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Incredibly, the belief that a lifetime—hundreds of thousands lifetimes, since our consciousness includes the acquired cultural and social knowledge of our entire species’ history—of bad thinking habits can be altered in a single evening high on LSD continues to be talked about seriously by people who really ought to know better. In Zig Zag Zen, Terence McKenna even comes out with the comically ridiculous question, “How can you be a serious Buddhist if you’re not doing psychedelics?” This kind of thing is a lot like eloquent discourse on tantric sex from guys who really only want to get their rocks off more often and better.

If you want to get fried off your ass, at least have the decency to admit it. Don’t try to convince us you’re on some kind of grand spiritual quest.

Drugs won’t show you the truth.

Drugs will only show you what it’s like to be on drugs.

ONCE TIM TOLD ME the story of how one of his teacher Kobun Chino’s students slipped him some acid. Kobun was a very trusting guy. When he was handed an acid-soaked sugar cube and told, “Here, eat this. It’ll make you feel good,” Kobun swallowed it without a second thought. His comments afterward about the LSD experience? “It was stupid,” he said. Spoken like a true Zen master.

The very idea of higher states of consciousness is absurd. Comparing one state of consciousness to another and saying one is “higher” and the other is “mundane” is like eating a banana and complaining it’s not a very good apple. The state of consciousness you have right now is 100 percent purely what it is. It is neither higher nor lower, better or worse, more or less significant, than the state of consciousness once achieved by some spaced-out swami who came back down and then wrote a book about his memories of it.

Are the visions you can experience on LSD “real” religious visions? Sure they are. And as such they are worse than useless. Religious visions and acid experiences are both fantasies, delusions, projections of your own hidden desires. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, nothing to do with reality. You learn even less about the true nature of reality from such fantasies than from watching a few hours of cartoons on Saturday morning.

Chasing after fantasies is always a bad idea. Stick with reality. Reality’s all you’ve got.

But here’s the real secret, the real miracle: It’s enough.

EATING A TANGERINE IS REAL ENLIGHTENMENT

Hmm… eternal happiness for a dollar?

I’d rather keep the dollar.

MONTGOMERY BURNS ON THE SIMPSONS

DRUGS AREN’T THE ONLY WAY to alter your consciousness and send you out chasing fantasies. Sometimes meditation does the trick just as well.

Once this guy who objected strongly to my oddball ways of presenting Buddhism sent me a piece by Ken Wilber, an enormously popular writer of Buddhist-style books (apparently) —though I’d never heard of him. Wilber, in this guy’s opinion, represented Real Truth as opposed to the drivel I put out. He wanted me to see the light.

In the piece my friend sent me, we learn that Wilber had read a phrase by Ramana Maharshi, an Indian teacher whose philosophy sometimes resembles Zen although he never studied Zen. The phrase was this: “That which is not present in deep, dreamless sleep is not real.” This phrase, Wilber says, deeply affected him and made him truly serious about meditation.

Wilber then tells of how he trained himself to be conscious even during deep sleep. He brags that he spent some eleven days straight in this condition during a retreat at a monastery.

If you do zazen long enough, this kind of stuff can happen. It’s a kind of sickness. And one of the good effects of getting sick is that when you recover you see just how nice your regular condition is. Good teachers can help you get over this illness; bad teachers will just let you get sicker and sicker. Some of the most dangerous ones even encourage it, writing books with their handsome mug on the cover filled with twisted explanations that being sick is really the only true way to be