The Buddha Molecule, Part I: DMT and the Soul of Visionary LoveWisdom
The Buddha Molecule: DMT and the Soul of Visionary LoveWisdom
How can Buddhist philosophy empower us to work more skillfully with the medicines of our world—including psychedelic medicines like DMT, LSD, MDMA, and others?
This contemplation was inspired in part by the surge of interest in psychedelic medicines in the past decade or so, and also in part by the dialogue I had with Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and DMT and the Soul of Prophecy. Rick found himself turning away from Buddhist philosophy as a framework for modeling and working with psychedelic experiences. While I applaud his work to show how the Hebrew Bible can help support working with psychedelic medicines, I disagree with his suggestions that Buddhist philosophy doesn’t provide every bit as skillful a support for us.
In this contemplation we begin to consider the relevance of Buddhist philosophy for maximizing the benefits psychedelic—or any other medicines—offer us. Whether we work with horse medicine, forest medicine, the medicine of music, the medicine of dance, or any one of the psychedelic medicines, we will find profound guidance in Buddhist philosophy for realizing the fullest potentials of our path of healing and transformative insight.
After we lay out some juicy philosophical reflections in this and a following contemplation, we will consider a kind of philosopher’s guide to working with the medicines of our world. What are the practices we should have in place as we approach the work we need to do to heal self and world at the same time?
Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.
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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into the mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.
We’re doing the work we need to do to heal self and world at the same time.
Today we will begin what will likely turn out to be at least two contemplations on holotropic or psychedelic medicines. Our reflections apply to our lives in general. We could say, whatever your medicine, we’re going to be talking about it. Maybe you work with psychedelic medicines, or maybe you work with the medicine of the horse, the medicine of the forest, the medicine of religious teachings, the medicine of music, the medicine of philosophy of any kind. That’s what we’re talking about, even if psychedelic medicines seem to be the main focus.
So let’s make it abundantly clear that we don’t have to have any interest in taking psychedelic medicines to follow along here. Whether we take psychedelic medicines or not, those medicines have implications for us.
The philosophical principles we’ll consider apply to working with our whole lives, not just these medicines. But we can learn a lot from them, and they have more potential than we have so far realized.
We are practicing philosophy together. That means we want to find out about reality, and base our lives on that. We want to root ourselves in wisdom, love, and beauty, and bring wisdom, love, and beauty into the world.
If you don’t work with psychedelics, you can apply what we talk about to your life without them, to make your life and your world better. If you work with psychedelic medicines in any way, or you think you might one day, these contemplations will help you work with them more skillfully.
I thought we might start with a couple stories, because that’s a fun way to start. Then we’ll circle back for a little more context.
The first story is about the philosopher Buddha and a demon named Alavaka.
On one occasion Buddha was living in the abode of Alavaka, the demon.
Alavaka approached the Buddha and said: “Get out, contemplative.” —
Buddha said, “Very well, friend,” and he went out.
Then the demon said, “Come in, contemplative.” — And Buddha said, “Very well, friend,” and he entered.
This happened a second time, then a third time. Then the demon started a fourth round, saying, “Get out, contemplative.” But Buddha said, “No, friend. We’re done with this.”
And the demon said, “Okay. I’m going to ask you a question. If you don’t answer, I will possess/confound your mind, or cleave your heart, or take you by your feet and fling you over to the further shore of the Ganges.
And Buddha said, “Well, friend, I don’t see anyone in the whole Cosmos—Gods, Devils, Brahmas, [Devas, Maras, Brahmas,] or any among the contemplatives, brahmanas, deities, and humans, who could either possess/confound my mind, or cleave my heart, or take me by the feet and fling me to the further shore of the Ganges. Nevertheless, friend, you may ask what you want.”
Then Alavaka addressed the Blessed One in verse:
1. What wealth here is best for human beings?
What well-practiced will bring true happiness?
What taste excels all other tastes?
How lived is the life they say is best?
[The Buddha replied:]
2. True spiritual confidence is the wealth here best for human beings
Reality well practiced brings happiness;
The taste of truth excels all other tastes;
Life wisely lived is best.
[Adapted from https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/snp/snp.1.10.piya.html]
The second story is also about the Buddha. [https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.11.0.than.html]
In this occasion, the Buddha was in the city of Nalanda. And a man named Kevatta approached him and said,
“Buddha, the city of Nalanda is powerful. It’s prosperous, and it has a large population of people who already follow your teachings. You should have one of your practitioners show off their psychic powers. That will make a huge splash here. It will make you so famous, and everyone will have even more confidence in you.”
And Buddha said, “Kevatta, I don’t teach practitioners to show off psychic powers.”
Kevatta asks him a second time. Buddha replies the same way. Kevatta asks him a third time. Buddha replies in the same way. But then he sees that he needs to explain further. So he says,
“Listen, Kevatta. I teach three kinds of miracles. The first is psychic powers, the second is telepathy.”
I’m going to cut Buddha off there, before he gets to the third kind of miracle, so we can talk a little about the first two.
It might sound weird to separate psychic power from telepathy. But Buddha explains what he means.
Psychic power includes some stuff we’d see in Marvel Comics. With psychic powers, a person can go from being one to being many, or from being many to being one. A person can vanish, and they can also appear out of nowhere. A person can pass through walls, and even pass through mountains. They can dive into the earth and also walk on water. They can fly. They can touch the Sun. And they can influence anything in the Cosmos.
It’s some pretty wild stuff.
Telepathy is just reading minds. Kind of tame by comparison, but still very cool.
Buddha explains to Kevatta that the first two kinds of miracles don’t convince dismissive people. The dominant culture philosopher Kierkegaard agreed with Buddha on this point. Kierkegaard wrote about people who say that they wish they could have met Jesus in person, and observed his miracles first-hand. Then, they say, they could believe in him.
But Kierkegaard says that seeing these things won’t sway us if we have a dismissive mind. After all, plenty of people met Jesus in person, and yet clearly not everyone accepted him as the messiah.
The idea is that where one person witnesses a miracle, a dismissive person will explain the miracle away. Those who don’t accept psychic powers will claim that they witnessed a mass hallucination, or a coincidence, or something like that.
Even if we accept psychic powers, Buddha felt people would not attribute them to the practice of philosophy. Isn’t that interesting? A person might accept psychic powers, but they would say, “Well, that Buddhist contemplative can’t read mind because of his spiritual practice. No. You see, there is an amulet or secret herb or something like that, and that’s what gives him the power to read minds.”
This is a very important point for us right now. Hold that image in your mind: The Buddha saying that people will tend to attribute psychic powers to an herb rather than accept that the practice of philosophy could unleash those powers as natural to us, as part of the capacity of our own mind.
The point is that Buddha doesn’t think psychic and telepathic miracles convince dismissive people.
But there is a third miracle. Buddha says the third miracle is instruction. Teachings.
How many of us have received teachings we experienced as miraculous?
But the teachings of the wisdom traditions are indeed miraculous. I see the miracles in people’s lives all the time. They often surprise people.
First of all, wouldn’t it seem miraculous to know someone who had lived with anxiety, depression, self-hatred, and a focus on material things, a person who would lie out of sheer discomfort, and who was reactive, distracted, and unhappy—
and then we find out that this same person lost all interest in money, renounced all deception and told the truth, they renounced self-deception too . . .
and they became a master of their attention, they gave up all idle chatter, they now feel true peace and joy, and they have tremendous powers of concentration?
Imagine a person who has experienced bliss, and then went beyond it. Imagine a person who has become truly wise, compassionate, and graceful, a person who has experienced profound and transformative insights into the nature of reality. All of that comes from the miracle of instruction.
Teachings can work miracles in our lives, and when others see us following good teachings, it affects them too. So teachings are in some sense the ultimate miracle.
But then Buddha also acknowledged to Kevatta that the miracle of instruction could also allow a person to create a second body made of their own mind. This is a hint of what we now call Vajrayana practice. A person creates a mental body, and that allows them to separate their essence from their habitual embodiment, and allows them to dispel the illusion of a rigid self.
And the Buddha also acknowledged to Kevatta that instruction would allow people to read minds, to hear divine sounds, to know their past lives, to go from being one to being many, to go from many to being one, and more.
And finally, Buddha acknowledges to Kevatta that instruction would allow people to converse with deities and celestial beings of other realms or dimensions of existence.
To illustrate this, Buddha tells Kevatta that a practitioner in Buddha’s community of meditators was contemplating the elements, and he wondered where the elements themselves come from, and where they come to an end.
So this meditator entered such a profound state of meditation that a portal opened up to other dimensions.
1) He goes through the portal, and he asks the celestial beings there about where all the elements cease to be. They tell him they have no idea.
But they suggest that maybe the beings in another celestial realm will know. So the meditator goes to them. They don’t know either, and they make the same suggestion: That maybe the beings in an even higher celestial realm might know.
He goes through this 14 times. Finally he arrives at the highest celestial realm. Those beings tell him that they don’t have the answer but that Brahma must surely know. Why? Because, they explain to the meditator, the Great Brahma is the great Conqueror, “the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be. He is higher and more sublime than we are,” say these beings, “and he should know where the elements come to an end.”
The meditator says, “That’s great. But, friends, where is the Great Brahma now?”
And they say, “We don’t know where he is or even what he is right now. But if you stick around, then light and radiance will appear, and then Brahma will appear.”
And soon enough, light and radiance appeared, and Brahma appeared.
And the meditator went up to Brahma and said, “Friend, where do the elements come to an end?”
And Brahma looked at him and said, “Listen here, meditator. I am Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be.”
The meditator looked at him. He replied, “Friend, I didn’t ask you if you were Brahma, the Great Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-Seeing, All-Powerful, the Sovereign Lord, the Maker, Creator, Chief, Appointer and Ruler, Father of All That Have Been and Shall Be. I asked you where the elements come to an end.”
This happened a second time, and even a third time. But after the third time, Braham took the meditator by the arm and led him away from the other celestial beings. And he said,
“Meditator, these gods, these other celestial beings, they firmly believe there is nothing the Great Brahma doesn’t know, nothing the Great Brahma doesn’t sense, nothing of which the Great Brahma is unaware.
“Therefore I can’t say what I’m about to say to you in front of them. You see, the truth is that I don’t have any idea where the elements come to an end. But Buddha knows. Go back and ask him.”
Remember that Buddha is sharing this story with Kevatta. And he tells Kevatta that, just like a strong human being might flex their extended arm, suddenly the meditator vanished from the highest celestial realm and appeared in front of Buddha.
And he asked Buddha his question.
And first, Buddha said, “It’s good you finally came back to me.” Then he told the meditator that he didn’t ask the question in quite the right way. So he adjusted the question and then gave the answer:
It is in our own mind that the elements come to an end.
Think of what a wild teaching that is, and what it means that this meditator needed such a teaching.
Most of us don’t have the kind of meditative power that when we sit down to meditate each day, portals to other Cosmic dimensions open up in our mind.
So we’re talking about an Olympic level meditator—a Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, or Michael Jordan level meditator. And even though this chap could open Cosmic portals in his mind, he still didn’t understand his mind as well as Buddha.
According to the tradition, Buddha knew all of this was happening, because he had psychic powers. But he let the meditator go through all of this, because he wanted the meditator to see clearly that gods don’t have all the answers.
We’re in sacrilegious territory here. Some people might find it offensive that Buddha suggests an enlightened human being can know things that even a god doesn’t know.
In Buddha’s time, there were people every bit as devoted to their god and people today. So he offered a radical message that says every one of us—even the gods—have equal access to wisdom.
The gods can learn what Buddha knows, but only if they practice. Buddhist philosophy views being a god as a poor state for enlightenment, because it’s just too much fun being a god. A god has too much power and veneration, and too long a lifespan, to become passionate about spiritual practice.
Okay, those are our opening stories. Let’s create a little context for them, so we can receive some of the deeper meanings and insights they offer.
We can consider this contemplation one philosopher’s reflections on how we might better understand and work with healing medicine of any kind—and specifically focusing on psychedelic medicine, so that those powerful medicines can help us to do what we always mention in our introduction: Healing ourselves and the world at the same time.
If we don’t do that, we will waste a precious opportunity, and we will allow these medicines, and our very lives, to become limited and even trivialized. If we want to liberate ourselves in mutuality with the world, then we need to free ourselves from the pattern of insanity that has us all in its grips.
The title of this contemplation—The Buddha Molecule—felt like a fun turn of phrase, and I think you’ll appreciate the significance of it as we go deeper. However, the title doesn’t make this a Buddhist contemplation in any narrow sense. I’m a philosopher, not a Buddhist.
But why mention the Buddha at all?
For several reasons. One of which has to do with the dialogue I very much enjoyed with Rick Strassman. After reading his book, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, and then engaging in that dialogue with him, it seemed important to try and offer a different view from the one Rick puts forward in that dialogue and in his book.
I do this with the utmost respect for Rick. He has put in a lot of hard work, and has lived an interesting life. He’s an intelligent person, and his work merits our attention and our respect.
But the first place I think we need some correction or broader perspective is in his views on Buddhist philosophy. A major premise of his book—and it runs like a thread through the text—is that Buddhist philosophy doesn’t offer us a helpful model for DMT experiences, and that the Hebrew Bible does offer a good model.
I was thrilled to read Rick’s book, because it at least addresses a basic concern I’ve had about psychedelic or holotropic medicines: namely, that we lack a proper philosophical context for working with these medicines in a way that maximizes their potential not only for each of us, but for the world we share.
My sense so far is that we mostly use these medicines in a way that limits their potential, and that means that, even if we ourselves seem to feel better, we may not realize how much potential we still have left covered over, and we may thus end up contributing to the problems of the world.
As a coarse example, I might fly to South America and take ayahuasca many times, and claim that it brought a lot of insight. And then some time later, I might assault someone at a nationally televised award ceremony, instigating a spectacle of aggression and media nonsense.
That seems to have happened in real life.
To speak more generally, and to put the matter bluntly, psychedelic medicines are getting co-opted into the larger pattern of insanity, and they have become part of the self-help catastrophe.
The self-help catastrophe creates conditions in which we help ourselves primarily by taking from the world. The world gives us its medicine, and we don’t give back in a way that not only balances things, but vitalizes them.
That means our healing comes at the cost of the ecologies we all depend on, and it means our healing can end up perpetuating the pattern of insanity that made us feel unwell in the first place. We just carry that pattern into new forms.
We can go further into that, but let’s stick with a crucial point on which Rick Strassman and I agree: We agree that holotropic or psychedelic medicines can give people powerful experiences, but that, without proper training, those experiences will be, as Rick puts it, aesthetically rich but informationally poor.
That means we experience something big and beautiful, and it can feel life-changing. But mostly it overwhelms us, and we can’t say very much about it. We don’t bring back insights and visions with enough clarity and detail that they can not only guide and direct our own lives, but could also guide and direct our whole community—I mean the whole community of life, all our relations.
We can make a clear contrast between someone like Black Elk, or Moses, or Buddha, on the one hand, and the typical person working with holotropic medicines on the other.
Rick focuses on people like Moses—prophets in the Jewish tradition. He makes a wonderful case that, because the prophets underwent training and lived a holistic and holy life, they could receive visionary LoveWisdom that could guide their entire culture. In this traditions, prophecy is ultimately an act of grace, but it also depends on our capacity to receive and communicate sacred inspiration.
Rick and I agree on this basic but essential issue: We need training and a holistic and ethical philosophy of life in order to maximize the potential of medicines that could bring transformational and healing insights.
Many people, maybe even most people, don’t realize this. The experiences they undergo feel so powerful, so real, and so transformative, that they don’t realize how much they’re missing.
I always go back to good old Joni Mitchell on this point. She told us that we don’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone. And we have to go one step further and realize that, if we never had it in the first place, we don’t know what we’re missing.
We don’t realize that our culture makes certain kinds of experience highly unlikely or even impossible for us. Together with the degradation of ecologies we have had a degradation of languages, cultures, and experiences. Just as some species and languages have gone extinct as a direct result of human activity, so too have some experiences become endangered and even perhaps in some cases extinct, or nearly extinct.
In our culture, in the dominant culture with all of its insanities, we don’t have an overarching context that makes it possible for us to orient toward certain aspects of the great mystery.
We have to seek out guidance.
While it thrills me that Rick has found that kind of guidance in the Hebrew Bible, I respectfully disagree with him on a few key points.
The main point we will consider here as a counter to Rick’s views is that Buddhist philosophy offers us a framework every bit as good as what we can find in the Abrahamic religions, which means Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in all their forms. I mean that Buddhist philosophy can help us understand psychedelic experiences and that, crucially, they can help us work far more skillfully with these medicines, thus improving the experiences and the effects of those experiences in the World.
Now, we shouldn’t think of Buddhist philosophy as superior to any other tradition, and we will not view it as superior to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. But we could say that it might function much better, for more people—for several reasons:
First, before we say anything else here, let’s acknowledge Rick’s concerns about interfaith dialogue. He offered the perspective of certain Jewish thinkers who feel that interfaith dialogue is bad, because it makes each religion appear equal. I know that sounds tricky.
Each religion sees itself as the one true religion—or, at least, it can see itself that way. It’s unsurprising if a tradition sees itself as the best one we have.
But we could take a different attitude, and say, first of all, that we will focus on Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist science and psychology. The religious part is separable to a certain degree. So we’re sharing philosophical and psychological teachings, insights, practices, and suggestions. That seems more neutral.
In any case, we have a sincere aim here to not make anyone feel lesser. We don’t lower ourselves by respecting the lives and practices of people from other cultural and religious traditions. Rather, we all have to figure out how to make sense of mutual acceptance and respect from within the highest ethical calling of our own tradition, and not in some way that damns outsiders to some variety of eternal hell.
We have to be able to look at this impossible mystery and sense that, somehow or other, the mystery left us with differing points of view. Not only that, but maybe it works better that way, so that we can come together in dialogue and genuinely learn from each other.
Secondly, the Hebrew Bible doesn’t say much about how exactly we must train our mind to work skillfully with the kinds of states and experiences these medicines help us enter into. While all the Abrahamic traditions carry information about mind training, it’s not mainstream, and it’s not spelled out in any great detail in the central texts.
Thirdly, many people have become frustrated with the Abrahamic religions. I think that’s bad news. I encourage people with ancestors in those traditions to inquire into them. We don’t realize how much we lost in our rejection of them. They have a lot of wisdom, and they can help to heal our lives and our world. They can even help us if we choose to work with psychedelic medicines. We may still want help from philosophies and psychologies outside our tradition, but that doesn’t mean they can’t support us.
This is part of what I appreciate so much about Rick’s work: He went into his own lineage, and he found guidance there.
However, while I encourage us all to value spiritual and philosophical lineages within the dominant culture, many people have no interest in getting deeply involved in some of these traditions in ways that would allow them to learn practices that could actually help them to work with holotropic medicines in an optimal way.
Many people simply have no interest in converting to the Abrahamic religions, or in professing them as their personal faith. They need a philosophical tradition that can give them everything they required for optimal transformational insight and healing, but without having a theistic focus. Buddhist philosophy can do that.
Fourth, not only atheists, but even committed members of the Abrahamic traditions have turned to dialogue and also practice within the Buddhist traditions, in part because of the clarity of Buddhist teachings on how to train the mind and heart.
Let’s pause to note that mind training means heart training, and it’s holistic. So we could spell it out as heart-mind-body-world training. But that’s a mouthful. Each time I say mind training, I mean heart-mind-body-world training. They all go together.
Okay, but the point here is that we can find Christian monastics—people who consider themselves Christians and have entered a monastic life—some of these people have also become Buddhist monastics, because they see Buddhist philosophy as teaching them how to be the best Christians they can be. In their lives, Buddhist philosophy helps them realize the teachings of the Bible. So they are Christians (or Jews or whatever) who practice Buddhist philosophy as the best way to be Christians (or Jews or whatever).
Buddhist philosophy can do this in part because, as we just noted, the Bible just doesn’t have the detailed and elaborated mind training practices in it that we find in the Buddhist traditions. And the Bible doesn’t give us the systematized map of the mind and heart that we find in Buddhist psychology. Buddhist philosophy gives us ideas and practices that we can put directly to work in our lives, including in our encounters with psychedelics. Buddhist philosophy can make us far more skillful psychonauts, and nothing I know of can rival its capacity to empower us.
This doesn’t mean Buddhist philosophy is the best philosophy. Others may be as good, and depending on our total situation, other philosophies may prove better for us. But I don’t think there is one that surpasses Buddhist philosophy, and among other things it can serve as a supplement and enhancement to any path we might already be engaged with, as long as we work with sincerity and discernment.
We could take a very cynical stance and claim that Buddhist philosophy could be some kind of evil teaching which puts on nice clothes so as to lure unsuspecting Christians or Jews into following false teachings. I know most people practice a little more open-mindedness than this, but we should at least acknowledge this issue, and use critical thinking.
Thinking critically, we can see that Buddhist ethics agrees quite clearly on all the major Abrahamic ethical commitments, and it has proven a helpful supplement for many people who consider themselves inheritors of the Abrahamic traditions.
Moreover, we could take a more inclusive view that reality is so wondrous and mysterious, that the creator or the great mystery put different kinds of knowledge with different traditions, so that we could all share what we know, and by such means bring about a greater life for all. Many indigenous philosophers think this way.
We don’t have to imagine this as divinely ordained. We can just think of it as a reality that offers up many cultural and experiential possibilities. Each one of the venerable traditions of our World has a place in our World, and each one has a special magic in it.
That’s our approach here. We will take an inclusive look at Buddhist philosophy as having some very special contributions to make for anyone at all, including someone seeking to work with holotropic of psychedelic medicines, and irrespective of their other religious commitments.
We want to find common ground and also offer some encouragement to ourselves, encouragement to think about how to work with our whole lives more skillfully, and that would including working more skillfully with holotropic medicines—if we decide to do that.
To say it again, they have a lot of potential. And they have become increasingly popular and fascinating to people. In some ways, we see a second psychedelic renaissance unfolding in the dominant culture, and we need to do everything we can to take care of ourselves, each other, and our world in the presence of these medicines.
Let’s begin with a little more respectful criticism of Rick’s views. I don’t want to pick on him, but any time we engage in public discourse, we naturally invite discussion and critique. We all need to think together. This expands the ecology of mind.
And it’s important to know that Rick seems to have some questionable views when it comes to Buddhist philosophy. I do recommend his books, but if you read them and think you are getting a reliable exposition of Buddhist philosophy, that will leave you with incorrect views.
To take a simple but significant example, in his book, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, Rick discusses the five aggregates of Buddhist psychology. This is one of the analyses Buddha gave of our experience, and a framework he gave for investigating our experience.
The traditional five aggregates are sometimes translated as form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.
Here’s the important point: In Buddhist philosophy, feeling refers to bare sensation. In fact, the word sensation is probably a better translation. Feeling does not mean emotions. It means the basic quality of sensation. We experience each moment as positive, negative, or neutral. That’s feeling. That’s how each moment feels to us.
I know of no Buddhist philosopher who teaches this as the same as emotion, and most Buddhist philosophers dealing with westerners are careful to point out that feeling is NOT emotion.
However, Rick refers to feeling as emotions.
This goes far beyond nitpicking for several reasons, not least of which that we are talking about something basic and central to Buddhist philosophy. If we don’t understand the core teachings, what kind of spiritual realization can we expect?
The importance of this relates to a major issue with respect to spiritual life in general, and holotropic medicines in particular, and that is—that we have marginalized, repressed, and suppressed our need for rigorous study and learning. We have so-called nondual teachers and gurus telling us we don’t need to study anything. And even in the Buddhist traditions, some practitioners do very little study.
Anyone reading Buddhist philosophy would understand that feeling is not emotion, from the Buddhist perspective. “Feeling” is a technical term. We have to use the definition the tradition provides. And it’s essential to get it right.
Moreover, the term takes its fullest meaning from direct practice. “Feeling” isn’t just some concept. It’s part of practice. And so we aren’t engaged in intellectual entertainment when we notice an error in the description of feeling. Rather, we’re noticing a practice that could take us in the wrong direction. The foundations of mindfulness, for instance, which Buddha called the direct path to enlightenment, those foundations of mindfulness depend on investigating feeling, and verifying how it works in our experience.
It becomes incredibly empowering to explore the nature of feeling, and to notice how we habitually recoil from anything unpleasant or even potentially unpleasant, how we crave pleasant things, and how we get bored or spacey when experience feels neutral. As we begin to sense this directly, we can stop being driven by this basic component of experience, and we can start to experience more spaciousness, freedom, and clarity of mind.
And that matters. If something in us avoids negative experiences, and even the fear or threat of a negative experience, then that something can keep certain experiences at bay. If we work with a holotropic medicine and something the ego finds too scary starts to come up, the mind may leap past it, even if we really needed to look at it. In fact, our ego can keep the material fully repressed, and we won’t even notice it.
In a general way, we can say the ego will leap right past our own liberation, because that liberation seems frightening to the ego. If we understand the way feeling operates in our experience, we will begin to feel more confident, courageous, and compassionate in the face of challenging experiences. And we must also keep in mind that this applies to experiences the ego imagines will feel uncomfortable or even awful, but which in reality may feel far less painful, and may even feel ecstatic.
In short, Buddha’s teachings related to feeling can become a game-changer, and thus we should try to get it right.
We consider this not only to point out an apparent error in Rick’s understanding of Buddhist philosophy and psychology, but also to acknowledge a larger cultural trend. It seems that some lineages of practice don’t require their students to understand the basics of their own tradition. We think we can practice Zen without ever reading Buddha’s teachings. I’m not accusing Rick of not reading the Buddha’s teachings. We’re talking about a general trend.
For instance, I have seen this in the mindfulness practices. I have spoken with several people who have mindfulness certifications of one kind or another who confessed that they had not read Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness. So, we can get formally certified to teach mindfulness without ever reading Buddha’s teachings.
Just as we might think we can practice meditation without serious study, we also seem to think we can work with holotropic medicines without serious study. Some people do think they’re studying something. However, given a choice between reading Buddha and reading Brene Brown, there really isn’t a choice—not if we want to know our own mind and achieve liberation.
I say that with great respect to Brene Brown. From what I can see, she has tried to bring a very positive message to the world. But as far as I know, she hasn’t said anything the wisdom traditions don’t already teach us, and reading popular books isn’t the same as studying and practicing a holistic philosophy of life informed by a long lineage of teachers regarded as sages. Buddha was a rare kind of genius, and studying the philosophy of such a genius can open up possibilities we cannot fully imagine.
And it’s perfectly fine if we experience Brene Brown as accessible and Buddha as challenging. The best books are over our heads, so to speak. They stretch us. And they encourage us to find teachers who can explain them to us, and orient us to realize the truths they point to—beyond the sorts of tropes the dominant culture is happy to indulge.
This gets at something we’ll consider more fully in a moment, so let’s just move on with our critique of Rick’s views on Buddhist philosophy.
We only have time for a few more brief reflections.
First, on a positive note, Rick skillfully acknowledges that the Buddhism many people in the dominant culture know is something limited. This ends up becoming a confusing point though.
While Rick thus lets us know that Buddhist philosophy has a place for the kinds of experiences we might have with holotropic medicines, it puzzles me that he doesn’t just go into elaborating what Buddhist philosophy has to offer us. Instead, he seems to take the confused and limited version of Buddhist philosophy, and then call Buddhist philosophy itself inadequate.
Does that make sense? Why admit that the view we have doesn’t generalize to the whole set of traditions, but then speak as if it does?
In practice, this applies to holotropic experiences in the following way: Our limited notions about Buddhist philosophy lead us to think it wants us to see the experiences with holotropic medicines as mere illusion. That’s a problem, in part because some of these experiences feel more real to people than habitual reality. But it’s also a problem because it’s not true to the Buddhist traditions. Rick admits this, but seems to say, “Well, we’re stuck with this view of Buddhist philosophy, and so we can’t use it to work with these medicines.”
That seems so strange. Why not go to the aspects of the tradition that DO help us work with these medicines? That’s what we will recommend here.
Of course, in a way, I think Rick made the right choice. He could have gone way deeper into Buddhism, going beyond the particular version of Amercanized Zen he might have been taught, and found out what the Buddhist traditions say that seems most resonant with and relevant to the experiences of psychedelic medicines. But it seems so much better that he instead returned to his own ancestors, and fell in love with the tradition.
Okay . . . a related point is this: Rick seems to think of enlightenment in the Buddhist traditions as some kind of white light unitive mysticism. This simply doesn’t hold up. I know of no serious Buddhist philosopher who would accept that as a characterization of Buddhist enlightenment.
Moreover, the Zen traditions—and that’s where Rick trained when he was a practicing Buddhist—the Zen traditions make this abundantly clear. Buddhist philosophy is a relational philosophy. It’s much more resonant with the Jewish mystic Martin Buber’s philosophy than it is with vague notions of a unitive mysticism.
Of course, Rick has objections to many Jewish mystical traditions. But the basic point holds: Enlightenment in Buddhist philosophy is a profound and inconceivable relational experience, and it isn’t a white light unitary experience.
But there is something to be said for Rick’s experience both of studying and practicing Buddhist philosophy in the U.S. as a lay practitioner, and also his particular experience in Zen.
In general, Buddhist philosophy in the U.S. gets stripped of anything people might consider supernatural.
We have already addressed some of the problems with this framing. If Nature herself is already super, then the concept of the supernatural falls apart. Nature is super, and we don’t understand Nature well enough to write off possibilities on the basis of metaphysical speculation. It’s unscientific, and also lacks intellectual conscience.
Buddhist philosophy as it appears in the U.S. basically comes far more domesticated than maybe what we deeply need.
Buddhist philosophy also comes pretty watered down. We opened with some stories from the Buddhist tradition. Buddha taught for over 4 decades. He gave a wide variety of teachings for a wide variety of people. If you gather together every teaching attributed to Buddha, you get literally thousands of pages.
I myself haven’t read all of this, and I often think of it as either synchronicity or coincidence that I have read any given teaching.
When we expand Buddhist philosophy to include other teachers revered as sages, we get into the tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of pages. It’s incredible.
So I don’t expect someone like Rick to have read all of this stuff. In a Buddhist culture, people might start to learn and even memorize huge amounts of this literature from a very young age. The Dalai Lama started training at about 5 years old. So, we would expect him to have the knowledge level of multiple professors with PhDs in Buddhist philosophy.
Ordinary folk like us don’t have this level of training. So we have to do our best.
Even the Zen tradition in which Rick studied has a vast literature. Not every U.S. student of Zen has read very fully or very deeply into that literature.
I say all of this in part to preface another story. In this story, a highly respected fellow named Anuruddha goes up to a perhaps even more respected fellow named Śāriputra. Anuruddha was Siddhartha’s cousin, and he became one of the ten principal disciples of the philosopher. He had mastered some powerful psychic states, but he hadn’t become enlightened. Śāriputra was kind of Siddharth’s right-hand person (technically one of two men and two women who functioned as his right and left hands—but Śāriputra has maintained a higher profile historically), so his advice carried a lot of weight.
Anuruddha approached Śāriputra and he said, “Friend, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I survey a thousandfold world system. Energy is aroused in me without slackening; my mindfulness is established without confusion; my body is tranquil without disturbance; my mind is concentrated and one-pointed. Yet my mind is still not fully liberated.”
So, here we have something like an apostle or saint telling us that he has perfect mindfulness, perfect energy and engagement, perfect peace and tranquility, perfect concentration.
This guy received direct instruction from the Buddha himself, and he had nothing to do all day long other than practice, practice, practice, so we can imagine he could have gotten pretty darn skilled.
Here’s what Śāriputra said in reply: He said, “Friend, when you think: ‘With the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I survey a thousandfold world system,’ this is your conceit. And when you think: ‘Energy is aroused in me without slackening; my mindfulness is established without confusion; my body is tranquil without disturbance; my mind is concentrated and one-pointed,’ this is your restlessness. And when you think: ‘Yet my mind is still not liberated,’ this is your remorse.
“It would be good if you would abandon these three qualities and stop attending to them. Instead, direct your mind to the deathless.”
He basically tells the guy: “You’re full of yourself. This is all spiritual materialism. Let it all go and get back to the real practice.” (Anguttara Nikaya 3.130).
The Zen tradition took this very seriously, and, basically, any time a modern student of Zen has some kind of psychic experience, the Zen teacher will say, “Forget all of that! Return to the deathless!”
This does not in any way mean that the Zen traditions themselves have no recognition of experiences that seem like psychedelic experiences. Moreover, it says nothing about whether the Zen traditions can help us prepare for, work with, and understand such experiences.
Does that make sense? Just because a tradition doesn’t focus on travelling to other dimensions of reality, talking to celestial beings, foreseeing the future, and so on, that doesn’t mean the tradition lacks the tools for doing such things in highly effective ways. The Chinese invented gunpowder, but they used it mainly for fireworks. But we cannot say they lacked the means to make artillery and explosives.
Of course, in point of fact, the Hebrew Bible doesn’t exactly focus on these kinds of experiences either. They’re common, but perhaps no more common than in the Buddhist tradition.
Either way, I don’t blame Rick for not knowing about all these teachings and all these aspects of Buddhist philosophy. It’s just that I don’t think he should have claimed Buddhist philosophy can’t offer exceptional support for working with DMT and other psychedelics, especially without doing further research.
All these stories have illustrated a direct contradiction to Rick’s claims that Buddhist philosophy doesn’t have a place for things like interacting with non-human entities, entering different dimensions of reality, and in general manifesting mind.
This has nothing to do with picking on poor Rick Strassman. This has to do with critical thinking, which isn’t personal. Specifically, it has to do with a basic problem: How can we work with the medicines of our World—any of the medicines of our World—in the most skillful and beautiful ways, so that we can bring greater wisdom, compassion, and healing to ourselves, other beings, and the World we share.
Buddhist philosophies are not immune to the kinds of spiritual materialism we see at work both in the major religious traditions of the dominant culture, and also in the world of psychedelics. Many of us have heard some disturbing stories about things that have happened in the context of working with psychedelics. And this has nothing to do with psychedelics in particular. It has to do with the fundamental challenges of spiritual materialism, which exist no matter what medicine, religion, politics, or general philosophy we try to root ourselves in.
And spiritual materialism means that absolutely anything can become co-opted into furthering our suffering, our ignorance, and our oppression—both the oppression others impose on us, and the oppression we impose on ourselves and other beings, whether human or nonhuman.
Buddhist philosophy has always been good about trying to put spiritual materialism front and center so we can deal with it.
And, most importantly, if Buddhist philosophies can help us work with the medicines of our Worlds in powerful and empowering ways, we need to cut through any delusions we have about those philosophies, and learn whatever might bring us that empowerment.
It’s interesting to think of medicine in relation to any philosophy. Buddha was specifically depicted as a physician of the soul, and Tibetan physicians are expected to be advanced spiritual practitioners, and they of course revere the sacred image of the Medicine Buddha, that beautiful blue buddha that many of us have seen.
The same basic image of healing holds in Ancient Greece too. In that lineage—which is not just my lineage, but something that belongs to all of us in the dominant culture and everyone else who feels drawn to it—in the Greek lineage as with some many other traditions, philosophy is therapy for the soul, and the philosopher makes use of a pharmakon of teachings and practices to help us heal ourselves and our World.
But maybe the best thing about Rick’s work is not only that he encourages us to work more skillfully with these medicines, but putting it into a religious context reminds us that we can make this work a sacrament. That means we treat the medicine as sacred, and allow it to help us see ourselves and our World as sacred. The way of knowing we most need could be called an epistemology of the sacred.
Any of our venerable philosophical, religious, or spiritual traditions can help us arrive at that. We have just explored how Buddhist philosophy can do so.
We do need to go at least a little further to get to the Buddha Molecule, the deeper meaning in the title of our contemplation, but this is a good place to pause and breathe, so we will bring the present contemplation to a close.
In that pause, we might try to keep alive the issue Buddha raised in the teaching encounters we considered. He said that many people wouldn’t think the practice of philosophy could produce extraordinary experiences.
Maybe we should sit with whether or not we truly value our own mind and the World we share. Do we have confidence in our mind and our World? Do we trust the vast potentials and the magic of our own mind and World? For the religious among us, this includes asking if they really trust the divine.
And for all of us it means asking if we trust sacredness—the sacredness of the Cosmos and the sacredness of the mystery to which we all belong.
I will release a second part to this contemplation as soon as possible after this one gets released. That way, you can continue when you feel ready.
However long a pause you take, feel free to get in touch with any questions, reflections, or stories of the power or danger of psychedelic medicines or any other medicines. Just go to dangerouwisdom.org
Until next time, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the World are not two things—take good care of them.