Nomad Codes

Unfortunately, as Nietzsche saw with a prophet’s eye, relativity is only a stone’s throw away from nihilism. Strong psychedelics gave people a glimpse of emptiness, but while the void can be glittering at its peak, it can feel like a bottomless pit the morning after. The ease with which so many psychedelic users sank into cynicism, mental instability, and addiction to more insidious drugs shows that psychedelics themselves do nothing to build the contexts of meaning and spiritual aspiration necessary to prevent such ecstatic technologies from becoming hollow and even destructive mechanisms. Some of the new religious movements of the 1970s—like the long-haired Jesus Movement—reacted against the druggy void with a new fundamentalism. But the dharma—whose fullfrontal embrace of sunyata is coupled with a compassionate rejection of nihilism—seemed unusually poised to answer the problems posed by a stark psychedelic confrontation with the ultimate relativity and provisional nature of all phenomenal experience.
    So how do we express and characterize the relationship between psychedelics and dharma practice? The conventional answer, offered by many once-tripping Buddhists, is that drugs “open the door.” Without much work or knowledge on the part of the user, psychedelics can crack open consensus reality, expand identity beyond the confines of the conventional self, induce ego-death, and unveil the connection between mind and the totality of the real. However “inauthentic” these experiences may be judged to be, many people respond to them by turning to Eastern practice in order to extend, comprehend, and deepen their insights. Once their practice has stabilized and opened up, many of these people abandon drugs as needless or even harmful distractions. In this view, spiritual practice becomes something like the lift-off of Apollo 11. Drugs point you towards the moon of enlightenment, and somewhat violently thrust you away from the gravity of consensus reality. Having done so, they can then be abandoned like the early stages of a rocket. Or as Alan Watts quipped about psychedelics, “If you get the message, hang up the phone.”
    But what happens when serious practitioners continue to follow what poet Dale Pendell calls “the poison path”? What happens when you open the door and don’t shut it tightly behind you? Here is where the real controversy begins. No one’s logging any numbers, but I suspect that a healthy chunk of self-identified practicing American Buddhists keep at least occasional dates with the writhing, world-rending void lurking in the heart of psychedelic hyperspace. But I also suspect that, if asked to pass judgment on such activities, most dharma teachers would deliver a fat thumbs down. Indeed, psychedelic spirituality may well be the only real heresy in American Buddhism (except, maybe, for voting Republican). Heresy, though, is a Western concept, the stuff of witch burnings and gnostic cults. And though serious psychedelic culture certainly has its gnostic aspects, in the context of American Buddhism, it is perhaps best described as a kind of tantra—a crude and scandalous one for sure, but homegrown at least, arising from our “native” tradition of countercultural craziness.
    Given the generally cheesy spectacle of American neo-tantric sexology, I want to emphasize that I am not claiming that psychedelics have much of anything to do with authentic Asian tantra, an immensely rich and complex tradition about which I have only a scattering of book learning. Nonetheless, in the spirit of productive analogies rather than proclamations of metaphysical truth, I’d like to suggest a number of intriguing parallels. The most obvious one is secrecy. Despite their crucial role in the propagation of American Buddhism, psychedelics are basically not the stuff of dharma talks, Shambhala books, or Tricycle articles. Discussions occur within the context of sangha and teacherstudent relationships, but only selectively and probably not very often at all. One reason for this secrecy derives from another similarity: as with the panca-tattva practices of “left-handed” tantric adepts—who, among other things, ritually consume booze, fish, and meat—the materials of psychedelic Buddhism are socially unsanctioned. They are, literally, “against the law.” In fact, the condemnation that surrounds psychedelics may actually lend them some of their esoteric power, just as the negative social