Nomad Codes

mores surrounding the consumption of animal flesh and alcohol contribute a certain antinomian buzz to the feistier tantric practices.
    The connection between psychedelics and tantra goes beyond social practices, into the heart of esoteric perception. This material is difficult to describe, but one could say for starters that psychedelics usher the bodymind into a magical zone that unfolds between the consensual sensory world and the worlds depicted in the different languages of dream, art, and high-octane metaphysics. Within this “bardo logic,” memories, ideas, and images multiply and pulse like hieroglyphic sigils, suggesting patterns of association and hidden resonances that voyagers often take—or mistake—for revelations. But the real object of revelation is the mind itself—not simply as a source of meaning, or linguistic categories, but as an organic machine of perception, a machine that can be tweaked. Simply put, psychedelics present the imagination. And by “imagination” I don’t simply mean the source of our hazy daydreams or visionary flights, but the synthetic power that Kant posited as the generally unconscious mechanism through which our basic conceptual faculties construct the world of space-time.
    The status of the imagination in Buddhism is, to put it mildly, ambivalent. On the one hand, the imagination is often treated as a synonym for avidya —it is the imagination that mistakes the rope of reality for the frightening (or seductive) serpent. The very literary form of the earliest Buddhist texts—their dryness, repetition, and lack of flavor—argues that the desiccation of the imagination was a goal of practice. On the other hand, many Mahayana sutras are brimming with the fantastic: galaxies of bodhisattvas, infinite garlands of wish-fulfilling gems, clouds of spheres of light the color of the curl of hair between the Buddha’s eyebrows. All this can seem very familiar. Indeed, I have not come across a canonical religious text that can approach the psychedelic majesty of the Avatamsaka Sutra , whose infinite details and ceaseless lists captures both the adamantine excess and the fractal multiplicity of deep psychedelia.
    What is the literary function of such apparently “imaginative” materials ? Are they glimpses of sambhogakaya , seductive folk material, depictions of literal powers, allegories of wisdom? Whatever its function in sutra, however, the work of the esoteric imagination in tantra is central, even on the most literal level of visualization. For the generation stages of tantra, during which deities and their associated mandalas are constructed with the inner eye, the merely individual imagination is used as a gateway, an engine to tame and train for the powerful perceptions of tantric reality. Through diligence, conduct, and ritual, the imagination itself is alchemically transformed, and the completion stages actualize, according to traditional accounts, what had only previously been imagined. Psychedelics are generally too chaotic and willful for this kind of controlled work; nonetheless, serious psychonauts will often encounter feelings, images, and pocket universes with an intensely tantric flavor. And why not? If one buys into tantric accounts of the subtle body, with its nadis and chakras and winds, then it is not too tough to imagine that, just as physical practices like Hatha yoga, mantra, and Tummo can stir up the energies of transformed perception, so might swarms of molecules swimming in the neural bath of the brain. Certainly it is the case that psychonauts who also practice yoga, t’ai chi, and visualization often find their work reshaping the phenomenology of their trips.
    Even if drugs trigger actual changes in the esoteric bodymind, they may be quite harmful, even demonic—a fear immortalized in the notorious folkloric claim that drugs somehow put “holes in your astral body.” As David Gordon White makes clear, however, medieval tantrics were not above ingesting alchemical elixirs, even as renegade sadhus ingest hashish and Jimson weed today. It is hard to imagine that if LSD, peyote, or DMT existed in ancient India, these substances would not have been used by at least some folks who conceived of their path as tantra. Despite the thoroughly integrated example of Vajrayana in Tibet, the religious temperament of tantra suggests that a percentage of its practitioners will almost inevitably stray towards heterodoxy; its extreme wings will adapt extreme