Jay Michaelson,
Reality Sandwich
Waking Times
It’s a not-so-dirty little secret that most of today’s leading
meditation teachers were interested in drugs. By “drugs,” of course, I
don’t mean alcohol or Oxycontin, but rather that subset of chemicals
which our society has deemed unfit for human consumption, including
cannabis, psilocybin, MDMA, and others. Many of today’s leading Buddhist
teachers, for example, credit their first taste of altered mind states
not to
samadhi but to LSD or mushrooms, and almost every spiritual teacher I know (and I know a bunch) smoked pot. Some still do.
So what’s the connection? Why do people who like drugs (I’ll stop
scarequoting the word, even though I shouldn’t) like meditation? And
what’s the relationship between them?
1. Pleasure
The first and simplest answer is that both drugs and meditation are
pleasurable – and a specific kind of pleasure, namely pleasures of the
mind. Of course, on the surface of things, meditation and psychedelics
seem to be quite different: one is boring and calm, the other wild and
crazy. Yet, as entheogen users and yogis know, neither image is
accurate. While some chemicals do indeed lead to ecstasy and blurring of
boundaries, others lead to their sharpening, and to
quiet states of reflection.
And while meditation does generally cause calm to arise in the mind, it
also leads to ecstasy, delight, religious/spiritual feelings, and
rapture — particularly when the faculties of concentration are
heightened.
I remember, when I had just started meditating, it was like I had
received the answer key to a hundred spiritual questions. “Aha! This is
what they were talking about when they said that God is everywhere!” The
attention brought to mundane objects renders them everyday miracles,
and an opened heart makes
davvening
a cathartic, healing experience. Suddenly simple phrases that seemed
like clichés — “Be Here Now” — became full not only of truth, but of
invitation. They cease to sound like pop psychology (“Remember,
bourgeois busy people, if you just become ‘present’ you can do all sorts
of things and be a more successful businessman/lover/person.”) and
instead sound like a call to home, to the One.
And, of course, meditation offers these benefits without the side
effects of chemicals, and with longer duration. To be sure, the buzz of
concentration is also temporary — but with practice, it can arise on and
off for days, rather than for a few hours. It takes much more work, but
the pleasure it brings is, after all, only a side-effect of an overall
process which greatly increases mental acuity. That is, it’s really good
for you. Perhaps this is why many (though not all) of us relinquish
plant medicines and chemical entheogens once we take up meditation in earnest.
The
type of pleasure is similar as well. When you’re stoned,
or rolling, or tripping, certain sensual sensations get enhanced. You
can see and feel music when you’re on ecstasy. The taste of some kinds
of food on marijuana is, as a stoner would say, “intense.” Everybody
knows this, and it’s why many people use drugs. (Of course, many people
smoke pot just to get wasted, not to have heightened visual, tactile, or
other sensual experiences. But they are not my subject here.) These
substances are not an escape from reality, but a magnifying glass held
up to it. Intimate details of how the mind works, of how fabric feels,
of music. Drugs can make every potato chip a delicate, crispy, greasy
delight.
Meditation is about the same process of ‘intensifying’ daily
experience, not by pursuing ever-more visceral thrills, but by quieting
the mind enough to — in the words of
Warren Zevon
— “appreciate every sandwich.” (Zevon coined that phrase when David
Letterman asked him what effect his diagnosis of terminal illness had on
his day-to-day life.) I used to see a contradiction between the ethos
of “seizing the day,” living as fully as possible, and the contemplative
life, which I associated with a withdrawal from much of human
experience. Eventually, though, I came to understand that a
contemplative path is the logical extension of living deliberately.
There are, really, only two choices available to someone who wants to
suck the marrow out of life: either continually seeking more extreme
experiences, or making
every experience ‘extreme.’ Some people
can apparently do the former, but I find that tiring. Meditation allows
me to “suck the marrow” out of each tree, table, soda, or breath. By
eliminating signal noise and stopping thought, the true colors of the
phenomenal universe become revealed, in ever-increasing brilliance. It’s
not like being stoned all the time, because there is not the
disorientation and tripping up of the rational mind that occurs on pot.
But it’s like being stoned in the sense of tastes, touches, smells,
sounds, and sights all becoming enhanced, kinesthetically interchanged,
and — simply in their non-conceptual presence — enough reason to live.
Incidentally, I was surprised, when I started meditating, that so
much pleasure would result. Of course, people who meditate often talk
about rapturous union with Being, or dissolution in the Divine, and
these do sound very pleasant indeed. But I still didn’t expect it, as if
anything “spiritual” had to be austere, or subtle, or boring. Was I
wrong! Apart from all the deeper benefits of meditation, the sheer
volume of joy is astonishing. In my experience, it beats any other high.
2. Altered Mind States
A second point of similarity between drug use and meditation is that
both lead to states of consciousness that are different from the
ordinary. Enjoying these seems to be a matter of taste. A lot of people
like to take vacations in foreign countries. Some like exotic foods. And
many others like vacations from their ordinary modes of consciousness
into a different ‘mind-space’ where new insights can occur and even
ordinary stimuli (and even without the sensual enhancement above) can be
experienced in a whole new way.
Many people deeply fear altered states of consciousness, I think
because they are overly afraid of their own non-rational minds.
Subscribing to a worldview in which ‘rational’ rules of decency,
propriety, etc., govern every aspect of life means relying on our
capacities of rational judgment for every important decision. And so,
mind-states which relegate such faculties to a subordinate or even
invisible role is scary. Now, of course, I’m all for rational judgment
making most decisions in the world, and certainly all of those which
seriously affect other people. But is it a rational judgment to dance?
To let go of the self in orgasm? To fall in love? Some of our most
transcendent moments come when the rational mind is quieted and
something else takes its place. In some aspects of life, being in touch
with the nonrational is essential to being human.
Purely for humanistic reasons, then, I think that altered mindstates
are an essential condition of living a full life. Of course, one can do
without them, just as one can do without art, dance, sex, and other
Divine gifts. But I think it’s a shame to do so. I think something is
missing, something impoverished, when they are lacking.
3. Truth
But, of course, many entheogen users and nearly all meditators want
to make a further claim: that these particular altered mindstates lead
to truth. This isn’t just about getting high and having fun, they say;
this is about knowing deeply the truth of your own experience, or even
of the fundamental nature of existence itself. Just sit and watch your
breath, some Buddhists say, and eventually you’ll intuitively understand
the four noble truths,
the basic facts of life.
And indeed, this has been my experience. Fortunately, I have been
able to set aside large swaths of time to practice, and I have come to
such intuitive understandings along the
Theravadan Buddhist
path, in particular on a five-month silent retreat I completed in
February, 2009. I’ve then re-examined and re-evaluated those insights
off-retreat – and they’ve tended to hold. The distractions (I should
start a publishing house!) have not passed the test of time, but the
deep stuff, e.g. about suffering being an inevitable consequence of
clinging — that stuff has stuck, and it seems true to me.
That said, when it comes to claims of “truth,” things do get tricky,
because there is some information that entheogens reveal which
meditation rarely reveals, and some information which meditation reveals
that drugs and chemicals don’t. For example, it takes huge amounts of
concentration over long periods of time to enter one of the meditative
absorptions (
jhanas)
which resemble, in some ways, distinct “realms” apart from this one,
and even the most intense which I have seen described (and, a fortiori,
which I have experienced) do not compare to the experiences of journeys
on ayahuasca or other plant medicines. I’m not aware of a way to
experience those phenomena without the medicine.
And, at the same time, while ayahuasca journeys yield a wealth of
information about other realms and one’s own heart, they tend not to
offer the level of analytical distinction that accompanies meditative
insight. That arises in meditation (and in many other ways, of course).
To me, the resolution of this tension is obvious: plant medicines are
good for some kinds of knowledge, and meditation for others. But,
spiritual people being the way we are, there’s often a lot of heat (and
only some light) on these points, with some people insisting this kind
of knowledge is good but inferior, and others countering that, no, that
kind of knowledge is the preliminary one and this is ultimate, and so
on. This is particularly the case because we all carry baggage related
to spiritual practice. Many meditators had early, naive, and unpleasant
experiences with drugs, and so assume that even the most rarified of
ibogaine
journeys is nothing more than their lousy acid trip at a Dead concert
in the 70s. Conversely, many users of plant medicines have never had the
opportunity to meditate in a conducive setting – e.g., a silent retreat
of five days or more — and so assume that either they can’t meditate,
or meditation is all a dry slog.
Personally, however, I’ve found that the two paths enrich each other.
Most of my work with medicines is, I think, behind me at this point in
my life. Yet when I was more involved with them, I found that the
ability to stabilize, to tease apart the strands of a mind-made story,
and to be a little dubious of what seems to be true to the mind, all
served me very well in my own shamanic work. And I have found that the
intensity of entheogenic work has been able to push my cognitive reset
button when more gradual practices such as
mindfulness
have been ineffective, or too difficult. At present, my vipassana side
is winning out over my shamanic side, and I tend to prefer clear insight
over mind-states and multi-realm experiences which seem susceptible to
misinterpretation. But, you know, go tell that to Ayaruna.
All that said, I am not a spiritual supercessionist. There are many
in the spiritual world who, having taken up yoga or meditation, regard
drugs as a useful preliminary, a glimpse of the orchard perhaps, but
ultimately something to be gotten beyond. My own path does reflect this
somewhat, but I have also met responsible plant aficionados who continue
to deepen their practice with medicines. To each their own.
I’m not
entirely pluralistic, though. As I’ve written before in these pages, I would say to my fellow
Sandwichers
that, in my humble opinion, a meditation practice is a necessary
prerequisite for any work in shamanic realms, with energy, or with the
supernatural in any form. I think having out-of-body experiences with
possibly-alien intelligences without having a meditation practice is
like flying an airplane without basic aviation training or navigational
instruments. Just seeing, over and over again, that the illusions of
consciousness do not constitute a “self” is worth the price of
admission. So is just seeing, over and over again, that you can have a
certain experience and still be wrong about its nature. But more than
that, I think the mind-sharpening practices of meditation provide
balance and focus in any entheogenic or other-worldly work. At the very
least, it’s the warm-up exercise.
It’s a neat little twist: visions brought on by drugs and
plant medicines invite people to meditation,
and then meditation becomes the necessary preliminary for deeper
practice with drugs or other modalities. One path shows you other
realms, the other teaches you how to navigate them – and this one as
well. Ultimately, all of us learn, usually the hard way, that the
exciting bells and whistles of spiritual experience all pass away, and
indeed, that the more light one invites into one’s life, the more shadow
one invites as well. For this reason, more cool experiences – including
powerfully transformative ones – tend to lose their appeal as aids to
spiritual progress. They’re still a great way to spend one’s time, but
they aren’t more than that. They aren’t “it.” Nothing, of course, is
“it”; just the slipperiness with which one navigates the its and yous of
life in this realm, hopefully making things a little happier for the
rest of us along the way.
