Nomad Codes

peculiar nutrients fundamentally shaped the blooms to come.
    For one thing, Buddhism owed many of its recruits to the widespread fascination with altered states of consciousness—a fascination that was largely sparked, if not fueled, by drugs. Simply put, psychedelics gave people a taste for the excitement, power, anxiety, insight, and joy of tweaking their perceptions. On an even more basic level, drugs also encouraged people to explore their own immediate experience, and to recognize that heaven and hell were functions of their own minds. Many Westerners were drawn to Buddhism because it too offered a “hands on” dimension lacking in Christianity, one that also loosely accorded with the modern “scientific” temperament that drugs, in their own way, subtly reinforced. This democratic turn towards direct experience became one of the hallmarks of countercultural spirituality, just as it became a hallmark of American Buddhism. The notion that samadhi was available to all, that everyone possessed something like the Buddhamind, was emphasized by the universal action of the Sandoz molecule. “Have you ever been experienced?” Hendrix asked. If not, why not?
    Once blown, many Western minds were far more likely to put up with alien rituals and grueling disciplines that promised even deeper and subtler experiences. The notion of practice —perhaps the richest and most multivalent term in American Buddhism—is crucial here. One basic meaning of practice is technique: one does not believe, one acts. (Or, perhaps more accurately, “action happens.”) In other words, one adopts a technique, an internalized technology or a psycho-behavioral recipe, and explores the results. Though the act of swallowing a sugar cube is a pretty rinky-dink operation compared to the rigor and depth of zazen or hatha yoga, psychedelics did teach people that altered states, even refined ones, could be accessed through technologies of perception.
    Indeed, LSD was only one device in the counterculture’s ever-expanding occult tool kit, which included divination systems like tarot cards and the I Ching , biofeedback devices and flotation tanks, as well as a variety of internal and physical disciplines: breathwork, t’ai chi, massage, pranayama, veganism, Kriya yoga. Given the unprecedented technological experience of the baby boom generation, it’s not surprising that they developed the conviction that technique, in some form, was integral to the process of transformation and insight. Whether the technology was external or internal was less important—was an acid test, with its feedback systems, light shows, and communal chemistry, inside or out? LSD helped insure that the Eliadean metaphor of spiritual practices as “inner technologies” would find its way into the lexicon of countercultural spirituality, so much so that it continues to appear in the writings of a serious Buddhist scholar like Robert Thurman.
    The problem with the metaphor of technology is that technologies often encourage a dualistic viewpoint, while mature practice erodes the perception that there is a doer using a tool to pursue a goal. This was an important lesson for American Buddhists during the freak years, when the goals were cosmic. In those idealistic times, there was a veritable obsession with the achievement of enlightenment experiences—an obsession that may have owed much of its ferocity to expectations first laid down by drugs. Over the decades, the emphasis has shifted away from such fierce pursuits, and many teachers go out of their way to deflate the excitement surrounding powerful meditation experiences. Indeed, I suspect that the hostility that some contemporary Buddhists express towards psychedelics conceals an anxiety that their practice remains tainted, on some level, with the desire to get high. But this is an understandable desire—it’s hard to say how many people would continue the practice over the years if they didn’t occasionally “get the goods,” whether on the pillow or on the drugs.
    But psychedelics don’t just get people high. Like literal acid, they work to empty, on both individual and social levels, the apparently solid substance of conventional reality—so-called common sense. Regardless of the otherworldly visions drugs can bestow, the deeper psychedelic message concerned the relativity of thought and perception—a “philosophical” insight that drugs reveal directly through the operation of your own nervous system.