Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [99]
I’m frequently asked about drugs, particularly whether or not so-called consciousness-raising drugs can help raise one’s mystical sights. This is a fair question and one that I once asked of my teachers. Like many of my generation, I myself cannot in all honesty say that I never inhaled. What I can say is that once I got to Nepal and afterward became gradually established in the spiritual life, drugs lost their appeal, and I no longer sought mystical or religious experiences through chemical substances or drugs. Meditation and other Dharma practices proved so much more fruitful, sane, healthy, and delightful—not to mention safe and legal.
Back in the early 1970s, I remember trying to discuss drugs with Lama Yeshe. I described to him in colorful detail my cosmic mystical experiences during a one-week solitary trek through Nepal. I spent two days meditating at a Himalayan hot spring, under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. I had hoped and even expected Lama to explain these things and even help me understand. Instead, he laughed loudly and exclaimed, “Western boy’s dream!” He would say no more. He just kept laughing.
I intensely longed to become one with the infinite awareness of luminous presence I had experienced on that trek in the mountains. I wanted to be that, not just visit that through a drug-induced state. I knew that my vision quest deserved further development. Lama Yeshe generously taught me how to be closer to these realities through the practice of Tibetan meditation and breathing exercises; he wanted to show me the difference between chimerical dreams and the realistically achievable, immanent reality of clear light within each of us.
Like me, during the late sixties and early seventies many of the men and women who were my fellow companions on the path were attracted to the writings of people like Carlos Castenada,
Timothy Leary, R. D. Laing, Gary Snyder, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, Suzuki, Jack Kerouac, Watts, Krishnamurti, and Ram Dass. Some of this consciousness literature romanticized the psychedelic experience and touted the sacramental value of certain drugs. We were young; many threw caution to the winds and played with their heads. It was simply what was happening back then. In the intervening years, we’ve become more sophisticated and wise; we’ve seen too many examples of bright men and women who left too many brain cells behind in the name of mysticism. Now I personally don’t use drugs, and I don’t recommend drugs.
Buddhism is unswerving in its bottom-line respect for reality. Once Allen Ginsberg asked one of my own late teachers, Dudjom Rinpoche, for advice about the awesome visions he had experienced from taking psychedelics. The kindly old Tibetan sage sighed and simply said, “If you see anything horrible, don’t cling to it; if you see anything beautiful, don’t cling to it. Whatever the mind produces, it’s the same teaching. Don’t cling to it.” Buddha himself never said it better.
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
When one aged Zen master was asked to relate his biography, he exclaimed, “Just one mistake after another!” As we think about Right Action, we also can’t help but reflect on our mistakes. We’ve all done things we wish we could undo; we all have regrets. Recently a young man I never met wrote to me saying, “Am I doomed to bad karma because of the abortion my girlfriend and I decided to have performed three years before we married? Since then we have become Buddhists and discovered that traditional Dharma teachers consider that we killed a sentient being, which is the worst kind of sin, and that the karmic repercussions are said to be rebirth in hell. Is there any way to expiate