The Buddha Molecule, Part II: Psychedelics and the Soul of Visionary LoveWisdom
The Buddha Molecule, Part II: Psychedelics 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?
Psychedelic medicines have a burgeoning presence in our culture. People have experienced healing and transformation with them. How can we work with them, and with our whole lives, in accord with wisdom, love, and beauty? With a more holistic approach, these medicines could empower us in ways that might yet surprise us.
In this contemplation we begin with the source of the term, “psychedelic”. By looking at where it came from, and what its fuller meaning points to, we can consider more deeply how a holistic philosophy of life like Buddhism can open up potentials for us to become the medicine the World needs right now.
Among other things, we will discuss one of the most psychedelic texts in the history of world philosophy: The Avatamsaka Sutra, or Flower Ornament Scripture. This is one of my favorite books of all time, and I think you will appreciate the way it expands the imagination and vibrates with a kind of field of enlightenment energy.
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.
We pick up here with our contemplation of the Buddha Molecule: DMT and the Soul of Visionary LoveWisdom.
We’re thinking about how to work with the medicines of our world, including psychedelic medicines. They have become increasingly accepted, and they have a lot of potential. Some people have experienced what they feel are deep transformation and healing with these medicines, but they come with a variety of risks—some rather obvious, and some quite subtle.
As with so many things in our lives, we have to confront our philosophy of psychedelics. We can’t work with psychedelics in the absence of a philosophy, because philosophy is simply how we do things. Wisdom means our way of doing things shows skill and insight. Wisdom is what truly works, without creating further problems.
When it comes to philosophy, the only question we can have in our lives and in any activity is whether we have a sufficiently skillful and holistic philosophy, or whether we have something fragmented and ultimately fragmenting.
In our last contemplation, we tried to begin to sense the ways Buddhist philosophy has a clear place for some of the phenomena of psychedelic experiences—things like interacting with non-human entities, entering different dimensions of reality, and in general manifesting mind.
In this contemplation we’ll go a little deeper into the meaning of the Buddha Molecule and the soul of visionary LoveWisdom, so that we can sense a little better how Buddhist philosophy offers us an exceptional support for working with psychedelics and with the other medicines of our World.
We’ll have just a little more of the bigger picture, and then in a final contemplation we’ll look at the most essential practices that I as a philosopher would recommend for anyone seeking insight and healing, no matter what kind of medicine they work with. And really, we’ll be talking about what brings true peace and joy, true wisdom, love, and beauty into our lives and our World.
Let’s make something clear: The present contemplation isn’t about abstractions. Among other things, we want to try to understand why we need a holistic philosophy of life informing our work with any of the medicines of our World. And part of what a holistic philosophy provides are the kind of basic image of reality that we are trying to outline here. The big picture visions and suggestions we make here have the most concrete and practical consequences in our everyday lives, and in the work we do with any of the medicines of our World.
In this contemplation, maybe we can begin with the term “psychedelic”.
As many of us know, “psychedelic” means mind manifesting, or that which shows the mind, or that which makes the mind real.
The “psyche” in psychedelic is the soul, and also the nature of the mind. Psychology is supposed to be the study of the mind, but so far we owe more to philosophy than to psychology as far as understanding and skillfully working with our minds.
Psyche means both mind and soul. In other words, it means life force, and life essence.
And “delos” means visible and clear. That means psychedelics can clarify the soul, clarify the mind.
The proto-Indo-European root of delos indicates shining or radiance. So, a psychedelic medicine reveals the radiance of the soul.
Many people know at least the basic idea that “psychedelic” means “mind manifesting”. People may not know all those nuances. And maybe not very many people know how we got the term psychedelic. It’s a helpful reflection.
We owe the term psychedelic to Dr. Humphry Osmond, a psychiatrist. Way back in 1957 he published a paper called, “A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents”.
What are psychotomimetic agents? Well, they would include DMT, LSD, and many other medicines.
Why were they called psychotomimetic? Because people thought that these medicines mainly mimic psychosis. The value of the medicines was thought to be confined to helping us understand schizophrenia or other cases of psychic breakdown.
Osmond argued that we shouldn’t see this as the only thing—and definitely not the most important thing—these medicines do. He thought they had much more potential for us, and that mental health professionals should work with them.
He also takes the time in that paper to acknowledge the debt we owe to our indigenous ancestors who courageously sought out and experimented with these medicines. He of course mentions indigenous peoples from Africa, the Americas, and so on. But we should keep in mind that all of us have a lineage that goes back to an indigenous people. Our own ancestors probably worked with these medicines.
In the Greek tradition, this is almost certainly so, and that tradition influenced the whole of the dominant culture. It’s important to keep in mind that the dominant culture doesn’t just have roots in the Hebrew Bible, but also Ancient Greece. In any case, wherever our ancestors come from, if we go back far enough, we will find an indigenous people who worked with a variety of states of consciousness. But now, the dominant culture narrows the states of consciousness we commonly have access to, and those states are not conducive to wisdom, love, and beauty in the fullest sense.
The mention of indigenous traditions is not a side branch, but integral to the main stalk or trunk of the tree of wisdom. One of the problems we face right now is that too few people work with psychedelics in accord with a sincere intention to reindigenize themselves and their culture. We will discuss the problem of intention in our next contemplation, but we need to consider the ways psychedelic medicines have gotten co-opted into the self-help catastrophe.
That co-opting means many of the people working with these medicines mainly do so in a manner that extracts from ecologies where they do not live. This is not a universal fact, but a matter of the apparent majority of the activity.
For instance, most of us, for instance, don’t live in a place where Ayahuasca and Chacruna grow. And so we have to go to somebody else’s ecology, or we have to extract it in some other way, and maybe the medicine has to be shipped to us.
Whether we go ourselves or have the medicine shipped, we are consuming from ecologies we don’t belong to, and we don’t tend to give back to them.
People go to Peru for an Ayahuasca vacation. They don’t go to Peru principally to and save the rainforest—and then in their spare time, or during some special sacred time, have an Ayahuasca ritual. And they don’t usually go to Peru with the clear intention to reindigenize themselves and their culture.
Rather, people fly thousands of miles, take Ayahuasca, and then leave. Maybe they spend some time there, practicing a dieta, spending money in villages, and so on. But they also eaten these people’s food, drink the water, use all manner of resources, and they burn a bunch of fossil fuels to get down there and back.
And when they return home, they may return to a job that mostly extracts from ecologies all over the World.
So, there’s all kinds of karma being created, including ecological degradation. All that karma goes into this Ayahuasca experience, and becomes part of its effects in the World we share.
Again, these generalizations have exceptions. It seems that many people working with psychedelics experience increased ecological sensitivity. They may feel more connected to Earth, but we don’t know what that means. For instance, we don’t know how often that arises as a selection effect. In other words, a person open to working with an Earth medicine may be prone to feeling more connected to the Earth after their experience. On the other hand, a person disconnected from ecological reality may feel radically transformed—but that remains relative to where they started from. They may still live a life which is, overall, harmful to the ecologies we all depend on.
In any case we imagine, what we don’t know is how much any give person who works with psychedelic medicines will go on to increase their own ecofluency and the ecofluency of the culture. We need attunement with ecological and spiritual realities, in a way that sees them as unified rather than as two separate things.
This is all part of reindigenization—which means truly honoring our own indigenous ancestors and simultatneously honoring indigenous peoples alive today. And that in turn means healing a whole lot of inherited karma on all sides.
Okay, returning to Osmond.
In defining psychotomimetics, Osmond wanted to distinguish them from a lot of other substances people might argue over. Osmond recognized that many drugs produce significant changes in our bodies and minds, and he felt it important to exclude anesthetics, hypnotics, alcohol, and all derivatives of morphine, atropine, and cocaine from the class of medicines we now refer to as psychedelics.
Although he said our definition of the medicines he wished to include would change as we learned more about them and about ourselves, he suggested that we define them as “substances that produce changes in thought, perception, mood and sometimes posture, occurring alone or in concert, without causing either major disturbances of the autonomic nervous system or addictive craving, and although, with overdosage, disorientation, memory disturbance, stupor, and even narcosis may occur, these reactions are not characteristic.”
The main point he seemed to want to make is that, as he put it, “If mimicking mental illness were the main characteristic of these agents, “psychotomimetics” would indeed be a suitable generic term. It is true that they do so, but they do much more.”
And then he asked the following questions: He said, “Why are we always preoccupied with the pathological, the negative? Is good merely the absence of evil? Is pathology the only yardstick? Must we [mimic] Freud’s gloomier moods that persuaded him that a happy man is a self-deceiver evading the heartache for which there is no anodyne? Is not a child infinitely potential rather than polymorphously perverse?”
And in that spirit he considered several names for these medicines, to help us see them as capable of enriching our minds and enlarging our vision.
He considered the following names: psychephoric, psychehormic, psycheplastic, psychezymic, psychelytic, psycherhexic, and finally psychedelic.
He liked that last one best. But the others have interesting meanings if you recognize the etymologies. We have mind moving, mind provoking, mind transforming, mind fermenting, mind releasing, and mind bursting forth. I kind of like that one. And finally, we have mind manifesting, or mind clarifying, or mind radiance.
Osmond’s paper is worth reading, and a couple more things he wrote should stay with us in this context. First of all, he wrote,
“So far as I can judge, spontaneous experience of the kind we are discussing has always been infrequent, and the techniques for developing it are often faulty, uncertain, clumsy, objectionable, and even dangerous.”
That’s the vibe we’re working with in our contemplation together. We are turning to Buddhist philosophy precisely to address this issue. Buddhist LoveWisdom can help us become consistent, skillful, clear, precise, graceful, ethical, and genuinely helpful to ourselves and the World we share, including our work with medicines of any kind.
Then Osmond writes the following:
“I believe that the psychedelics provide a chance, perhaps only a slender one, for homo faber, the cunning, ruthless, foolhardy, pleasure-greedy toolmaker to merge into that other creature—whose presence we have so rashly presumed— [namely] homo sapiens, the wise, the understanding, the compassionate, in whose four-fold vision art, politics, science, and religion are one. Surely we must seize that chance.” (emphasis added, including altered syntax)
How marvelous! He invites us to unite art, science, religion, and politics. What a miraculous vision we would need.
And that gives us the subtitle of these contemplations. The full title is, “The Buddha Molecule: DMT and the Soul of Visionary LoveWisdom.” We are trying to get at what even a dominant culture psychiatrist saw as profoundly important—and urgent.
Now, I promise, one final bit from Osmond, because it was pretty spot on. Remember, this was written in 1957, by a man who seems to have worked with these medicines. This is a little longer passage, so stay with me, and I’ll let you know when we come to the end. Osmond wrote:
“[The] mystic and [the] scientist have the same recipe for those who seek truth. Perhaps, if we can [follow that recipe], we shall learn how to rebuild our world in another and better image, for our extraordinary technical virtuosity is forcing change on us whether we like it or not. Our old faults, however, persisting in our new edifice, are far more dangerous to us than they were in the old structure. The old world perishes and, unless we are to perish in its ruins, we must leave our old assumptions to die with it . . .
“While we are learning, we may hope that dogmatic religion and authoritarian science will keep away from each other’s throats . . . We need not shout down the voice of the mystic because we cannot hear it, or force our rationalizations on [them] for our own reassurance. Few of us can accept or understand the mind that emerges from these studies. Kant once said of Swedenborg, “Philosophy is often much embarrassed when she encounters certain facts she dare not doubt yet will not believe for fear of ridicule.” Sixty years ago orthodox physicists knew that the atom was incompressible and indivisible. Only a few cranks doubted this, yet who believes in the billiard-ball atom now?
“In a few years, I expect, the psychedelics that I have mentioned will seem as crude as our ways of using them. Yet even though many of them are gleanings from Stone Age peoples they can enlarge our experience greatly. Whether we employ these substances for good or ill, whether we use them with skill and deftness or with blundering ineptitude depends not a little on the courage, intelligence, and humanity of many of us who are working in the field today.”
Okay, that’s the quote. I left in the bit about Kant because it goes together with reference to Swedenborg and Osmond’s recognition that, as he put it, “Few of us can accept or understand the mind that emerges” or manifests from the study of psychedelic medicines. But Kant speaks foolishly here, projecting his narrow mind onto Sophia. Philosophy is not embarrassed by anomalous data. Rather, the true philosopher is always drawn there. The anomalous is Sophia calling to us.
The point of considering together this long passage is to bring home what the man who gave us the term psychedelics saw as the potential and calling of these medicines. It’s not that he’s the first and last word, but that he made some insightful suggestions.
And what we are trying to see here is that Buddhist philosophy itself is psychedelic. It causes the mind to become manifest to us, to become clear, to burst forth, to release, to reveal its inherent radiance. And thus the kind of mind that emerges in these studies is in fact accepted and to some degree understood within the Buddhist philosophical traditions.
What we may never fully understand by means of conventional psychedelic medicines, the great Buddhist philosophers understood by direct inquiry and experience, using the psychedelic medicine of Buddhist philosophy itself. We’re talking about incredible psychonauts who journeyed into the vast space of the mind using only the techniques of meditation, many of which remain unknown to most people in the dominant culture.
All of that means Buddhist philosophy provides skillful concepts and practices for helping us to rejuvenate our world in the manner Osmond suggests we must, if we will avoid catastrophe. And we have only gone further into danger since 1957. We seem to need to up our game, so to speak, and good philosophy—wherever we find it—will become a great medicine for us all. Good philosophy can empower our work with all the medicines of the World, including psychedelics.
Apropos of Osmond’s definition of psychedelics, we can note that the stories we opened with in our last contemplation illustrate that the practice of Buddhist philosophy alters our thought, perception, mood, and posture, in ways that include the most expansive and positive potentials Dr. Osmond had in mind when he coined the term psychedelic.
To say it again: Buddhist philosophy is itself a psychedelic. This is not accidental, but rather its explicit aim: To make the true nature of our mind and reality manifest to us, to allow the radiance of the mind to shine forth.
Moreover, Buddha himself is a psychedelic. His very presence is able to manifest the nature of mind and reality. We can see this, for instance, in the Vimalakirti Sutra. In that teaching, Buddha talks about the establishment of buddha-fields.
A Buddha-field is a field in the sense of a magnetic field or a gravitational field, and also a field in the sense of a place where things grow.
A Buddhafield means a mandala of spiritual awakening, or an ecology of insight, an ecology of practice and realization, an ecology of enlightenment.
Awakening beings make these fields of awakening, to help the beings in their world to become enlightened.
In other words, they create the set and setting, and they also offer the medicine that will help our mind to manifest and burst forth. And they do this on a galactic and even intergalactic scale.
In the Vimalakirti sutra, a psychedelic scene unfolds—actually several. The sutra is wild and magical in many ways. We won’t go into all of it.
But the teaching opens with Buddha surrounded by hundreds of thousands of beings. And 500 of them come up to him, each carrying a precious jeweled parasol, and they lay it before him.
After all of the parasols were laid down, the Buddha caused them to become transformed into a single, incredible canopy.
And in that massive canopy, our entire universe appeared, so that people could see limitless abodes of suns, moons, stars, and many dimensions of reality. They saw mountains, rivers, and many diverse ecologies. And they heard the voices of all the Buddhas in every direction in the universe—teaching philosophy in all the worlds of the universe.
Naturally, everyone felt ecstatic.
After this psychedelic display, Buddha goes on to talk about Buddhafields. And then, Buddha’s right-hand man, Shariputra, thinks the following thought:
He thinks, “If the buddha-field is pure only to the extent that the mind of the awakening being is pure, then, when Sakyamuni Buddha was engaged in the work of an awakening being, his mind must have been impure. Otherwise, how could this buddha-field appear to be so impure?”
That’s pretty hilarious. It would be like one of the Christian apostles thinking to himself, “Well, God must have a pretty impure mind, because this place is a dump.”
The Buddha could read Śāriputra’s mind, so he said, “What do you think, Śāriputra? Is it because the sun and moon are impure that those blind from birth don’t see them?”
Śāriputra replied, “No, Buddha . . . The fault lies with those blind from birth, and not with the sun and moon.”
Then Brahma spoke up. Remember Brahma, the god from our last contemplation?
There are many Brahmas, because there are many universes within the Cosmos. This Brahma was known as Brahma Sikhin. And he said to Śāriputra, “Reverend Śāriputra, do not say that the buddha-field of the Buddha is impure. The buddha-field of the Buddha is pure. I see the splendid expanse of the buddha-field of Sakyamuni Buddha as equal to the splendor of, for example, the abodes of the highest deities.”
And then Śāriputra said to this Brahma, “Well, as far as I’m concerned, O Brahma, I see this great earth, with its highs and lows, its thorns, its precipices, its peaks, and its abysses, as if it were entirely filled with excrement.”
Wow. How incredible! I love that.
And Brahma Sikhin gives him a great reply. Brahma says, “The fact that you see such a buddha-field as this as if it were so impure, reverend Śāriputra, is a sure sign that there are highs and lows in your mind and that your positive thought in regard to the buddha-gnosis (or buddha-knowledge) is not pure either. Reverend Śāriputra, those whose minds are impartial toward all living beings and whose positive thoughts toward the buddha-gnosis are pure see this buddha-field as perfectly pure.”
That already is a good teaching for people working with psychedelics.
But then, Buddha took matters into his own psychedelic hands—or in this case, his psychedelic feet—and he touched the ground—not only of our Earth, but of our billion-world-galactic universe—he touched that ground with his big toe, and suddenly the entire World was transformed into a huge mass of precious jewels, a magnificent array of many hundreds of thousands of clusters of precious gems, and it was all luminous and magnificent . . . Everyone in the entire assembly was filled with wonder, each perceiving themselves seated on a throne of jeweled lotuses.
Then, the Buddha said to Śāriputra, “Śāriputra, do you see this splendor of the virtues of the buddha-field?”
And Śāriputra replied, “I see it, Buddha! Here before me is a display of splendor such as I never before even heard of, let alone beheld!” (adapted from the translation by Robert Thurman)
So in this passage, we can get a clear feel for Buddha as a psychedelic agent. He touches his toe to the ground, and everyone experiences something profound, a bursting forth of the nature of their own mind and the nature of reality. We see that he has the capacity to alter our perception, our posture, our mood, our thinking, and our understanding.
Again, we’re using the definition of psychedelics given to us by the doctor who coined the term.
And isn’t it sweet that we can be psychedelics for each other? Buddha represents what we are. We all have buddha in us. It’s our basic goodness, our basic sanity, our inherent creativity and magic, our inherent meaning and mystery.
We can become present for people we love in such a way that we positively alter their mood, their perception, their thinking, their understanding, and even their posture. We can take care of each other that way, and give each other a good journey, a healing and vitalizing experience of life.
We can become present for our friends like that, and for our children, for strangers, for horses and wolves, for mountains and rivers, for bees and flowers, for countless sentient beings, and for the whole World too. The Earth would love for us to become good medicine.
All of this can begin to deepen our appreciation for the ways Buddhist philosophy might serve as a most excellent resource for modelling, supporting, working with, and integrating psychedelic experiences.
We need a lot more detail, and we could do many, many contemplations about this. But we’re going to consider just a couple more reflections as far as the bigger picture.
First, let’s acknowledge at least one major figure in fairly recent Buddhist history, one who gives a luminous example of the ways Buddhist philosophy can skillfully receive experiences of the kind that arise with psychedelic medicines, including DMT.
The figure I have in mind is Dudjom Lingpa. Dudjom Lingpa lived from 1835-1904. So his life doesn’t feel as far away as the life of Buddha.
Dudjom Lingpa stands out because he had no human teachers. He only received teaching from what we might call immaterial beings, or spiritually advanced beings operating on a Cosmic scale.
We should emphasize the fact that many other Tibetan sages received teachings from these sorts of special beings, and that includes Tsongkhapa, who was one of the most influential figures in the whole history of Tibetan Buddhism, and whose life and work were integral to the establishment of the Dalai Lama lineage.
But usually a Tibetan sage will also have had human teachers, and maybe primarily so. Dudjom Lingpa had only these special Cosmic level teachers.
That created a little skepticism about him at first. However, people began to look at Dudjom Lingpa’s students, and they could clearly see that Dudjom Lingpa must be an exceptional teacher.
That part alone should stand out, because in our context we can forget the importance of exceptional teachers. They should produce exceptional students.
Dudjom Lingpa recorded his visionary encounters with highly advanced spiritual beings. Those texts have become revered in Buddhist philosophy, and they continue to serve as powerful and empowering teachings for students today. How many experiences with psychedelic medicines result in that kind of positive effect? We’re talking about sophisticated and profound teaching texts.
If we judge even this one example according to Rick Strassman’s own suggestions, we must find Buddhist philosophy to perform exceptionally well. Dudjom Lingpa experienced something aesthetically rich—and also informationally rich. His experience became transmuted into something that could inform not only his own life, but the lives of others, the broader culture, and even the World. His works are venerated, and even having a translation of his works in our home is considered a positive and active presence, as if the text is itself a buddhafield, an enlightenment vibration opening our psyche.
When Dudjom Lingpa died, the tradition accepted that he had split his mindstream into five. In other words, he didn’t reincarnate as one person, but as five apparently different people.
We can recall here from our last contemplation that when Buddha talked about psychic powers, he included the power to go from manifesting as one to manifesting as many, and from manifesting as many to manifesting as one.
The Dalai Lama is kind of like this too. On one understanding, he is an emanation of a Cosmic level enlightenment being called Avalokiteshvara. That means Avalokiteshvara went from one to many, because he is still active as Avalokiteshvara in addition to manifesting as the Dalai Lama.
Imagine being the Dalai Lama. He is probably a very advanced spiritual practitioner, to put the matter conservatively. Most of us will never have that level of training and practice. But maybe he still doesn’t feel like Avalokiteshvara. Nevertheless, the tradition can view him that way, and it means Avalokiteshvara can emanate as a being that doesn’t fully know itself as Avalokiteshvara.
It’s an extremely trippy concept. And the Buddhist tradition accepts it as a real possibility—for people like us, human beings who differ only on the basis of practice and realization.
That, too, reveals one of the central issues here. We’ve already touched on this. Buddha tells us that we are just like he is. The only thing standing between us and enlightenment is our own ignorance. And we can cut through that ignorance. It’s not permanent. It’s not essential to us.
As for what that enlightenment might be like, we will turn to our final example of the psychedelic character of Buddhist philosophy: The Flower Garland Sutra.
This is hands down one of my favorite books of all time. It’s incredible. It’s a psychedelic encyclopedia of Buddhist LoveWisdom.
It’s not the kind of book we can just sit down and read. As we considered earlier: The best books are over our heads. They help us to expand, to see beyond what we can currently comprehend.
But I still encourage you to try reading it. You can open it randomly, and if you savor a page or two or three, you may find it beginning to work on you.
The very text is psychedelic. It manifests mind and the nature of mind.
The great American Buddhist philosopher Robert Thurman even reported that he was reading this text, and suddenly saw jeweled light emanating from it. I believe him, as much as I would believe him if he reported such a thing after taking DMT. It’s that kind of text.
Fair warning, it’s also about 1500 pages long. Again, not the kind of book we just sit down and read. It’s an expansive and magical expression of Buddhist LoveWisdom. It’s not for everyone, but it’s definitely worth reading at least some of it.
The philosopher D.T. Suzuki referred to it as “the consummation of Buddhist thought, Buddhist sentiment, and Buddhist experience.” He wrote that, in this text,
“not only deeply speculative minds find satisfaction, but humble spirits and heavily oppressed hearts, too, will find their burdens lightened. Abstract truths are so concretely, so symbolically represented here that one will finally come to a realization of the truth that even in a particle of dust the whole universe is seen reflected—not this visible universe only, but a vast system of universes, conceivable by the highest minds only.”
I’ll read you the opening paragraphs, which unfold as Buddha attains enlightenment, here on Earth. Picture this in your mind like a psychedelic experience, or the way you might imagine such an experience if you never worked with psychedelics. Those of you who have worked with psychedelics will notice how strongly this text resonates with the experiences of those medicines.
Okay, here we go:
“It happened like this: At one time the Buddha was in the land of Magadha, in a state of purity, at the site of enlightenment, having just realized true awareness. The ground was solid and firm, made of diamond, adorned with exquisite jewel discs and myriad precious flowers, with pure clear crystals. The ocean of characteristics of the various colors appeared over an infinite extent. There were banners of precious stones, constantly emitting shining light and producing beautiful sounds. Nets of myriad gems and garlands of exquisitely scented flowers hung all around. The finest jewels appeared spontaneously, raining inexhaustible quantities of gems and beautiful flowers all over the earth. There were rows of jewel trees, their branches and foliage lustrous and luxuriant. By the Buddha’s spiritual power, he caused all the adornments of this enlightenment site to be reflected therein.
“The tree of enlightenment was tall and outstanding. Its trunk was diamond, its main boughs were lapis lazuli, its branches and twigs were of various precious elements. The leaves, spreading in all directions, provided shade, like clouds. The precious blossoms were of various colors, the branching twigs spread out their shadows. Also the fruits were jewels containing a blazing radiance. They were together with the flowers in great arrays. The entire circumference of the tree emanated light; within the light there rained precious stones, and within each gem were enlightening beings, in great hosts like clouds, simultaneously appearing.
“Also, by virtue of the awesome spiritual power of the Buddha, the tree of enlightenment constantly gave forth sublime sounds speaking various truths without end.
“The palace chamber in which the Buddha was situated was spacious and beautifully adorned. It extended throughout the ten directions. It was made of jewels of various colors and was decorated with all kinds of precious flowers. The various adornments emanated lights like clouds; the masses of their reflections from within the palace formed banners.
“A boundless host of enlightening beings, the congregation at the site of enlightenment, were all gathered there: by means of the ability to manifest the lights and inconceivable sounds of the Buddhas, they fashioned nets of the finest jewels, from which came forth all the realms of action of the spiritual powers of the Buddhas, and in which were reflected images of the abodes of all beings.
“Also, by virtue of the aid of the spiritual power of the Buddha, they embraced the entire cosmos in a single thought.
“Their lion seats were high, wide, and beautiful. The bases were made of jewels, their nets of lotus blossoms, their tableaus of pure, exquisite gemstones. They were adorned with various flowers of all colors. Their roofs, chambers, steps, and doors were adorned by the images of all things. The branches and fruits of jewel trees surrounded them, arrayed at intervals.
“Clouds of radiance of jewels reflected each other: the Buddhas of the ten directions conjured regal pearls, and the exquisite jewels in the topknots of all the enlightening beings all emanated light, which came and illuminated them.
“Furthermore, sustained by the spiritual power of all Buddhas, they expounded the vast perspective of the Enlightened Ones, their subtle tones extending afar, there being no place they did not reach.
“At that time, the Buddha, the World Honored One, in this setting, attained to supreme, correct awareness of all things. His knowledge entered into all times with complete equanimity; his body filled all worlds; his voice universally accorded with all lands in the ten directions. Like space, which contains all forms, he made no discrimination among all objects. And, as space extends everywhere, he entered all lands with equanimity. His body forever sat omnipresent in all sites of enlightenment. Among the host of enlightening beings, his awesome light shone clearly, like the sun emerging, illumining the world. The ocean of myriad virtues which he practiced in all times was thoroughly pure, and he constantly demonstrated the production of all the buddha-lands, their boundless forms and spheres of light extending throughout the entire cosmos, equally and impartially.
“He expounded all truths, like spreading great clouds. Each of his hair tips was able to contain all worlds without interference, in each manifesting immeasurable spiritual powers, teaching and civilizing all sentient beings. His body extended throughout the ten directions, yet without coming or going. His knowledge entered into all forms and realized the emptiness of things. All the miraculous displays of the Buddhas of past, present, and future, were all seen in his light, and all the adornments of inconceivable eons were revealed.
“There were great enlightening beings numerous as the atoms in ten buddha-worlds surrounding him.”
Okay . . . This is just the opening. The text just gets better and better, and in many ways wilder.
Notice the fractal quality introduced here. The Buddha contains all worlds in each hair tip. In fact, if we could look into each atom of his body, we would find a universe.
This same kind of vision allows Buddha to be under the tree of enlightenment, but also in a palace that itself extends throughout the whole Cosmos.
And we find here a reality comprised not of atoms ultimately, but of something subatomic. We see reality pervaded by a kind of luminous jewel plasma. Sometimes a diamond surface is firm, but sometimes the jewel energy comes in the form of mists and clouds.
And notice how when the Buddha realizes full enlightenment, he becomes present everywhere and at all times.
It’s all super trippy and inconceivable. But the text is also filled with teachings, so it’s not just the textual equivalent of a cheap tie-dye shirt. The teachings can help us in our lives, and the images contain potential for transformative and healing insight.
Let’s consider another passage from the text. This one touches on how many kinds of beings and world systems or universes Buddhist LoveWisdom includes in its cosmic vision.
Some people have depicted Ayahuasca as a being, like a goddess or bodhisattva. The Flower Garland Sutra acknowledges the presence of herb spirits, each of whom has their special skill for helping to bring insight and inspiration, love and liberation to countless beings.
The sutra says the following:
“ . . . the herb spirit Auspicious found the door of liberation observing the mentalities of all sentient beings and striving to unify them. The herb spirit Sandalwood Forest found the door of liberation embracing all sentient beings with light and causing those who see it not to waste the experience. The herb spirit Pure Light found the door of liberation able to annihilate the afflictions of all sentient beings by pure techniques. The herb spirit Universal Renown found the door of liberation able to increase the boundless ocean of good roots by means of a great reputation. The herb spirit Radiant Pores found the door of liberation hurrying to all sites of illness with the banner of great compassion. The herb spirit Darkness Destroying Purifier found the door of liberation able to cure all blind sentient beings and cause their eye of wisdom to be clear. The herb spirit Roarer found the door of liberation able to expound the verbal teaching of the Buddha explaining the different meanings of all things. The herb spirit Banner of Light Outshining the Sun found the door of liberation able to be the advisor of all sentient beings, causing all who see to produce roots of goodness. The herb spirit Seeing in All Directions found the door of liberation of the mine of pure compassion able to make beings give rise to faith and resolve by means of appropriate techniques. The herb spirit Everywhere Emanating Majestic Light found the door of liberation causing beings to remember Buddha, thereby eliminating their sicknesses.”
Okay, so those are some of the Herb Spirits in the infinite Cosmos. There are probably as many Herb Spirits in the Cosmos as there are atoms in our visible universe, and similarly there are Crop Spirits with names like, Gentle Superb Flavor, and Increasing Vitality; and there are Forest Spirits with names like Outstanding Trunk Unfolding Light, and Auspicious Pure Leaves, and Draped Flame Treasury. That’s the vision of this sutra.
And when we look at it, we might have the kind of experience we have when we look at the art of Alex Grey. If you have seen the art of Alex Grey, and especially if you have seen that art and also had some exposure to psychedelic experiences, you can sense the ways in which that art clearly reflects or expresses something about psychedelic experience. The Flower Ornament Sutra is like that.
The sutra gives us a marvelous vision of life, in which everything around us calls us to awakening. Everything is a teaching and a portal into the great mystery. Everything arises as part of our awakening to reality.
Let’s consider one more passage. In this passage, we find a young person named Suddhana on a spiritual pilgrimage, a walking pilgrimage to a series of spiritual teachers. This is the inward journey, mapped out for us.
Sudhana meets up with a very advanced being named Gopa. After paying his respects, he says,
“I have set my mind on supreme perfect enlightenment, but I do not know how enlightening beings act in the midst of the mundane whirl without being stained by its ills; how they realize the equal essence of all phenomena without staying in the stage of personal liberation alone; how they manifest the qualities of buddhas without stopping the practice of enlightening beings; how they remain in the stage of enlightening beings yet show the sphere of all buddhas; how they transcend all worldly states yet act in the midst of worldly states; how they achieve the reality-body yet produce endless physical manifestations; how they resort to the formless reality-body yet manifest bodies like all beings; how they comprehend all the inexpressible truths, yet expound the truths to sentient beings in all languages; how they know there are no beings in the elements of existence, yet do not give up efforts to guide all beings; how they realize all phenomena are unoriginated and unperishing, yet do not give up the effort to serve all buddhas; how they realize there arc no results of action in phenomena, yet do not give up the effort to perform good deeds.”
Gopa gives him an explanation, and as part of that explanation, Gopa speaks the following words in verse:
Those who set out for vast pure wisdom for the welfare of others
And serve true benefactors honestly
With tireless vigor, seeing them as teachers,
Carry out practice in the world like the cosmic net.
Those whose devotion is vast as the sky,
Embracing all worlds of past, present, and future,
All lands, beings, phenomena, and buddhas
Theirs is this practice, producers of the light of knowledge.
When the will is infinite as the sky,
Supremely pure, free from the taint of afflictions,
Therein arise the virtues of all buddhas,
Concentrating the whole variety of the cosmic net of practice.
The wise who rest on great oceans of virtue,
Inconceivable, infinite, vast as omniscience,
As pure offspring of the body of all virtues
They act in the world unstained by the filth of the world.
Those who listen to the teaching of buddhas
And tirelessly catch every nuance
Are lamps shining with wisdom in accord with truth;
Theirs is this practice which lights the world.
Those who perceive in an instant of awareness
The infinite buddhas everywhere, interrelated,
Contemplate the ocean of all buddhas;
This is the way into the mind of the enlightened.
Those who sec the vast audiences of the buddhas
Enter the ocean of their meditations
And their infinite ocean of vows;
This is the practice of those like the cosmic net.
Those empowered by all the buddhas
Practice universal good for endless ages,
Reflected in all lands;
This is the practice of the lights of truth.
It goes on from there, but it’s good to stop at this acknowledgement that our practice of life is reflected in the land. Our virtue appears in the land, and so do our vices. If we think about the world today, we can see our practice of life vividly reflected in all lands—all of them.
The other reason I chose this passage to share has to do with its mention of a cosmic net of practice. Wisdom is skillful interwovenness. A spiritually advanced being is one who practices the vast interwovenness of the Cosmos, moment-to-moment, right where they stand.
This interwovenness, along with the fractal-like and holographic character of the Cosmos depicted in the Flower Garland Sutra, together with the sutra’s other fascinating contents, make it surprisingly psychedelic. It’s sort of like the text we would get if we had a whole team of Alex Greys engaged in writing rather than painting. In fact, it’s much more than that, because this text comes from the experience of enlightenment.
That raises a natural question: Given these kinds of resonance between psychedelics and Buddhist philosophy we might ask, Can we use psychedelic medicines to become enlightened?
Let’s consider a rather deflationary suggestion first. I don’t think we can become enlightened using these medicines. Certainly not without a holistic philosophical context, but maybe, in the end, we will always need to find our fuller capacities without a medicine that seems to come from the outside.
We have a couple things going on in that seemingly deflationary answer—but they point to a profound optimism and encouragement.
Maybe we can get at some of it by asking: Why are these two contemplations called “The Buddha Molecule”? Put another way, “What is the Buddha molecule?”
On the one hand, we might think I have renamed DMT. Rick Strassman called it “the spirit molecule,” and we have called it “the Buddha molecule”.
That carries a little bit of truth to it. And why is it a helpful truth? Because Buddha is us. Buddhist philosophy differs from certain kinds of conventional religious views in that it makes the highest image an image of ourselves. So, we are Buddha.
And Buddha is enlightenment. Buddha is the dispellment or dissolution of all our ignorance, and everything that arises out of that ignorance, including our fear, anger, reactivity, self-centeredness, greed, pride, clinging, craving, addiction, and jealousy—along with all our manipulation, control, and doing. Buddha means someone who has stopped doing their lives, and started dancing them.
If we can see Jung’s point of view, we can say that Buddha as an archetypal images touches every human being. Any of us can look at that image and say, “I get it: That’s a genuinely free human being, a genuinely wise, loving, and beautiful being, beyond hope and fear.”
Buddha may seem a bit sacrilegious, because he appears to have characteristics some traditions associate with a deity. But even in those religions we may find some space for seeing the good in this image.
For instance, if our tradition tells us we were made in the image of the divine—do we take that as something superficial, or something deep and essential? Are we made in the surface image of the divine, or the deep and essential image of the divine?
Do we share with the divine a body that looks like the one we have? Or do we share an essence?
And what do we think that essence would be, other than wisdom, love, and beauty?
Buddha as an image says that we were made in the image of wisdom, love, and beauty, and that our whole World is like this. We can know God’s love only because our love is just like God’s love—when we liberate it, when we liberate ourselves by becoming what we are.
Buddha represents our very highest potential—beyond what our current patterns of thought can imagine for us. There’s a mystery, a magic, a vastness that we can only realize by means of an intimate and passionate practice of our lives.
Another way to put this is that we need to ask what kind of medicine we ourselves will become. What will we bring to the World? When people get a dose of our presence, our medicine, our magic, how do they feel?
And if we want our medicine to become mutually healing, mutually nourishing, mutually illuminating, and mutually liberating, we need a holistic philosophy of life—which means ethics, study, learning from teachers, and daily practices combined with regular retreats—
and in the context of our present discussion, we need that holistic philosophy to create the context for psychedelic medicines to gift us all the wondrous treasures that we otherwise might miss because we lack such a holistic philosophy.
We need to honor the good these medicines have already done. But to honor their highest goodness, we need to go deeper, and we have to become realistic.
When we are starving, a piece of white bread can taste divine, and a sliver of lemon might cure our scurvy—or at least make us feel a lot better.
Scurvy can make us feel awful. Our gums bleed, our old wounds open up, and we feel run down and wiped out. Curing that scurvy can feel wonderful, but curing scurvy doesn’t make us healthy overall.
I don’t know of anyone who became a great sage by means of psychedelics alone. If you know of any, ask them to come forward and offer teachings.
So we have another meaning to the Buddha molecule here. When we take DMT or another psychedelic medicine—did we take the Buddha molecule? Are we Buddhas during that time?
Let’s think of the teachings Buddha offered on the basis of his insights. Maybe you don’t know many of those teachings. But let’s consider that people from all over the larger cultural milieux—the larger ecologies of mind—people came from all over to study with him, to learn. And they kept passing those teachings down, for generations, for thousands of years. And now we put people in brain scanners and find out that the teachings work. They bring healing and transformative insight, and make possible things our culture didn’t know were possible.
Is that how the average psychedelic session goes? Do we leave those sessions with insights that become teachings that can heal, shift, and guide the whole of the dominant culture?
If we can entertain the possibility that psychedelic experiences are often aesthetically rich and informationally poor, at least relatively speaking, then we should perhaps find it hubling and inspiring to recognize just how much information Buddha manifested out of his self-induced psychedelic experiences—and by self-induced, I mean that he didn’t take an herb, but unleashed even greater capacities from his own mind than anyone has apparently ever has with the use of psychedelic medicines.
Buddha verified that we ourselves are the medicine.
Then he went on to teach for decades. As we have considered, those teachings comprise thousands of pages of written text. They include a skillful and detailed analysis of mind and experience, mind and life, along with precise practices for transforming our experience of life.
It’s not clear psychedelics can do that—at least not in the absence of a holistic philosophical tradition.
In that sense, DMT isn’t really the Buddha molecule. We ourselves are the Buddha molecule.
This touches on the Flower Garland Sutra as well. There we see the fractal images of a Buddha in every one of the atoms of our body. Every atom has a whole world system in it, and each world system has a Buddha.
And Buddha is, in a way, sub-atomic—not in the sense of being a particle, but in the sense of being sub-particulate altogether. Buddha is the wholeness out of which apparent particles emerge. And we are that wholeness.
If we can’t truly see that, then the Buddha molecule would remain other. It would remain something outside ourselves. This is a nuanced issue, but the subtle ways we treat ourselves as imperfect and incomplete have profound effects in our lives. If we can’t arrive at Visionary LoveWisdom without an external medicine, we may thereby limit ourselves and our World.
The issue here in part comes to the dualistic mind we practice. We do need help. We are totally interwoven with the whole. We do need to seek teachers and not behave in a self-centered and prideful way, in which we think we know everything already.
And at the same time, we need to find the inner guru. In Buddhist philosophy, we see a consistent emphasis on the inner guru, even as we may engage in the most passionate and devoted manner with an external guru whose virtue, wisdom, compassion, and grace have made it abundantly clear that they can skillfully guide us.
We revere such a teacher as a realization of something we ourselves fundamentally are. And such teachers seek only to help us experience this for ourselves.
This also relates to experience, because enlightenment is in some way not an ordinary experience. The way we’re using that word right now, psychedelic experiences are ordinary, even if they’re kind of extreme.
In what sense?
Enlightenment is what we could call a consummatory experience. A consummatory experience involves reaching the highest point, and arriving at a great perfection, a great connection and connectedness.
We can think of it as analogous to arriving at the peak of a mountain we have climbed for many hours or even days. We can’t start at the peak. We can only get to the peak by climbing. And the experience of being at the peak is the consummation of the whole journey—including everything we experienced on the way up the mountain. Everything gets recontextualized at the peak. And you have to have some good stuff to recontextualize in order to make the peak feel most poignant.
Many psychedelic experiences seem quite enhanced compared to habitual experience. But they require a rich context, a rich ecology of practice, in order to become increasingly consummatory. A holistic philosophy of life helps create an enriched context.
If we compare the wisdom Buddha brought forth on the basis of his Cosmically consummatory experience to the kinds of things we get from even experienced psychedelic pilgrims, it does seem we will find Buddha more reliable as a guide for our lives.
But just because we can all do better, doesn’t mean the medicines are no good, or that wonderful healing hasn’t happened with them. Again, I find a lot of potential in these medicines.
But maybe their greatest potential will always be that they wipe away some of our doubts about the magic and mystery of our World and our own mind, and make us curious enough to seek training on how we can arrive at transformative and healing insights even without the help of these medicines.
In the end, we may need to remember some of the stories and images we have considered together, including the image of Anuruddha, who enjoyed all kinds of psychic trips, but in the end had to be told to move past all of that and turn to the deathless.
I would love to read more from the Flower Garland Sutra, because it’s so remarkable.
Instead, let’s acknowledge that we’ve come a long way. We need to think through a lot more, and forgive me if I left out anything you find important.
To further encourage you, I will just read a few lines from the translator’s introduction to the only English translation we have of the text, the one done by Thomas Cleary. Clear writes,
“it is interesting to observe how much apparently disconnected activity can be brought into coherent focus through the vision of the Flower Ornament Scripture . . . .”
“ . . . there are untold incipient enlightening beings always becoming manifest in every thought, word, and deed of compassion. It is the task of the more fully developed enlightening beings in every community to contact and nurture what is best in others; whether they do it through religion or art or cooperation in ordinary activities is purely a matter of local expediency. Often it is the case that preoccupation with the external face of such activity obscures its inner purpose; over a period of time this leads to elaboration of forms without their original meaning, fragmentation of the work, and mutual misunderstanding and even intolerance and hostility among members of what have now become factions. One of the functions of The Flower Ornament Scripture is to present a vision of the whole underlying the parts, so as to help people offset the effects of this scattering tendency and rise above sectarianism and other forms of bigotry.”
In other words, this is a text that cultivates inclusiveness in us, and a sense of a common ground of sacredness and mystery, a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty.
We will engage in at least one more contemplation on psychedelics, to talk about what I see as essential practices to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of working with these medicines.
Until then, if you have any questions about this contemplation and the general topic of wisdom, love, and psychedelics, please get in touch through dangerouswisdom.org, and we might be able to bring some of your questions into a future contemplation.
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.