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By Root 696 0

all wired to the gills as well as stoned. I was actually hallucinating—the first time that had happened. Whenever I closed my eyes the patterns on my eyelids formed into bizarre shapes. I couldn’t shut out my vision. I started to get tense. I kept telling myself that the drug would wear off in a few hours. But, as hard as I tried I could not get any sense of what “a few hours” meant. How the hell long was a few hours? What was an hour? How could it have “length”? I understood that the position of the hands of my watch meant that it was one A.M. What “one A.M.” meant, however, I had no clue. The word hour might as well have been an unknown word in a foreign language. I turned it over and over in my mind. But as hard as I tried I couldn’t make anything out of it at all. I had completely forgotten the concept of time. This was terror piled upon terror. I knew I’d be well in a few hours but what for the love of God was an hour?

I went to the toilet, afraid to be alone, and took a shaky piss. I went to wash my hands and, looking up at the cracked mirror, discovered that looking into mirrors was not such a good idea. My face was changing, melting into a bizarre array of ever evolving shapes, most of them weird and ugly.

After considerable effort I managed to stop panicking. I went into the kitchen to chill out. Just then Donnel showed up again. He’d disappeared a few hours before (or a few minutes, I wouldn’t have known the difference), apparently to chug down more whiskey. When he arrived in the kitchen, I was wadding up pieces of tinfoil and tossing them into the garbage can. It was distracting me from the sudden flashes of naked horror that kept threatening to tear my brain apart. Donnel decided he wanted to play too. But instead of wadding up a ball of tinfoil, he wrenched the door off the oven and tossed it across the room, shouting, “Why don’t we just throw it all away!”

After I came down I vowed never to touch LSD again.

DRUGS ARE EXTREMELY DESTRUCTIVE to your physical body, and they can leave emotional psychic wounds that can form permanent scars. They do not aid you in usefully discovering the truth in the least. I’m amazed I even survived my experimentation with that poison. My advice to you: Don’t bother.

The only lasting value in the acid experience for me was the clear understanding that acid wasn’t going to live up to the promises of guys like Ram Dass and Allan Hunt Badiner. It also left me wondering how those guys could be so stupid as not to notice that for themselves. If that’s beatific vision and ultimate truth, they can keep it.

Any kind of traumatic experience—a car accident, a high fever, the death of a loved one—can dramatically rip a person out of their normal consciousness. But psychedelic drugs mangle your brain and body and when you start off with the idea that some mangled, abnormal state of mind is the “optimal state of consciousness,” as Zig Zag Zen postulates in its first chapter, the boneheaded notion that getting bombed out of your gourd is the way to find reality is a pretty easy conclusion to jump to. But if there is one thing I want to make clear, it’s that Buddhism has nothing to do with “transcendent states” or “higher levels of consciousness” or “optimal levels of being.” (I remain unconvinced, by the way, that a state of mind where you can no longer even roll your own doobies, let alone do anything the least bit useful for anyone else, is somehow “optimal.”)

Buddhism isn’t about anything so diminutive as any of your mental states at all. It’s much deeper than that.

There is no optimal state of consciousness. Optimal is just an idea, another manifestation of the Great Somewhere Else. Consciousness is just an idea.

The notion that you can take a drug to get enlightened is as sensible as thinking you can take off the weight gained from twenty years of shoveling nothing but Oreos®, Pringles®, and Big Macs® down your gullet by swallowing a few miracle diet pills. It’s big money for big business, but if you’re eating three meals a day at Mickey D’s you’re gonna be taking up two seats