Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [68]
1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding “entheogenic” drug LSD?
And here’s a bonus question:
2. Why does an “expanded consciousness” include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?
One of the few contributors to the book who even acknowledges the fifth precept, Dokusho Vallalba Sensei,7 thinks doing drugs is fine if the “setting” is correct. But in my experience such a “setting” almost always includes one person who stays straight and looks after the safety of the drug-user. Now, just why is it that people at higher levels of consciousness can’t seem to survive without one of us low-level folks there to help them out? Those of you who’ve ever been that caretaker know just how much fun it can be to try and keep folks in “heightened states of awareness” from doing themselves grievous bodily harm.
The very good reason most Western Buddhist teachers don’t talk much about the druggy days of their youth is because there are always guys around who’ll latch onto any little scrap to justify their own predilection for getting wasted. Zig Zag Zen contributor Rick Fields cites the story—probably apocryphal—of how Nagarjuna, one of Buddhism’s most brilliant poet-philosophers, told one of his disciples to accept only whatever food could fit on the end of a pin. The disciple came back with a pancake balanced on a pin. Fields calls this “compelling evidence” that Nagarjuna’s real source of inspiration was magic mushrooms—since, y’know, a mushroom sorta looks a little like a pancake balanced on top of a pin if you think about it hard enough (especially if your thinking about it while tripped out on ’shrooms). So while I’m personally reluctant to drag those skeletons out of my own closet, the existence of Zig Zag Zen and its dubious claims of being the first work to take a serious look at the matter make me feel it’s necessary to address what really shouldn’t even be an issue at all.
LIKE SO MANY OTHER pimply-faced young Buddhist wanna-bes in the West, when I was a boneheaded little college dweeb I was dumb enough to fall for the spiel of one of these irresponsible pricks who claimed that psychedelic drugs were one of the “skillful means” spoken of in Buddhist literature for reaching enlightenment.
Now in high school, I was a major fan of John Lennon and knew Lennon had used LSD so I really wanted to try it for myself. Hell, I would’ve posed naked with Yoko Ono if it’d have made me more like John Lennon.8 One morning, ........... probably late in my junior year, a friend and I found a dealer in the school parking lot—which was a veritable drug supermarket at the time—who sold us what he said was acid. We went to my friend’s treehouse that night and each swallowed one of the pills we’d bought. We waited and waited, but nothing happened. We’d been scammed. We were more relieved than angry though. Oddly enough, a few days later, when I confronted the guy who’d sold the pills to us, he just laughed and gave the money back. Honor among thieves, I suppose.
Once I joined Zero Defex, I became aware that LSD—real LSD, that is—might be available. I knew Jimi Imij, our singer, had used it. He was a great acid-head philosopher, always willing to hold forth with psychedelic cosmic wisdom. I asked him once if it was true you could see God when you took acid. “Yeah,” he said, “but you can see the Devil too.”
At that time, though, I didn’t ask him for any LSD because I was in a heavy anti-drug phase. I’d given up John Lennon (and my hopes for Yoko) and the whole hippy thing and embraced punk. Whatever the hippies were for, punk was against.