a force that will harmoniously connect the demands of the modern psychedelic industry with ancient wisdom. “With FDA approval in sight for some of these medicines… what’s happening is there are a lot of entrepreneurial interests [that] are creating trainings and programs and medicalizing substances and plant medicines. There’s a lot of interest in investment and capitalizing on this cultural emergence, or reemergence,” says Beachy. “Naropa, among other institutions, [has] a commitment to ethics, Right Use of Power, and relieving human suffering—and doing that in a way that’s equitable, rather than motivated by profit only. We feel that there’s a need for the kind of guidance we can provide in the world; guidance that’s rooted in mindfulness, and rooted in deep conversations about ethics and equity.”

♦

Read more on Buddhism and psychedelics here.

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While taking a psychedelic journey—such as with psilocybin mushrooms or LSD—many people have the experience of being in the presence of sacredness or touching the essence of spirituality. On a very successful “trip” you may not feel any separation from the journey itself. It’s an aspect of the experience that is rarely depicted in films, which tend to focus on the auditory and visual hallucinations that can be directly reproduced on screen. The movies that attempt to convey this spiritual dimension often end up creating a caricature. But the new documentary Descending the Mountain succeeds where others have fallen short, managing to an amazing extent to produce a vicarious experience of being high on psilocybin.

Shot at beautiful Felsentor Foundation, a Buddhist retreat center on majestic Mount Rigi in Switzerland, the film is a true account of what happened when psychiatric researcher Franz Vollenweider and Zen master Vanja Palmers created this groundbreaking and successful experiment.

Interest in psychedelic mushrooms is booming—having less to do with tripping for entertainment than for the potential aid to one’s health, mental and physical, as well as deep spiritual enrichment. Today, every university of high quality in the United States and Europe has researchers in psychedelic science. Michael Pollan, author, Harvard professor, and guru of the plant world, called himself a “reluctant psychonaut” and wrote a book called How to Change Your Mind.

Now fully out of the psychedelic closet, Pollan points to several good reasons why he thinks psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, and LSD have amazing potential for humanity: multiple clinical studies have already revealed effective lessening of depression, anxiety, PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol use disorder, and tobacco use disorder. Pollan believes that another reason to enlist the help of psychedelics is the shocking degree of tribalism present in current human culture. As we all know, human society is the architect of the environmental crisis, and yet the crisis is largely ignored.

Experienced psychedelic explorers like Franz Vollenweider and Vanja Palmers fully realize the exigencies of exploring the mind with psychedelics. In the 1960s and ’70s many young people had psychedelic experiences in Buddhist zendos, but they eventually faced criticism from the very people who would be most able to blend psychedelics with disciplined ritual.

For much of the film one is struck by its sincerity, as well as by its religious and scientific rigor—and its spontaneous humor, such as when Franz Vollenweider smacks his head on a zendo beam, or the coining of the phrase “extreme placebos.” Much of the film’s charm comes from the very likable Zen master Palmer. The scenery is exemplary, and the spontaneous intercuts of music and visuals unquestionably enrich the experience.

Cosmo Sheldrake, the composer son of the sound healer Jill Purce and the biologist and author Rupert Sheldrake (known for his notion of morphic resonance, which asserts that memory is inherent in nature and present in ecological systems), and the Dutch composer Michel Banabila are credited for the film’s enthralling and hypnotic music, and sound effects play a powerful role—delicate yet transfixing. Beautifully documented is the unity of pigs, goats, birds, and plants. The visuals, along with stunning animation, sounds, and strong use of artificial intelligence, create exceptional effects.

Directed by Maartje Nevejan, Descending the Mountain was an offering of the San Francisco–based International Buddhist Film Festival. All in all, I like feeling that Zig Zag Zen, my anthology of essays about Buddhism and psychedelics, is a kind of spiritual companion to the unique and lovely film Descending the Mountain.

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In April 2012 a dancer named Sharon Stern committed suicide. Stern was deeply committed to the Buddhist-influenced Japanese dance form of Butoh, in which mastery involves surrendering parts of the self. Prior to her suicide Stern was exhibiting mental instability, including worrisome signs of depersonalization, a condition marked by a sense of detachment from one’s body and thoughts. As Stern’s devotion to Butoh grew, so did her inability to identify as an individual with a history, personality, or future. She began writing emails in the third person, and as Rachel Aviv detailed in The New Yorker, in one of Stern’s last emails to her teacher, she asked, “So the question arises what happens AFTER the deconstruction of your body/mind/ego?” 

It’s a question that has both inspired and haunted seekers for millennia. The deconstruction of the ego can lead to the type of transcendent oneness that is a hallmark of a profound spiritual experience, or to the type of destabilizing freefall that is a hallmark of severe mental illness or a bad psychedelic trip. As the case of Sharon Stern and others have shown, mental illness or psychedelics aren’t the only gateway to destabilization. Contemplative practice can lead there, too. Conversely, just as contemplative practice can lead to radical understanding, so too can mental illness or psychedelics. 

A recent revival of scientific research on psychedelics, which was barred from the halls of academia in the late seventies, has allowed researchers to study the brains of people undergoing experiences of ego deconstruction. In How to Change Your Mind, author Michael Pollan explains that while participants are undergoing drug-induced mystical experiences in a lab setting, “imaging tools can observe changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the ‘neural correlates’ of the sense of self and spiritual experience.” A similar mental mapping has occurred in research around both meditation and psychosis. By examining how depersonalization unfolds in the brains of meditators, during psychedelic experiences, and through psychosis, we can better understand why depersonalization can be a vector for both the profound and for profound loss, and perhaps learn how such an experience can be better integrated into one’s life.

It may be impossible to isolate the factors that determine the ultimate outcome—the profound or profound loss—but research, as well as history, points to two key, interdependent players: set and setting. The careful consideration of set and setting in research on psychedelics, and the resulting infrequency of bad trips, suggests that similar considerations could protect against negative experiences with contemplative practices. Indeed, in Buddhist practice, where ego deconstruction is a goal, there exists a framework in which proper intention can be cultivated, proper guidance is present, and contextualization and support are available.

This is Your Brain on Self

At some point in human history it became advantageous to consider one’s self in relation to everything else. In Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius explain how one’s ability to conceive of a self “has been stitched into human DNA by reproductive advantages slowly accumulating across a hundred thousand generations.” One of the primary mechanisms of the self is the ability to simulate experience internally, either by reflecting on past experiences to promote wiring of successful behavior, or by anticipating future events in order to choose the approach most likely to protect one’s self. 

When one is not engaged in a task, researchers have found that the brain’s default mode is self-referential processing, which occurs in an area of the brain known as the default mode network (DMN). The DMN seems to be most active when one is at rest and is correlated with self-referential mind-wandering, or the movie version of your life that you project while folding laundry, in which you’re either the hero or the victim, but the star nonetheless.

Activity in the DMN is also associated with unhappiness. Researchers have found that when people recognize that they were ruminating, they rate themselves as feeling less happy than when they were engaged in an activity. This raises the question: can we spend less time succumbing to self-obsession? The default mode works well, writes Pollan in How to Change Your Mind, “but what if it isn’t the only, or necessarily the best, way to go through life?”

This is Your Brain on Meditation

The self might be an excellent contrivance for keeping the project of craving-attainment humming along, a significant evolutionary advantage, but it can be a cumbersome contrivance in a world of abundance. By trafficking heavily in introspection, the DMN props up the notion of self and its paramount desires, thereby propagating the cycle of suffering. But, as the Buddha realized while meditating under the Bodhi tree, chasing cravings is not the only, or the best, way to go through life. And so began the practice of recognizing and releasing this pattern of grasping that is known as meditation. 

“Prior to contemplative practice, we simply respond to a particular type of event in the habitual, unintentional ways we have in the past,” says Buddhist scholar Dale Wright in Buddhism, What Everyone Needs to Know. “Meditative practice consciously develops alternatives to those patterns of action.” This was true millenia before functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) existed, at least in a phenomenological sense, but advances in neuroimaging have allowed researchers to observe these alternative patterns neurologically as well. The brains of meditators look different than the brains of research participants at rest.

In multiple studies, researchers have found a decrease of activity in key regions of the default mode network of meditators. The fact that meditation leads to decreased activity in the DMN suggests that it can interrupt the brain’s tendency to reify the self. When the time typically spent sorting memories, anticipating how the self might perform in future scenarios, or ruminating on past encounters starring the self gets devoted to meditation, one spends less time passively watching the movie and more time attending to the flow of unfolding sensory stimulation. And the tether that one might have felt to the concept of self could become more tenuous.

This experience can no doubt be intense. Researchers at Brown University have gathered and analyzed first-person reports of unsettling reactions to meditation in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project. Cataloguing such reports, researchers found numerous instances of practitioners who experienced an “adverse effect” regarding their sense of self. The most common one was the change in boundaries between the inner self and the outer world. In a paper summarizing the findings of the project, Jared R. Lindahl, et al., wrote: 

Some practitioners reported boundaries dissolving and general permeability with the environment or with other people; others felt like their self had expanded out from their body and merged with the world; still others used the inverse language, reporting that the world had become merged with their sense of self. A range of different affective responses were associated with this change, from neutral curiosity, to bliss and joy, to fear and terror.

It’s a description, it turns out, that bears a striking resemblance to another kind of transcendent experience.

This is Your Brain on Drugs

Before they were known as psychedelics, hallucinogenic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD were used in research on mental illness and called psychotomimetics for their ability to mimic the state of psychosis. Research participants exhibited behavior under the influence of these drugs that suggested that something profound was occurring in their minds. The problem with the psychotomimetic model, however, was that rather than psychosis, often what was going on in their minds seemed to be profoundly good. Participants frequently counted such experiences amongst the most meaningful ones of their lives. The psychotomimetic model gave way to the psychedelic—or “mind manifesting”—model, with the hope that such experiences could not just mimic psychosis but help otherwise healthy individuals attain deeper levels of consciousness. “What a psychiatrist might diagnose as depersonalization, hallucinations, or mania, might better be thought of as instances of mystical union, visionary experience, or ecstasy,” writes Pollan in How to Change Your Mind. “Could it be that the doctors were mistaking transcendence for insanity?” 

In the late 1960s the idea of drug-induced transcendence became problematic from the perspective of a government trying to preserve the status quo, and psychedelics became a banned substance. But the use of modern brain-imaging tools to map this inward journey has led to a resurgence in enthusiasm for this class of drugs. It has also allowed researchers to correlate the experience of depersonalization, or mystical union, with specific patterns in the brain.

“What a psychiatrist might diagnose as depersonalization, hallucinations, or mania, might better be thought of as instances of mystical union, visionary experience, or ecstasy.”

In attempting to map the neural correlates of “drug-induced ego dissolution,” researchers have administered a wide variety of substances. They’ve found that psilocybin, ayahuasca, and LSD are all linked to decreased functional integrity of the DMN, and that DMN interruption is correlated with ego dissolution and reduced rumination about the past. Furthermore, the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), structures that are part of the DMN and involved in self-referential processing, both show decreased activity under the influence of these drugs. These are the same regions that also display decreased activity during mindfulness meditation. 

Reflecting on his own psychedelic journey, Pollan offers a poignant description of depersonalization:

The sovereign ego, with all its armaments and fears, its backward-looking resentments and forward-looking worries, was simply no more, and there was no one left to mourn its passing. Yet something had succeeded it: this bare disembodied awareness, which gazed upon the scene of the self’s dissolution with benign indifference.

The equanimity, lack of a concrete self, and bare awareness Pollan describes are all emblematic of the profound meditative experience.

Of course, drug-induced ego dissolution, as with meditation-induced self-loss, is not always a transcendently positive experience. A “bad trip,” in which the sudden loss of self leads to intense destabilization and potentially destructive behavior, is what first led researchers to conclude that psychedelics could mimic the experience of psychosis. They weren’t entirely wrong.

This is Your Brain on Psychosis

Psychosis is a broad term that, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, refers to mental health disorders in which there is some form of loss of contact with reality, including hallucinations, delusions, or schizophrenia. 

In examining resting-state fMRI data from schizophrenic patients in comparison with healthy controls, researchers have found altered DMN connectivity in schizophrenics. In another study, researchers comparing brain images from schizophrenic patients with those of healthy controls have found that decreased DMN activity correlates with the severity of symptoms in patients. Both of these studies are consistent with previous findings that show both a hyperconnectivity in the DMN and decreased DMN connectivity in schizophrenic patients. In short, it seems that schizophrenics suffer from aberrant DMN activity; a self-referential process that is either absent or on overdrive, wherein the prism through which the ego is filtered is off kilter.

Of course, perception itself is a controlled hallucination for so-called normal brains as well. As a highly efficient predictive machine, the brain will readily pick and choose what information is allowed to formulate conscious attention. It is not surprising that researchers examining the potential dark side of meditation in the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study faced a conundrum in making a distinction between an “adverse effect” and a “religious experience.” They wrote, “Similar challenges affect research that attempts to compare and differentiate ‘mystical’ or ‘religious’ experiences from ‘psychopathology.’”

The above is not meant to undermine the legitimate suffering and confusion experienced by those with psychosis. There are subsets of the general population that suffer from consistent imbalances in functional connectivity resulting in debilitating mental disorders. But it is entirely possible that somewhere within this jumble of disorders are glimpses into forms of consciousness that meditation and psychedelics also offer, such as depersonalization. Furthermore, the way various cultures approach these glimpses can have a considerable impact on how those undergoing them are treated.

Phil Borges, a documentarian of indigenous and tribal cultures, notes in a TED talk that in some of these societies shamans are often those who have suffered a mental break. When this psychological crisis occurs, the individual is taken under the wing of a mentor who offers guidance, and leads the individual through a ritual of death and rebirth, in which consciousness and compassion are meant to expand, and the individual takes on a life of service as a shaman. 

Borges contrasted this with the way psychosis is approached in Western society by way of a young man named Adam who he encountered while researching this topic. Adam described his mental break first as “shattering” and “mind-opening,” featuring a “beautiful” connection to the universe in which the boundary between self and other dissipated. But the feeling shifted to panic and fear, and eventually he was diagnosed with a mental disorder and prescribed medication. After several years Adam attended a Vipassana meditation retreat that led to a period of stabilization. But when seeking to do another retreat, his history of mental illness was disclosed, and he was not allowed to partake. The stigma of his condition and lack of overarching guidance or support left him stranded.

There’s no question that psychosis requires professional intervention. And the depersonalization that occurs through meditation, drugs, or mental disorder can nudge one into a dangerous state, as occurred in the case of Sharon Stern. Yet it is also possible that one could be nudged in a more spiritual direction to experience depersonalization as a unifying awakening. Whether one experiences the former or the latter might depend on the support systems one has in place.

Set and Setting

Timothy Leary is a complex figure in the history of psychedelics, notorious for pushing the envelope in a way that may have antagonized the establishment into action. But he also contributed greatly to knowledge and understanding in the burgeoning field, including coining the terms “set” and “setting,” which Ido Hartogsohn, professor and author of American Trip, describes as follows:

The set and setting hypothesis basically holds that the effects of psychedelic drugs are dependent first and foremost upon set (personality, preparation, expectation, and intention of the person having the experience) and setting (the physical, social, and cultural environment in which the experience takes place).

Despite the volatility of these substances, experiences of bad trips in a research setting are more infrequent because set and setting are carefully considered. A person taking a psychedelic in a clinical setting is given time to properly frame the experience and set meaningful intentions for the journey; the individual undertakes the experience in a space designed with the proper ambience in mind, and with the help of an experienced guide (what Michael Pollan has called “White Coat Shamanism”); and following the experience the individual undergoes an integration in which the trip is contextualized with the help of the guide or clinician.

The lack of proper set and setting in the Western meditative context can lead to a dissolution of ego that is absent of the support or resources required to make sense of it.

The attention to set and setting here bears a striking resemblance to the support offered to (and by) shamans in indigenous and tribal communities. Similarly, in Buddhist practice one takes refuge in the Three Jewels of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Buddha refers to the historical Buddha, as well as the teachers in one’s life that embody the teachings; the dharma refers to the teachings and the truth of reality; and the sangha refers to the community one practices amongst. 

Unfortunately, this framework is often absent from the meditative experience that has been taken up in the West. Rachel Aviv quoted Robert Sharf, a professor of Buddhist studies, who explained:

The depersonalization to which Buddhists aspire is not supposed to result in dysfunctional alienation. The dissolution of the ego is meant to occur within an institutional and ideological framework that helps one make sense of the experience. Nowadays, people who become depressed or depersonalized through secularized meditation practices don’t have access to the conceptual resources and social structures to help them handle what is happening to them.

The lack of proper set and setting in the Western meditative context can lead to a dissolution of ego that is absent of the support or resources required to make sense of it.

Returning to the case of Sharon Stern, the descent from dancer to self-destruction becomes clearer. Stern dove headfirst into a Buddhist-influenced form of dance that prizes surrendering the self and committing completely to the form. She became overly involved with her teacher, Katsura Kan (a Butoh master who had studied Zen Buddhism for three decades), to the point that her family intervened, leaving Stern feeling alienated and adrift. She remained in contact with Kan, and continued to dance and attend his workshops, though she suffered a psychological crisis, ended up in a psychiatric ward, and was put on medication. Stern’s email to Kan in which she asked, “What happens AFTER the deconstruction of your body/mind/ego?” was sent a week before she killed herself.

It is possible that Stern suffered from mental illness and that this imbalance and subsequent behavior would have surfaced regardless of the path she had taken. It is also possible that her devotion to a form of dance that likely deactivated her DMN in a manner similar to meditation or psychedelics resulted in a depersonalization that pushed her to that liminal stage between psychosis and spirituality. But Stern lacked the context and care that set and setting provide. She lacked a place to take refuge, such as the Three Jewels, to help support and direct this experience.

Granted, as the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project has made clear, even with proper support, depersonalization can be deeply unsettling. The Buddhist teacher Shinzen Young has described such experiences of no self as “Enlightenment’s Evil Twin.” In a 2011 blog post, he wrote, “This is serious but still manageable through intensive, perhaps daily, guidance under a competent teacher. In some cases it takes months or even years to fully metabolize, but in my experience the results are almost always highly positive.” As with the experience of shamans-in-training, or psychedelics, Young emphasizes the continuous guidance and support that allow for the intensity of the experience to be enfolded into the spiritual journey. Just as psychedelics taken outside of a clinical setting are more likely to result in bad trips, in the absence of the Three Jewels, secularized meditation in the West runs the risk of inducing profound experiences without the proper tools to process them. Taking a page from the secularized process of psychedelic research, accounting for set and setting could go a long way toward supporting the depersonalization that can occur when “one” becomes “none.”

The concept of a self has allowed the human species to flourish to an extent that is unrivaled in the history of life on this planet. By ruminating on the past and strategizing for the future, countless generations of selves have been able to orchestrate growth on a scale and magnitude that has dramatic implications for all life. By learning how to properly support and integrate experiences of self-loss, perhaps humans can begin to act on these implications and these countless other lives in a more compassionate way, leading to the sense of unity to which mystical experiences so tantalizingly point. 

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On the morning of July 10, 1970, the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal included headlines relating to Congress rejecting a ban on sending troops to Cambodia, the US government moving to desegregate school districts in Mississippi, Florida, and other Southern states, and that at 61 deaths, the American death toll in Vietnam was the lowest in more than three and a half years.

Tucked away in the paper, under the obituaries, was a short article without a byline: “Prof. Robinson, 44, Critically Burned in Heater’s Blast.” Richard H. Robinson, who had started the country’s first dedicated doctorate degree in Buddhist studies, initially survived the explosion that blinded him and burned most of his body. Doctors didn’t expect him to live through the night; yet he survived another four weeks at the University Hospital before dying from complications related to the accident.

Robinson left behind an estranged wife, two children, a girlfriend, and countless students who had been in awe of the man who commanded numerous languages and expected them to follow suit. His death rocked the department that he had started at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—there was no apparent successor—and his students scattered across the globe, carving out niches for themselves in areas of academic scholarship in which they would become experts. Now, 50 years after his death, we’re taking a long-overdue look at Robinson, who mentored some of today’s top Buddhist thinkers and set the groundwork for Buddhist higher learning in the US.

Richard Hugh Robinson was born on June 21, 1926, in Carstairs, a small town about 40 miles north of Calgary, a two-hour drive along the eastern edge of Banff National Park. Robinson’s father’s family hailed from Ireland, his mother’s family from western Scotland.

As a teenager, Robinson developed an interest in Asia. He started learning Chinese after discovering that the son of a local laundry-man could teach him. But Robinson’s father insisted that he “study something useful,” recalled his widow, Hannah Robinson, and Robinson graduated from the University of Alberta with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1947. His desire to study Chinese and Buddhism was ultimately satisfied, however, when he matriculated several years later at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

It was in a Buddhist studies class at SOAS that Robinson met his future wife in 1951. Mentioned in the academic obituaries only as his wife and mother of his children, Hannah Grenville was working as a registered nurse in London, where she had settled after leaving Germany as one of the estimated 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children who were granted access to leave Germany, Poland, and other European countries in the nine months leading up to the second World War.

“I read a book called Peaks and Lamas by Marco Pallis,” recalled Hannah Robinson, now 90. “There was one chapter on Buddhism and one chapter on Tibet and I got very interested and wanted to go.” She learned that if she wanted to travel to Tibet, she ought to learn Tibetan, and so she enrolled at SOAS.

Her first impression of Robinson was that “he asked a lot of questions and had a lot of opinions.” They married the following year, and while Robinson studied Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, and Sanskrit, he and his wife started a family. Their daughter, Sita, was born in 1955, and a son, Neil, followed in 1957. Robinson’s PhD—on early Madhyamika in India and China—was completed in 1959, and the family moved to his native Canada, where he started teaching at the University of Toronto’s Department of East Asian Studies.

Related: Scholar-Practitioners in American Buddhism

Robinson lived and worked in an era when revealing one’s personal faith was enough to discredit one’s academic work, no matter how profound or revolutionary the scholar’s contribution to the field. Even 50 years later, Robinson’s closest students and mentees could only guess whether or not he had been a practitioner. But Hannah Robinson said that both she and her husband were Buddhists, that they had kept a shrine in their house, meditated, and practiced in the Tibetan and Indian traditions. And according to Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, one of the first Westerners to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun and the founder of India’s Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery, Robinson was “one of the first Western Buddhist scholars courageous enough in the world of academia to declare themselves as practicing Buddhists.”

Tenzin Palmo, who met Robinson just once when he visited India in the 1960s, recounted a story Robinson told her about a conversation he had had with Tibetologist David Snellgrove (who had been Tenzin Palmo’s Tibetan teacher at SOAS.). When Snellgrove said that he was converting to Catholicism because “We can’t possibly become Buddhist, can we?” Robinson responded, “Well, I’m trying.”

Robinson was active in the Toronto Buddhist Church, a Jodo Shinshu temple whose congregants were primarily second-generation Japanese Canadians. He also founded a group called the Ashoka Society, which taught college students.

The family’s time in Toronto, however, was short-lived. In 1960, Robinson was hired by the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor. The family packed up and moved to the lower 48, with Robinson teaching Chinese, Sanskrit, and Asian art—the last being a new area of study that required quite a few museum trips. He quickly advanced to a tenured position.

Through his steadfast advocacy, academic prowess, and chutzpah, Robinson convinced Wisconsin to start a dedicated doctorate program in Buddhist Studies in 1961, something not in demand at all in the years before American convert Buddhists began stomping around South Asia and taking up meditation. Robinson created a program that valued linguistics, history, art—all the things that he had studied in a patchwork manner, now packaged up into one program.

“I think of him as being the pioneer of trans-discipline studies, in the sense that if you have a problem, you can bring in any field you want to solve that problem—there is no limitation,” said Lewis Lancaster, the first graduate of the program, who went on to start a PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, and today is professor emeritus in the school’s Department of East Languages and Cultures. Robinson stocked his department with experts he found beyond the coffers of Western academia. The faculty included Geshe Lhundub Sopa, who had administered His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s geshe exams and eventually became the first Tibetan to receive a tenured position in an American university, and Minoru Kiyota, who was held at a WWII internment camp as a teenager with his Japanese parents, received his PhD in Buddhist Studies in Japan, and became professor emeritus at Madison.

Madison in the 60s was a “magical” place, recalled the meditation teacher and neuroscience research consultant Shinzen Young (then known as Steve), where politically progressive students protested the Vienam War, embraced the Black Power movement, and tried mind-altering drugs.

“For the first time, large numbers of people were interested in things like Buddhism,” Young said. “Robinson was one of the few people academically trained in Indian Studies and Buddhist Studies and so forth. So that was the place to be because that’s where you came if you wanted to do that kind of thing.”

Robinson was demanding—aggressive yet nurturing—and had a large physical presence that allowed him to command any room he was in. He expected his students to have a language of expertise, a working knowledge of Sanskrit, Pali, and Chinese, plus two modern languages.

“He was my role model. He was my ideal, like ‘When I grow up this is what I want to be,’” said Young, who was in his early twenties during the program. “He had this extraordinary range of knowledge combined with a brilliant wit, and so he would, in a single conversation, weave incredible complexity, and you practically had to have a couple of PhDs just to appreciate what he would do with language.”

Charles Prebish, who started out studying dentistry and later became the leading authority on American sanghas, said he breezed through his first semester in the program with As, but at that point he had yet to encounter Robinson in the classroom. Meanwhile, to offset some of the financial burdens of being in graduate school, Prebish applied for and in 1968 was awarded a National Defense Education Act Grant in Hindi.

Not long after, Prebish’s phone rang on a Friday afternoon. When he heard the department chair’s voice on the other end of the line, he wondered what he had done to get in trouble.

But in fact Robinson had heard about Prebish’s grant, and he was calling to talk him out of it. Robinson said that Hindi wasn’t a language that would help the student with his Buddhist studies, and he invited Prebish to be his research assistant instead.

“I could have just jumped up and down. I was so excited. He said, ‘Why don’t you think about it over the weekend and let me know on Monday.’ I said, ‘No, I can tell you right now. I’m happy to do this! I should pay you to take this!’” Prebish remembered.

For the next two years Prebish assisted Robinson, working on the manuscript for The Buddhist Religion, which was published in 1970 and became the standard text for introductory Buddhist courses. For Prebish, and for many of his other students, Robinson took an active role not only in guiding their current studies but also in carving out a clear path for the rest of their academic careers. For Prebish the focus was American Buddhist communities; for Young it was the esoteric teachings of the Shingon school in Japan.

“[Robinson] said the way to have a long and successful career is to find an area in Buddhist studies that most people aren’t terribly interested in, and you will become the world’s authority in that area simply because you will be one of the few people that are doing it,” Prebish said.

Robinson was an “independent spirit” who admired that characteristic in his students, Lancaster said; the professor never wanted to create “clones of himself,” but rather fostered work that was new, exciting, and the student’s own.

“With his flexible mind, he would have been more than happy that so much that I have written is contrary to what he wrote. He’d enjoy it tremendously,” said Jeffrey Hopkins, Robinson’s student and now professor emeritus of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia.

Robinson also took an active role in advocating for the hiring of his students in the religious and Asian studies departments of other universities—and not always for altruistic reasons.

“He certainly helped to promote my hiring at Berkeley,” said Lancaster, who went on to start a doctorate program there. “It was something he really wanted for the program, because if somebody got hired by Berkeley, it would, in a sense, validate what he was trying to do in the academic world.”

On the home front, the Robinsons were raising their children, with Hannah occasionally sitting in on her husband’s classes and the couple hosting a Buddhist group in their home. Their circle of friends included graduate students and refugees from eastern Europe who had settled in Wisconsin.

As the 60s progressed, Robinson became deeply engaged in the counterculture: he was passionate about opposing the Vietnam War and about another cultural staple—psychedelics.

“Through this period he lost his way. Maybe he was thinking he had found his way, but the vision that I admired him so much for evaporated,” said a former colleague who asked not to be identified. “He did not buy a little red sports car, but he did everything else.”

It was during this time that the Dalai Lama sent several Tibetan lamas who had fled the Chinese takeover to the United States to start learning English, and Robinson threw himself into learning more about their language and culture. Robinson had also separated from his wife and had a new girlfriend, a graduate student 20 years his junior who was no secret in the department.

One day in the late ’60s, Hopkins recalled, Robinson showed up at his door and said, “Let’s get a house.” They found a farmhouse in Cambridge and created North America’s first (and unofficial) Tibet House.

“Of course, we just named it that ourselves,” Hopkins recalled. They lived there together with other students and visiting Tibetan professors and held events. Although he was not an overnight resident, Geshe Lhundub Sopa spent a lot of time at the farmhouse as well. Robinson lived there until early in 1970, when his girlfriend and he began living by themselves in another farmhouse. His old room was filled by Khensur Ngawang Lekden, a Tibetan scholar who was a visiting professor at Madison.

Although he was a scholar, Robinson was also interested in the more esoteric practices of Buddhism and Eastern thought, including physiognomy, the assessment of character from a person’s outward appearance, a practice used as far back as the ancient Indian, Chinese, and Greek civilizations. (Prebish, Robinson’s former research assistant, recalled that his mentor had wanted to meet his newborn son to examine the child’s head.) To some, these Eastern practices later seemed to have forecast his early and untimely death in 1970. Robinson had his horoscope read every year by an Indian, who saw fire and mortar in the professor’s future, Hopkins said. And just a few months before Robinson’s death, Khensur Ngawang Lekden, the Tibetan professor who was living in Robinson’s former room at the Tibet House, prophesied that Robinson was going to have trouble.

Related: The Buddhist and the Buddhologist

On July 9, just hours after he had debated Prebish in his office and declared him ready to take his comprehensive exams, Robinson went to the basement of his home to reignite a pilot light. The gas explosion was powerful enough to shift the foundation, though Robinson managed to get himself upstairs, escaping the flames in time to be pulled to safety.

After nearly a month in the burn unit, Robinson died on August 6, 1970. His death was international news in the Buddhist world. Lewis Lancaster, his first graduate student, was on research leave from Berkeley and at Kyoto University when the news came about Robinson’s death.

“The Japanese scholarly community at that time in Kyoto admired him,” Lancaster said. “So they were very disheartened by his early death. They felt it endangered the transmission of academic research in Buddhist studies.”

When Robinson died, Shinzen Young was also in Japan, living at a monastery and waiting to be formally ordained. He had been planning to live as a monk to carry out his dissertation research on Japanese Shingon esoteric practices and then return to academia, but the news of his role model’s death shook him to the core and changed his trajectory.

“It’s like, ‘This is what I want to be when I finally grow up,’ but what good is it?” Young recalled thinking. “What good is all that knowledge and all that intelligence when your body is literally a shard of agony day after day after day? This completely changed my whole value system, my whole orientation. Meditation, liberation, and freedom became tangible concerns for me,” Young said.

“The Japanese scholarly community was very disheartened by Robinson’s early death. They felt it endangered the transmission of academic research in Buddhist studies.”

Back in Wisconsin, there was a good deal of tension in the department that resulted from the gaping hole left by Robinson. In the years to come, however, a new face of the department would emerge: that of Geshe Sopa, who had been hired by Robinson to co-teach Tibetan with him. Even though he lacked a Western academic degree, Sopa rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a full professor.

“Part of the reason why Robinson hired Geshe Sopa was that he wanted not just this kind of almost colonial perspective of a scholar looking in from the outside. He wanted the philosophers from within the tradition to be represented,” said John Dunne, a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and holder of the Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities at the Center for Healthy Minds at Madison.

In many ways, Sopa continued the work that Robinson had started: training the first generation of Buddhist scholars emerging from Buddhist Studies programs in the US.

Sopa also organized the Dalai Lama’s first trip to Madison in 1979 and convinced the Tibetan leader to come back and give a Kalachakra empowerment, a ceremony that authorizes participants to practice tantra— the first ever held in the West. Through his work with the Deer Park Buddhist Center near Madison, which he established in 1975, Sopa continued to engage with the Tibetan community spiritually and academically, including the sponsoring of 100 Tibetan refugees to settle in Madison in 1992. He retired in 1997 as professor emeritus after more than 30 years of teaching and in 2014 died at Deer Park at the age of 92.

“‘We who are of yesterday are now in all your cities and camps,’” said Shinzen Young, thinking back on his late professor’s legacy and quoting Tertullian, an early Christian who lived during the time when Christianity was transitioning from cult to legitimate religion. Tertullian could see that Christianity would become a dominant force in society and the religion of the establishment, not the counterculture.

Young feels the same way about the Buddhist students of the 1960s.

“I’m old enough to remember an America [of the 1950s] that wasn’t going to be any different,” Young said. “If you grew up during the ’50s, the notion that something from the East would blow in and pervade North American civilization was unthinkable. It wasn’t on anyone’s radar that they would be teaching Buddhist meditation to US Army personnel and basketball players and [mindfulness practice] would be in every hospital and therapy program and board room,” Young said.

In many ways, this history was shaped by Richard Robinson. Madison no longer has the program that Robinson started— following several departmental reorganizations over the decades, the university now offers a PhD in Asian Languages and Literature with an optional concentration in Buddhist Studies—and yet, as John Dunne remarked, “there’s certainly a kind of continuity in the program that has produced a number of leading Buddhist Studies people.”

“It’s just amazing to think he died at 44, and what might have happened if he had been able to live on to a nice, ripe old age,” said Prebish, Robinson’s former graduate assistant. “I’ve got to believe that the scholarship he would have turned out would have been just immense.”

The post The Most Important Scholar of Buddhism You’ve Never Heard Of 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.

Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (2nd edition)

Edited by Allan Badiner
Synergetic Press; May 2015
304 pp.; $38.95 (Cloth)

It was something I noticed back in the early 1980s, when I was working as a newspaper reporter and interviewing longtime members of San Francisco Zen Center. I’d ask them how they got interested in Buddhism, and I’d keep hearing about “the long, strange trip.”

“Well,” the answer would go, “I guess you could say it started with that first acid trip back in 1965.”

This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the first San Francisco “Acid Test,” when a promising young writer named Ken Kesey gathered the infamous band of Merry Pranksters and spiked the Kool-Aid. It was 1965, the same year that another early psychedelic explorer, ousted Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert, headed out to San Francisco, the first stop on his pilgrimage to India, where he’d be reincarnated as Baba Ram Dass.

Today, psychedelics (and Kesey’s house band, the Grateful Dead) are very much back in the news, and so is the debate about how and whether getting high on psychoactive substances should be part of the Buddhist path.

First, the news: The final stage of government-approved clinical trials into the medical use of MDMA, also known as “ecstasy,” and psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” is expected to begin next year. Promising early results show that MDMA-fueled psychotherapy sessions can help people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, including thousands of troubled American soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other research indicates that supervised sessions with psilocybin can greatly help cancer patients deal with the “psycho-spiritual distress” that often accompanies a life-threatening diagnosis. As early as 2020, researchers now predict, MDMA and psilocybin could be reclassified by the US Food and Drug Administration and routinely used under the watchful eye of trained therapists.

Meanwhile, legal restrictions are also loosening for some religious groups that use psychedelic plants in their rites and ceremonies. Following earlier court rulings allowing Native Americans to legally use peyote in their spiritual practices, a 2006 Supreme Court decision granted similar protections to North American congregations affiliated with two Brazilian churches that use ayahuasca, a psychedelic tea, in their ceremonial life.

Ayahuasca devotees outside those Brazilian sects are also starting to come out of the shamanic closet. All-night sessions are not hard to find among Brooklyn hipsters and Hollywood trendsetters. Mainstream media coverage of the new wave of psychedelic research and rituals has been overwhelmingly positive and restrained—unlike a wave of sensationalist coverage in the late 1960s that conspired to allow Congress to pass the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which helped shut down 20 years of early research into the beneficial use of psychedelics.

This shifting psychedelic landscape makes the new edition of Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, edited by Allan Badiner and published by Synergetic Press, all the more timely. Like the first edition, published in 2002 by Chronicle Books, this hardcover volume is vividly illustrated with visionary art, including a new foldout centerpiece featuring the work of Android Jones.

Most of the essays are reprints from the first edition, but two of the new offerings point to some of the changes over the past 20 years. The first is an interview with Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. He has raised close to $20 million to support drug researchers and persuade federal regulators that MDMA can be safely and effectively used to ease the psychic pain of war veterans and sexual abuse victims. Doblin, who had his first LSD trip as a college freshman in 1972, talks in the interview about the Zendo Project, which offers psychedelic harm reduction services at the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada dessert.

The psychotherapist Ralph Metzner pens another one of this edition’s original essays: “A New Look at the Psychedelic Tibetan Book of the Dead.” He is the author (along with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert) of the influential 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience, a manual on how to take an LSD trip. Metzner, Leary, and Alpert based their tripping manual on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a self-styled English translation of texts popularized by the American Theosophist W.Y. Evans-Wentz, first published in 1927. Whether or not The Tibetan Book of the Dead reflects ideas that are authentically Tibetan or Buddhist, Metzner and his coauthors helped establish the idea that a psychedelic drug trip was another route to the mystical insights one could achieve—with much more work—through the discipline of Buddhist meditation.

“Psychedelic travelers could be guided, or guide themselves, to release their ego-attachments and illusory self-images, the way a Tibetan Buddhist lama would guide a person who was actually dying to relinquish their attachments,” writes Metzner.

Fifty years later, the psychotherapist is more convinced than ever that “the two most beneficent potential areas of application of psychedelic technologies are in the treatment of addictions and in the psycho-spiritual preparation for the final transition.”

Buddhists teachers who were interviewed or wrote their own essays in Zig Zag Zen disagree as to what extent psychoactive drugs can help or hinder those on the Buddhist path. Some say they offer a glimpse of another way of being and can open a door. Others, such as meditation teacher Michele McDonald, just say “no” to psychedelics. “Drugs promote attachment to experience,” she writes. “What you actually get from drug experience is the desire to take the drugs again.”

Psychedelic drugs can produce feelings similar to those reported by religious mystics—a sense of oneness with the universe, transcendence of time and space, an intuitive knowing, a deeply felt positive mood, and a sense of ineffability and paradox.

Huston Smith, the noted religion scholar who writes the preface, once told me that it doesn’t matter much if a religious experience is “real” or drug induced. It doesn’t matter if your mind is altered by 250 micrograms of LSD or years of long meditation retreats. What matters is what you do with the experience. Do altered states lead to altered traits?

This all sounds a lot like the debate that the editors at Tricycle inspired nearly 20 years ago when the magazine devoted an issue to the subject of Buddhism and psychedelics.

Their conclusion then seems like good advice today: “Just Say Maybe.”

The post The Long, Strange Trip appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Kokyo Henkel: My name is Kokyo. I’ve been a Zen Buddhist priest for 18 years in the tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and San Francisco Zen Center, mostly living in monasteries or similar environments over the course of that time. Around the same time as I was beginning Zen practice, some psychedelic experiences were really formative for me. I think it was a significant condition for giving my whole life over to Buddhist practice.

James (Jim) Fadiman: I’m Jim and in 1961, I started working with psychedelics with Richard Alpert, now Ram Dass, and then with the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park while I was earning a PhD in Psychology from Stanford. Until I first experienced the effects of psychedelics, I had no interest in Buddhist practice. However, explorers in the psychedelic realm, doing formal or informal research, became aware early on that there were experiences that apparently overlapped the core mystical experiences of many spiritual traditions. That is more true today. I recognized that my central concern is helping establish the proper place of altered states of consciousness in contemporary society.

Kokyo: Let me set the stage for the Buddhist perspective with one of the major issues that people have in Buddhism around this topic, which is what we call the ethical precepts that go all the way back to early Buddhism. They include not killing living beings, not taking what’s not given, not misusing sexuality, and not lying or speaking falsely. The fifth one, as originally worded in the Pali and the Sanskrit, is “not to consume alcoholic beverages that lead to heedlessness or carelessness.” I think it is interesting that the first four precepts are not explained. It’s obvious why these actions are harmful to others, so in the original language they are very short. But the fifth precept is longer since it includes the reason for it. We often interpret the fifth precept as not intoxicating body and mind, or not taking intoxicants, which at the time meant alcohol. The main issue here is: Does psychedelic use lead to harming others? Does it lead to carelessness and heedlessness? Do we start disrespecting others through having altered our mind in this way? So if we do use psychedelics, this would be the bottom line: Is it harmful to others or harmful to ourselves?

I think that’s a good context to look at the use of different substances. Do we think that it would be beneficial to our self and—from a bodhisattva perspective, being beneficial to our self is not the foremost thing—is it beneficial to our deeper unfolding of realization so that we can help others more fully?

Jim: The serious question seems to be: Does having psychedelic experiences improve or degrade my practice? This isn’t yet looking at the inner framework, or the life situation of the person. This question, “What does it do to my practice?” is still internal. I’d like to share some stories that have helped my understanding.

Near the end of his life Alan Watts was asked by a young man, “Is it worthwhile to take LSD?” After pondering a bit, Alan replied, “That’s like asking me if life is worthwhile.”

Next is a quote from the website DMT-Nexus: “I can says this after a lifetime of meditating and only two trips on psychedelics, that they are not just a trip. The lasting effects are huge. The changes in me have been profound and seem substantially permanent. I agree; it is best to work on yourself using all available methods.” And finally this from a professor, speaking of a high dose experience: “After the collective purification ended, I was spun into the radiance of what, using Buddhist vocabulary, I perceived to be the domain of diamond luminosity. I’ve known light many times before, but this was an exceptionally pure light. Its clarity was so overwhelming, its energy so pure, that returning to it quickly became my deepest agenda for future sessions. After my first initiation into this reality, it took five sessions of intense purification and surrender before the doors were opened again and I was returned to the diamond light, now experience at a slightly deeper and even purer form.”

For me, these reports bring up very practical questions: Are psychedelics beneficial in the sense of moving you towards living a life more life a bodhisattva? Are they good for you right now?

Kokyo: One place we can go is to talk about what qualities of psychedelic experience could be in accord with Buddhism—because there are lots of things that happen in a psychedelic experience that have nothing to do with Buddhism.

A basic Buddhist teaching is that the root of all our problems is the belief that things are separate, outside us, and things substantially exist in and of themselves. So the profound insight that those are actually illusions can release one from all kinds of suffering, if it’s deeply realized and integrated into one’s life. But going beyond this, in Mahayana Buddhism the purpose of that very insight is not even for our own liberation from suffering; it’s so that we can really help others, and really meet others with complete openness and a sense of non-separation. That’s the bodhisattva path. So, there can be realization of nonduality, of non-separation, that people aren’t who we think they are. And to realize that people aren’t who we think they are is very beneficial to those people who we meet.

There may be—lastly, and maybe most importantly—persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior after a psychedelic experience is over: Changes in attitude towards oneself, toward others, towards life and towards spiritual experiences. Deep meditation practice and psychedelics can both bring up unconscious problems or issues, karmic patterns, and enable us to really look at them in a caring and therapeutic way. More sensitivity, tolerance, openness, and love of others, with lasting change, can occur through a psychedelic experience. Vocational commitment and appreciation of all life can be strengthened.

Audience: Either with psychedelics or practice, how do we get past the problem that, once we’ve seen something, we want to get back there, and we’re grasping, and we’re looking for it, and it’s hard to get there because it’s a state of innocence?

Kokyo: That’s a great question. We have a wonderful experience that we feel is really beneficial, and then we wonder how do we get back there? It’s a state of innocence, so any movement or wish to get back to that state of innocence is already not innocent. This is a major issue in Buddhist practice, maybe not talked about so much in psychedelic practice but I think should be. That’s what we call grasping or attachment, saying, “I gotta get that again.” That is the definition of discontent in Buddhism.

Jim: It’s not talked about in psychedelics enough. It is that wonderful paradox of, “I just did this and then this incredible wonderful thing happened. And, I want it again.” The question all too often is: “What drug should I take, and do you have any?” instead of the questions we are asking.

In an early chapter of my book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, I say that after you have a major experience, if within the first six weeks after it you feel you have the need to get back there, what you are doing is avoiding working with something in yourself that has come up. [sigh from the audience] The advice is wait another six weeks.

We know from the meditative traditions, if you get out of the way, the universe brightens. Here is what interests me: if “I,” Jim Fadiman, want that experience, and the “I” that wants it is going to be diminished, then if I get it, “I” can’t get it. The me that needs to get out of the way can never get it. But maybe, of course, if I had the right psychedelic [laughter] or the new ones maybe [laughter], it would be different. You see the problem.

Kokyo: A quote comes to mind from Dogen Zenji, “Buddha-Dharma cannot be realized by a person . . . Only a Buddha can realize Buddha-Dharma.”

Jim: Let me ask a question: Whatever that highest and most amazing experience is, let’s call it unity, where there is no division between you and the universe, and that you understand that there’s no distinctions of time and space, and that while your personality and body are mortal, you’re not. How many people have actually experienced that? [looking around, many raised hands] So, here we are, everybody came back. Many of the people I have guided have this question when they come back. “Why did I come back into this body, with all of its neurotic problems? When I was out there, it was clear that I was not necessarily attached to it.”

Kokyo: In ultimate truth there is no division, just complete unity; there’s no self and no other. Emptiness. The conventional truth is where there is the appearance of self and other; those two truths are not separate: the conventional and the ultimate truth. Of course, most of us live in the conventional truth, the conventional world, almost all the time. We need to realize the ultimate truth, but as Nagarjuna, one of the great Indian ancestors, says, “in order to realize the ultimate truth you must be completely grounded in the conventional truth,” which means the precepts of ethical conduct, and so on. If we neglect how we are taking care of ourselves and other people, then it is actually impossible to realize the ultimate truth, at least in the Buddhist view. Now, in the psychedelic world, some of us might say, “Let’s bypass the conventional and go straight to the ultimate.” This can be a problem.

Audience: I wanted to ask about the practice. In your experience and the experience of people in the room, how can psychedelics be used as a practice, as an ongoing process of spiritual maturation?

Kokyo: Maybe part of that question is implying that there are two different types of psychedelic use, especially in relation to Buddhism. I think we could look at a psychedelic experience as an initial opening, like you have an insight into non-separation for example, and then you pick up a meditation practice or some other method to sustain and develop that insight. Another use would be to use psychedelics as an ongoing path of practice. One problem with an initial experience is that you “see” a certain realm of reality—you “see” it; just that very language implies there may be a subtle duality there, that you’re seeing “something.” It might be very, very subtle, but the emphasis is on seeing a realm. In my tradition of Soto Zen, Dogen Zenji criticized the term kensho, which means seeing the nature of reality, seeing nature, seeing buddhanature. This is usually said to be the goal in Rinzai Zen, seeing your nature. Dogen, with his emphasis on nonduality, was critical of that term because it’s putting something out there. Dogen is always talking about manifestation or becoming. So you might say that it is not a matter of seeing your true nature. It’s about becoming that, manifesting your true nature, which you might not even realize is happening as some objective thing. It’s easy to make the enlightenment into something and try to get it.

Jim: You mean it’s not a thing? It’s not a destination? It’s not a realization that colors the rest of your life? It’s not a sense of awareness that pervades more and more of your life? We’re asking what’s the purpose of psychedelic experience? When is it appropriate? When is the correct time in one’s life to do such and such? Those questions must occur in Buddhism. There is something about timing, what the Sufis call, “a sense of occasion” and what therapists call, “a teachable moment.” Kokyo, you have devoted your life not to just work on yourself, but to working on yourself in the service of others. Most people who talk psychedelics don’t say that. They do say that they are working on themselves, and want to make the world a better place. But there is still a lot of self that is primary, and that may be a difference.

Kokyo: Myron Stolaroff in his essay, “Are Psychedelics Useful in Buddhism?” said that another thing they both do is dissolve mindsets. Any kind of fixed mind set, cultural and societal assumptions—a lot of things we just take for granted—one can see through, with both of these technologies. And that’s part of the reason, some people have theorized, why most of these substances are illegal, because they threaten the very fabric of society as we know it.

Jim: Kathy Speeth, a gifted teacher, had a wonderful saying: “Enlightenment is always a crime.” What she was saying is that every culture wants to remain stable and wants its institutions to be supported and believed in. Enlightenment, from any tradition, cuts through that. What she was pointing out was that it is culturally correct to define enlightenment as a crime.

Kokyo: To add to the discussion about ritual settings for psychedelics, and to bring Buddhism and psychedelics together, you might be surprised that there’s an experiment scheduled to begin this year by a friend of mine. Vanja Palmers is the senior dharma heir of Kobun Chino Otagawa Roshi, who taught at Santa Cruz Zen Center many years ago. Vanja is a longtime, very serious Zen practitioner and priest. He lives in Switzerland most of the time, and he got permission from the Swiss government to do an experiment during a sesshin. Sesshin means to collect the mind, to gather the mind. It’s the Zen name for an intensive meditation retreat. In a five-day sesshin, you’re meditating basically all day, completely in silence; from 4 or 5 a.m. until 9 p.m. there is sitting meditation, interspersed with walking meditation. The experiment will be that on the fourth day of sesshin, twenty people will take a medium does of psilocybin, and twenty won’t, in a double-blind experiment, and basically see what happens—particularly around mystical experience. Vanja is hand selecting the people, inviting particular longtime experienced meditators, who ideally also have some experience with psychedelics. He’s doing interviews with them beforehand and following up afterwards for at least six months, and maybe longer. In the “Good Friday Experiment” in the Christian tradition that I mentioned earlier, they followed up with the subjects six months later, to see how many of the changes had lasted. And they admitted that six months is not very long. So in this case they may check after six months, maybe longer, to interview people regarding the lasting effects of the experience.

This may be the furthest that this kind of experiment has gone, integrating serious intensive Buddhist meditation with psychedelics. Part of this particular experiment is a medium dose. People often have mystical nondual experiences with a high dose but without meditation. So part of the proposal of the experiment is to see if after four days of all-day meditation, can a similar thing happen with a smaller dose?

Audience: I have a question about Buddhism. Could you compare something like the jhana states with the psychedelic experience?

Kokyo: The jhanas are different levels of concentration, or states of absorption, particularly emphasized in Theravada Buddhism. They are deepening levels of withdrawal from the external world, or more simply, becoming more and more absorbed in nondual concentration. These jhanic states were taught by the Buddha, not as enlightenment itself, not as insight, but actually as concentration practices to develop a stable body and mind in order for insight to arrive. The jhanas are not the main point. They are part of the path, and many traditions don’t practice them methodically. The practice of withdrawal from the external sensory world is one way to develop these jhanas.

That’s often the case with psychedelics as well. Part of the setting, with psychedelics, is whether the eyes are opened or closed. With eyes closed, there can be an internal unity experience, a whole internal world going on, where one is not really relating to objects. With eyes open, one is still visually relating to the apparently external world. Then there’s the unity of self and sensory objects, an experience that happens in a so-called mystical experience. Jhana is maybe more related to the inner unity as opposed to the external unity.

Audience: Can you talk about the role of satsang [spiritual community] in Buddhism and how community can be used in the integration process in the psychedelic experience?

Kokyo: In Buddhism, sangha is the spiritual community and it’s very important, one of the refuges to rely on. We rely on the spiritual community to help sustain our practice and encourage us. So practice is not just an individual thing; we do it together. Especially in the Zen tradition, meditation practice and retreats are very much a group thing. We’re in silence, but in very close quarters, sitting right together, and it’s very interactive, with lots of rituals. We serve food to each other in very particular ways in the silence.

The spiritual community in Buddhism is very important, because part of what we’re realizing through practice is non-separation and intimacy. The realization is that we’re all completely intimate beyond our imagination. Psychedelic work tends to be more individual, even if people are tripping together. On the other hand, I have had experiences with psychedelics that were excruciatingly intimate; for example, at a Grateful Dead Concert. [laughter] We are one being! [laughter] That is one example of a communal ritual that has been commonly used in the tradition.

Jim: There are communities that help their members with integration. The one that is most developed is the Burner community. Burning Man is one of the closest replacements we have to Grateful Dead concerts, and it lasts for a week, not an evening. If you look at this stage of development, and compare it to Buddhism in the first 50 years after Buddha’s death, which is where we are with psychedelics in this country, we may be doing all right. Buddhists have had a lot more time to work out some of the problems.

Kokyo: May we all stay connected and realize our intimacy. As we often do at the end of dharma events, let’s dedicate the merit, any positive energy that was generated by this discussion, to the benefit of all beings, to the awakening and freedom of all beings.

I’d like to finish with a classic quote from Dogen Zenji, the Japanese founder of Soto Zen: 

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the body and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly.

To read more on this topic, check out the 1996 “Buddhism and Psychedelics” special issue.

Reprinted with permission from Synergetic Press from Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (New Edition) edited by Allan Badiner with Art Editor Alex Grey (2015). For more information, visit Synergetic Press.

The post Tripping with the Buddha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

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.  

The post Dharma on the Playa appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The road to Ram Dass’s home on the north shore of Maui winds from the Hana Highway toward the roiling Pacific. The sage green split-level sits on a lushly landscaped rise overlooking the ocean; waves crash against the rugged shore below, and trade winds whip the palms and Norfolk pines.

This is the Hawaii of surfers’ dreams and National Geographic photo spreads, the Hawaii of poetry and the imagination. It’s a rare day when a tropical afternoon shower does not produce a spectacular rainbow, one end of which often pierces the ocean like a blade.

I am here for a five-day private retreat with Ram Dass. My friend Liz and I will stay in the guesthouse on his estate and spend private time with him each day. I have no idea what to expect.

In 2004, I came to Hawaii for Ram Dass’s first Maui retreat, a small gathering of about 25 people. Each afternoon we’d trek from the retreat center to Ram Dass’s rented house, and in the intimacy of his living room he would give a dharma talk and answer questions. After that retreat, he fell gravely ill with a septic urinary tract infection. When he recovered after several weeks in the hospital, he was finished with traveling: Maui would be his new home.

During that first retreat, Ram Dass spoke often about death and dying; as he got older the subject appeared to intrigue him even more. Seven years earlier, a massive stroke had nearly killed him and had left this incredibly glib man with expressive aphasia, extreme difficulty in producing language, and the right side of his body paralyzed.

“Dying is like a Bingo game,” he said at one point during that 2004 retreat, searching for words in “the bombed-out closet” of his mind while sucking on Tootsie Pops. “When you die and are finished with the Sturm und Drang of the incarnation, you realize that the incarnation was like the five you needed to get Bingo.” The stroke may have slowed him down, but it had not diminished his wicked sense of humor.

Today Ram Dass still grapples for words, but his vocabulary is richer and he becomes more fluent as he converses. He hates it when you try to find a word or finish a sentence for him unless he specifically asks for help. Ram Dass says the stroke brought him closer to his center and made it easier to relate to the suffering of others.

“There is grace in suffering. Suffering is part of the training program for wisdom,” he says.

Over 50 years of spiritual practice, utter faith in his guru—Neem Karoli Baba—and a devoted network of friends have allowed him to spin the stroke into a positive experience. He sees himself as a beacon for the aging baby boomer population, one step ahead on the journey toward physical decline and eventual death.

Related: Tricycle Talks: Buddhism and Psychedelics 

Born into a Boston Brahmin family in 1931 as Richard Alpert, he was a freewheeling, sports car–driving psychology professor at Harvard when his colleague Timothy Leary turned him on to psilocybin in 1961. That experience totally changed his life.

“When I took my first trip, I knew I was home,” he tells me.

Although Dr. Alpert was sanctioned to conduct psychedelic experiments with graduate students, when he gave LSD to an undergraduate in 1963, he was fired. Later, he headed to India, where he met his guru, whom he calls Maharaj-ji. It was Maharaj-ji who gave him the name Ram Dass, which means “servant of God.” When Ram Dass’s beloved teacher told him to go back to the United States and “write his book,” he had no idea what book Maharaj-ji was referring to. But once back in the States, he wrote Be Here Now, which has been in print since its publication in 1971 and has sold over 2 million copies. Since then he has written 11 other books.

When Ram Dass arrived home from India, barefoot in flowing white robes, his father, George Alpert, president of the New Haven Railroad and one of the founders of Brandeis University, ushered him into the car, hoping no one would see him. He mocked his son, calling him Rum Dumb or Rammed Ass. Yet in Fierce Grace, a 2001 documentary about Ram Dass, George Alpert seemed delighted to welcome the hundreds of hippies who swooped down on his New Hampshire farm to be near his son.

“When the cameras were rolling,” Ram Dass recalls, “he was a different person. He was acting.”

There was a poignant reconciliation between the two when his father was dying, but as Maharaj-ji counseled, Ram Dass turned down his substantial inheritance.

I attended that first retreat right after my own father’s death. I wanted to spend time with the man whose CDs on death and dying had helped me transform that experience into a collage of precious and intimate moments. By hearing Ram Dass’s take on his own father’s death and the bedside vigil he kept as his stepmother died, I was able to be present during my father’s final months and embrace the truth in the dying experience.

Now, eight years later, I am back. Ram Dass will turn 82 in a couple of months—if I don’t hang out with him now, when?

There is nothing five-star about the guesthouse, a funky two-room studio with a shower in the kitchen. Pictures of Maharaj-ji adorn the puja altars in each room. Tomes by Ram Dass and other spiritual teachers—Stephen Levine, Deepak Chopra, and Thich Nhat Hanh among them—fill the bookcase. There’s a boom box and CDs by Krishna Das and Jai Uttal. We are free to use the pool and Jacuzzi, both of which have breathtaking views.

Ram Dass is wheeled into the guesthouse the next morning by his young Sufi assistant, Muib. Barefoot, dressed in shorts and a Hari Om T-shirt, Ram Dass fiddles with the baseball cap in his lap with his left hand. His right hand, its fingers slightly bent in on themselves, has been rendered useless by his stroke. He is thinner than the last time I saw him, though still a tall and elegant man. A rotator cuff injury makes it almost impossible for him to raise himself out of his wheelchair without assistance; at one point, he describes himself as having no arms because of the injury.

Naturally, we speak about death; the subject fascinates me, too. Twenty years ago, I wrote a book about the impact of AIDS on the artistic community and spent two years interviewing dozens of artists living with—and dying of—the disease. And over the past few years, I have volunteered to sit with the sick and dying, an experience I shared with my father and recently, my mother.

“The medical establishment does everything it can to keep someone alive,” Ram Dass says. “This culture says, ‘Don’t go, don’t go,’ and priests or rabbis say, ‘It’s okay to go.’ You need to stay in the middle. Don’t let your model of death interfere.”

Related: A Good Death 

Years ago, Ram Dass and Stephen Levine started a dying hotline. People on their deathbeds could call in and be supported through the process—“pillow talk,” Ram Dass calls it.

“All you can do is love,” he adds. “Be a loving rock they can push against. You shift when they shift.”

I ask Ram Dass how I can reconcile the part of me that can sit with an open heart with a dying stranger and the part that often feels, to quote Jean-Paul Sartre, that “hell is other people.” But before he can respond, the answer is clear to me.

“I guess I don’t have to make much of a commitment to someone who is dying,” I blurt out.

Ram Dass bursts into peals of laughter. “Boy, oh boy, you’re honest!” he exclaims, slapping his knee with his good hand. He tells me that when people rub me the wrong way, I must focus on their souls rather than their egos.

“Their karma is their dharma,” he says. (He often speaks in pithy little nuggets of wisdom.) “We go from here, ego,” he says, tapping his head, “to here.” He pats his heart. “What I call the soul, the spiritual heart. That’s the path. Then you can view your life with a sense of detachment.” He closes his eyes and places his hand on his heart. “I am loving awareness,” he whispers.

As he repeats “I am loving awareness” and we begin to meditate, I experience my ego dissolving, the boundary between us becoming nebulous. A feeling of oneness permeates the room, and my heart is flooded with love. I have experienced this egoless, deep-hearted love before, once a few years ago with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in a small group at a Jewish temple in California. It is the same feeling we chased after, again and again, with psychedelics and other drugs in the sixties and seventies.

A couple of days later, Ram Dass comments on the phenomenon.

“This is new,” he says. With his left hand, he lightly stirs the air in front of his face. “The aura thing.”

He thinks this state would be even more accessible if his ego didn’t admonish him when it happens: “Who does he think he is to embody Maharaj-ji?” When he can let go of the negative voices, the dissolve we experienced—“the aura thing,” as he calls it—is more frequent.

He touches his forehead with his long, elegant fingers.

“I really felt Maharaj-ji in the room during the meditation,” he tells me.

I definitely felt something. And now, a day later, it is as though the hard edges of my personality, which I had just the day before said I wanted to be rid of, have disappeared. I feel softer, more vulnerable.

“How much do I have to pay for the private retreat with LSD?” I joke. Ram Dass laughs heartily. He appreciates my sense of humor.

The first object I notice when I enter Ram Dass’s house the next day is a rectangle of dirty carpeting hanging on the wall in the foyer. Reverentially framed with a Tibetan prayer scarf, akata, this piece is an inside joke between Ram Dass and Mickey Lemle, the director of Fierce Grace. In an Indian restaurant years ago, Ram Dass was going on expansively about how he loved everything, even the soiled carpeting underfoot. Mickey jokingly noted that if that were the case, it would no longer mean much when Ram Dass told Mickey that he loved him—not if he loved the restaurant’s disgusting carpeting, too. So Mickey gifted Ram Dass this piece of cheap, beige carpeting with a shocking black smear in the center. Ram Dass displays it with no irony, as prominently as a photograph of a Maui rainbow and a portrait of Neem Karoli Baba.

On the majestic puja altar in the living room, there are photographs of Anandamayi Ma, Shivabalayogi, Lama Tsultrim, and Barack Obama, among others. A photo of John Boehner, like the one of George W. Bush that was on the altar during Bush’s presidency, reminds Ram Dass to love the soul in whatever incarnation it finds itself.

“A satsang, all yearning for God,” Ram Dass says about this assembly of spiritual teachers (Boehner included).

In his kitchen, Liz and I unload groceries. Tonight we’re making dinner: two kinds of pasta with half a dozen varieties of local mushrooms. A candle burns in front of a picture of Maharaj-ji on the big center island. Tiles on a Scrabble caddy spell out Be Love Now, the title of one of Ram Dass’s books.

I check the six-burner stove and the pots and pans hanging above it. Though the clock on the wall says it’s half past “now”—there are no numbers, just the word “now” at the quarter hour marks—everything runs on a set schedule. Dinner is at 6:30 p.m., give or take 15 minutes. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are taped and watched afterward in a little alcove that holds the big-screen TV.

Dassi Ma, Ram Dass’s confidante and personal assistant, keeps things flowing as precisely as a majordomo but as lighthandedly as a hippie, thanks to an imperturbable personality and the organizational skills acquired as a corporate HR executive back when she was still Kathleen Murphy.

“She protects me,” Ram Dass says. If things get too hectic, he retires to his apartment on the upper floor of the house, where he works at his computer or reads, lately books on near-death experiences like Nanci Danison’s Backwards.

It can and does get hectic. This week Bokara “Bo” Legendre, an old friend, is visiting, as is Lama Surya Das. I see them meditating on the long sectional couch in Ram Dass’s living room and later heading to the beach in a rented convertible with the top down. Joan Halifax visited recently; Wes Nisker, Jack Kornfield, and Trudy Goodman come a couple of times a year. Mirabai Bush, treasurer of Ram Dass’s Love Serve Remember foundation, is due any day, as is Zach Leary, Tim’s stepson.

Tonight, though, the house is quiet. Although he generally eats spartan vegetarian fare—the fridge brims with organic produce, a bag of raw cashews, sparkling water—Ram Dass loves the occasional epicurean indulgence. He gobbles the perfect mango I offer one morning before our meditation. He savors Liz’s Hanuman-shaped organic chocolates. And tonight he digs into the pasta, refilling his plate, as Bo regales us with stories of her socialite mother who spent the roaring twenties big-game hunting in Africa.

Over chocolate and tea, Ram Dass describes his first trip with Leary, which ended with him shoveling his parents’ driveway in a snowstorm at five o’clock in the morning, to their considerable dismay. He has tripped once since his stroke, with his doctor, but now he doesn’t even smoke pot.

“I used to smoke for them,” he explains, for his audiences, whom he assumed were all high. Smoking before he went on stage put him on their wavelength, or so he thought when he saw their heads nodding in unison from the stage. But now he’s not high and they still nod their heads.

Today the back of Ram Dass’s white Honda Crossfit is packed with life jackets, floats, and towels, and we are heading to Kamaole Beach in Kihei for the weekly ocean swim. There we are joined by a motley group of friends and fans representing every age from teen to octogenarian.

When I hesitate about swimming in the chilly Pacific, Ram Dass nudges me until I dive in. I know I will regret it if I ignore his urging. A dozen of us glide to the limit of the swimming area; Ram Dass, in a life vest, propels himself on his side with his good arm and leg. He grabs hold of the floating marker and, eyes closed, blissfully repeats “Oh buoy, oh buoy,” punning on one of his favorite expressions. Lili, the septuagenarian self-appointed “minister of fun,” has us join hands and chant: “If it’s not fun, don’t do it. If you must do it, make it fun!” Tom, a middle-aged surfer/photographer, flings delicate jade flowers and hibiscus blooms that bob, as we do, with the waves.

Back on the beach, two young musicians from Portland sing for Ram Dass, kneeling at his feet. A man wheels his skeletal friend over in a beach buggy. Ram Dass takes the dying man’s hand and sits with him, eyes closed, not saying much. Tears in their eyes, the two men are visibly moved.

Afterward we head to a nearby restaurant, Pita Paradise. Ram Dass orders hebi, a local fish, and a Diet Snapple. I sit opposite him. When Liz oohs and ahhs over the potatoes on my vegetarian platter, Ram Dass orders me playfully, but sternly, to “give her some.”

I offer her my plate, of course, and we all laugh. For a second, it felt like a father admonishing his daughter to share with her sibling.

Ram Dass is a father. Four years ago, he found out he had a son, Peter Reichard, an investment banker who lives in North Carolina. When Peter’s younger brother first contacted Ram Dass, he thought he was being hustled. But a DNA test confirmed that Peter was the result of a fling over half a century ago, when Ram Dass was a graduate student at Stanford.

“Can you believe I found out at 79 that I had a 53-year-old son?” he asks incredulously.

The two men look remarkably similar, tall and lanky with the same smile and distinctive hairline.

Ram Dass, who has had relationships with both men and women, never wanted children, had never placed much value on family. But now that Peter is in his life, the man who famously said “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family” seems to be rethinking the connection. He lights up when he speaks of his son visiting him in Maui with his wife and daughter. One Sunday in the guesthouse, he gets fidgety when Muib is a couple of minutes late to wheel him back. It is nearly one o’clock; he does not want to be late for his weekly Skype date with his son.

The last morning of the retreat, Ram Dass knocks on the guesthouse door. He has come bearing gifts: pictures of Maharaj-ji and malas knotted with threads from Maharaj-ji’s blanket.

In the late afternoon, the musicians from the beach come to the house for an improvised kirtan, just a handful of us sitting cross-legged on the sofa. Nobody seems to remember the words to the Hanuman Chalisa—definitely not the musicians, who have never played kirtan before—but when they segue into the familiar call-and-response chants, we sing our hearts out.

I pick up a drum and find the beat. Ram Dass beckons me to hand him the finger cymbals.

“You’ve got rhythm,” Ram Dass tells me.

I’m sad to be leaving, I say. I am, in my heart, and want to stay there.

He takes my hand.

“You will be bathed in loving light whenever you want it,” he assures me. “That’s what grace is.”

Polishing The Mirror 

For over 40 years, Ram Dass has been exploring—and writing about—a soul-centered life path, his journey from living in his head to living in his heart. Since his first book was published in 1971 (Be Here Now, which has sold over 2 million copies), he has described the various methods and experiences that have helped him navigate his own life’s voyage: psychedelics, meditation, bhakti yoga, karma yoga, guru kripa, prayer, service, and working with the dying, sick, and aging.

His latest book is Polishing the Mirror: How to Live From Your Spiritual Heart (Sounds True, 2013), written with his friend and collaborator Rameshwar Das. The book’s title is inspired by the first line of the Hindu devotional hymn Hanuman Chalisa: “I cleanse the mirror of my heart with the pollen dust of holy Guru’s lotus feet.”

“This internal reflection,” Ram Dass writes, “can also be seen as a process of witnessing . . . our own actions, thoughts, and emotions with an attitude of tolerance and love.”

Ram Dass has been polishing the mirror of his heart for decades. Now 82 years old, he has the process down pat. “As you become more aware of what gets you to God and what doesn’t,” he writes, “you will naturally let go of what doesn’t.”

For those negotiating this process, Polishing the Mirror offers an eclectic tool kit. Kirtan chants and meditation suggestions are mixed with classic Ram Dass stories, tales from the Hindu epic Ramayana, and poems by Rilke and Rumi (and Hallmark!). His take on subjects such as karma and relationships blends with his observations on aging, changing, and dying.

His message, as clear as it has always been and delivered with his inimitable humor, does not deviate much from the original words of wisdom he received from his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, many years ago: Love everyone and tell the truth.

The fact that this book does not get into the deeply personal exploration of his own final chapter—the book that would be the natural follow-up to Still Here, which ends with a recounting of his devastating 1997 stroke—leads us to think that Ram Dass has at least one more book in him.

Or not. As he notes, “your romantic attachment to your own story line and how it comes out fades.”

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