At the age of 19 I took my first dose of LSD. For many years I had taken a deep and oddly curious interest in the cultural revolution of the sixties, the influence LSD had on that revolution, and the puzzling connection LSD and other psychedelics had with eastern spiritual traditions. When I dropped those first couple hits I was anticipating a complete paradigm shift in my consciousness and a turning point in my life. As it turned out those anticipations were fulfilled and much more. Looking back to my teenage naivety I can’t recollect just what I thought would happen but all that I had heard from certain figures such as Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and the music of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and other musicians led me to believe within LSD was a key to the meaning of life. Perhaps the gates of paradise could be accessed via this chemical key. Pop culture had led me to believe this was at least an idealistic possibility!
What I found in Lysergic Acid Diethylamide was not so much the answers to all my existential questions but the opening up of the possibility of arriving at the answers. LSD was a tool that could dissolve the dominant belief systems that operated my mind and provide on a tiny square of blotter “thinking outside of the box.” My spiritual search began with LSD and gave birth to deep held convictions about the nature of reality and my place in it. After some time of exploring the potential of LSD and a few other psychedelics I turned to Buddhism and the syncretistic teachings of Ram Dass in his groundbreaking book Be Here Now. Ram Dass was a person who had went a good way on the spiritual path using psychedelics as tools for transcendence and union with god.
What Ram Dass found was that psychedelics could give you an experience of god however you always came back from that enraptured vision of transcendence and Oneness. I resonated with this sentiment since this was my experience as well. No matter how high I got on LSD or how long I could extend the trip I always came down; Oneness always deteriorated into separation and alienation. The obvious alternative was to pursue the spiritual path the old-fashioned way and commit myself to practices like meditation and yoga. This was the choice Ram Dass had made so many years ago. My theory, which was not novel by any means, was that the same states achieved during a psychedelic trip could be reproduced naturally through strict focused commitment to meditative and yogic practices. This has proved to be true to one degree or another over the past fifteen years or so.
As with most spiritually inclined people I had an attachment to the belief that liberation was an experience, something that would happen to me, and would be a permanent state from the time of the enlightenment event until my death. So My theory of reproducing the “enlightenment” of psychedelics naturally was doomed as well. No matter how deep I went into meditation I always came back, just like with my psychedelic experiences; they were all experiences, states of mind. The mark of an experience of course is that it begins at a certain point, persists for a time, and eventually ceases. This was a very frustrating predicament to be in. You see I was running into the same problem whether I was dosing a chemical or spending hours in meditative states. Clearly now years later I can say that all my difficulty stemmed from a flawed conception, a faulty paradigm. I had always thought, and read in countless spiritual books and scripture, that enlightenment was an experience that would transform my life and leave me sitting on a hillside somewhere in infinite bliss, it was a state of being. This could not be further from the truth however, but I was hopelessly addicted to achieving ecstatic spiritual states. Even when confronted with the truth that liberation was not something you get but something you already are by nature I just couldn’t accept it.
The divine irony of this whole drama is that all the spiritual searching, practices, reading, and frustration could have been avoided had I embraced an intuition I had in the first days of my experimentation with psychedelics. You see I had a deep experiential conviction or intuition that the nature of reality was nondual. I didn’t know what that meant all those years ago but I walked around for years with thoughts about the Oneness of reality, the interconnectedness of everything, and a sort of incomprehensible divinity underlying the material reality bouncing around in my head. Concepts like love, compassion, and unity seem to flow from this fundamental Oneness of reality yet I could never pull this truth together and account for it in everyday experience. Wrapping my mind around god as the ground of being, beyond form and even formlessness made no sense to my conceptual mind. For my normal experience of day-to-day life was nothing but duality, separation, division, false love, and feigned compassion. I could hardly cope with form, how could I propose to grasp not only the formless but the transcendence of any distinction between the two?
This conviction has sat in the back of my mind for years. Underneath the surface level of what we consider to be real is an intrinsic Oneness that accounts for everything in existence and gives life to all that appears in our experience. Deep in my heart I knew that this was the way it all was. In all the years of following different spiritual traditions I’ve never been able to “stay” in that place. Psychedelics touched that place, meditation touched that place, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Christianity talks about that place. No matter where I looked I was never able to stay in that place, I could never gain the experience as a permanent state of being.
This state of affairs began to change course a few years ago when I to returned to the exploration of psychedelics in conjunction with the teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharj, Ramana Maharshi, and the traditions of Advaita Vedanta and Dzogchen and other purely nondual Buddhist traditions. All of these names and traditions are at heart pure expressions of nonduality. The intuitive notion of Oneness I had carried in my mind and heart for so many years suddenly found a clear expression in these sages and mysticisms of the past. At the same time the term psychedelic began to lose favor with me and a new term entheogen which means “god manifesting” replaced it. I was beginning to see that nonduality was throughly ingrained in the entheogenic experience. The entheogens were generally naturally occurring psychedelics or hallucinogens which had been used by many endogenous cultures for thousands of years as shamanic tools and medicines. Though the cultures and ideologies surrounding their use were deeply dogmatic just as Hinduism or Buddhism were, they too, strikingly pointed to nonduality as the essence of reality.
Though I had partaken of psilocybin mushrooms, one of the most popular of the entheogens, around the time of my LSD adventures I never ranked them as highly as my beloved Acid, mainly because they simply weren’t as popular in my circle of friends at the time. Entheogens provoke experiences as diverse as the individuals who ingest them and it would be an error to declare my experience with them is the only possible experience to have. Yet regardless of the particular entheogen which includes mushrooms, DMT, Salvia Divinorum, and Mescaline containing cactus to name a few, they all allow for the apprehension of the nondual experience. Beyond any individual experience of hallucinations, entity contact, revelation, or therapy encountered under the entheogenic intoxication they open up a realm of consciousness which makes possible the transcendence of the ego, duality, and language. This is the goal of any true nondual message. Where the direct pointing of a clear teacher of nonduality leads you is to this same place, only the entheogen does it in a forceful no holds barred way. That is, with entheogens the saying is true, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
So it was with this discovery of straight forward no-nonsense distillations of nonduality that I set off on a rediscovery of that first intuition I had tasted all those years ago. This time it was different, I was applying tools which had been a part of the shared consciousness of humanity and nature for a great many years. While I have no ill feelings toward synthetic entheogens per say I believe those that are naturally occuring which have been a part of the human diet for such an ecspance of time hold a certain treasured place in the medicine cabinet of God. It is the entheogens that beckon to our innermost essence that there is in the manifest world something such as themselves so anomalous that they could only be a key to accessing the matrix of reality and not only this but throw open the doors to the Absolute reality that is God with a grin. Entheogens are the touch of the Absolute which strip away the manifest reality and reveal only the truth of the Oneness of reality that has always been the case
The issue is that we do not recognize that we are already more alive than we could ever wish to be, more free, more aware, eternally blissful. Entheogens simply wash away the dirt of the apparent reality, just as practice does. The path I have taken throughout my life via spiritual practice and entheogenic use has been a vast accumulation of wisdom and works which have amounted to the sum total of that first intuition I had on LSD. Everything I ever needed to know I knew in that moment of clear seeing. But that message was to simple. We were never not liberated; we have always been enlightened! It is through being exposed to the clear message of nonduality, testing that message via direct inquiry into our experience, and through the use of tools such as meditation and entheogens that we come to end the struggle to be free. We come to see we’ve always been free. The search to become a certain type of person only reveals we’ve set our sights far to low, it’s playing with appearances. What we already are is so much more, infinitely more.
There is a primary emphasis on the direct method of inquiry, throughout my writing here on the blog and in my book (which I’m still writing), which is a method of simply investigating personal subjective experience and recognizing what is false about that experience. The other main practices are meditation and entheogens. The direct method is all that is truly needed to come to an intuitive conviction of the nondual nature of reality. In fact although I have had countless entheogenic experiences and a fair amount of time on the meditation cushion (this certainly laid the groundwork) it was fundamentally direct inquiry that finally caused the wave to break upon the beach of my consciousness. Liberation is a non-event in so much that no practice will cause it, yet paradoxically it is through means such as direct inquiry, meditation, and entheogens that we come to realize this in our own lives. As far as the story of “you” goes you surely appear to achieve liberation but from your perspective a “you” loses its meaning and thus there is no one to become liberated and no time or place for it to have happened. Funny that!
