How Psychedelics Paved My Zen Path

After four years of formal Zen practice in college, I entered a period of psychedelic Judaism that lasted until I was 30 years old and became a father. I then resumed formal Zen practice and took the Precepts. Here’s what I learned:

The beginning of my path involved very few conscious, informed decisions. I did not know when I was building my zazen practice in college that it was strengthening the stability and confidence I would need to finally try LSD in a few years. I just wanted to see more of reality.

I was a cannabis-using musician, and being stoned was very spiritual. I did try mushrooms a couple times in school. The first time was GREAT. The second time was TERRIBLE. I also played with high-concentrate Salvia divinorum extract a few times and LOVED that. I saw the Fabric.

The Fabric (I’m just coining that name for it now) was not unknown to me. I had perceived it dimly forever. Ripping my sensorium to pieces with salvia left nothing but Fabric to perceive, and it reassured me that it was and had always been there. Everything else was made of it.

This was already my intuition, and that was behind my exploration of sound and music, enhanced by cannabis, and it’s what drove my interest in zazen as well. I was examining the Fabric. I had lots of cultural and social support in this exploration, too.

Between my Jewish and Zen communities on campus, I had a LOT of points of reference — both in the form of living beings and in stories of ancestors and their handed-down learnings — for orienting myself in this exploration. Fellow travelers, too.

Not all my fellow travelers were so well oriented, though. Particularly one. He was the guy I smoked weed with every day; just happened to be my freshman dorm hall-mate, we met on night 1. He’s also the guy I ate shrooms with the first time. He showed me something I’d never seen.

When I came up on an eighth of shrooms for the first time, I had never imagined anything like it. My perception was integrated with the Fabric, like in other states, but it was also manifesting AS the physical world. I was playing ON the Fabric, WITH the Fabric, AS the Fabric.

At some point, n hours in (who could say), we ended up listening to “Comfortably Numb” on his laptop on the floor of a dorm room. The iTunes visualizer was extending off the screen and onto the floor, walls, and ceiling.

I looked up at him like 🙀.

“Welcome home,” he said to me.

I think for the rest of that night, I was just like, “Yeah dude, totally, HOME, dude! HOME!!!” But that utterance darkened my view of getting high with him. I was “home” the next morning. He wasn’t home until we lit the bowl. And I had glimpsed how far away his home really was.

I kept doing Zen in the mornings, observing the Fabric, and getting up and going to class. He kept doing whippets in the morning and not going to class. One night, he took an entire bottle of DXM cough medicine with a 2-liter of Dr. Pepper, fell down barfing, and I called EMS.

He was okay in the end — turned out to be a happy, good guy, actually — but he had to leave school, have really hard conversations with his high-pressure parents, kept doing drugs, was not fun to hang out with. He was the first casualty I saw on the path.

This put me off the hard stuff for a while. I kept smoking weed, though not NEARLY as much without that dude around. Got more serious about the music ITSELF, finally, played in some bands, kept sitting zazen, and kept trying out praying with my Jewish soul siblings.

By the end of college, I had established morning zazen as my check-in with the Fabric. While surely it was an experience of the truth of impermanence of phenomena, the reliability of the Fabric itself was a floor to my reality. Maybe more like a sea I was floating on, actually.

This is what I don’t think my friend had. He has no point of view from which the same sea of awareness held all the islands of experience within it. He was the fish who doesn’t know what water is, because what need does a fish a have for that knowledge?

My advantage, I think, came down to this: I was embedded in communities of practice with whom I could ground, check, and error-correct my experiences. He was just Major Tom-ing it up out past the Kuiper Belt, and no one could catch him. I would go on to meet many more like him.

It was a couple years after college that I dropped acid for the first time. It was at Burning Man, which I had been to three times already, so I felt comfortable(-ish) out there by then. That night, I realized that the Fabric was ME. And it was YOU. And so was I.

This is not, ultimately, a very interesting observation. It is the kind of shit spiritual people and drug people say. I am saying it because I think it is important for me to say that I first observed it on LSD, not in some act of formal Zen, and not fasting on Yom Kippur.

I would go on to try a great many psychedelics a great many times, sometimes in great quantities. They would lead me to make art and have conversations that still matter to me, to meet my future wife and mother of my children, and to the most religious experiences of my life.

All the while, the Fabric was unfurling itself all around me, in every experience. The more of it I saw, the more of it there was, and the more THERE it was, until it really made no difference what I was on or not on.

THIS is when I realized how attached I had been to STATES.

My motivation never changed. I just wanted to see more of reality. It stood to reason that the quickest way to do that was to get into as many states of mind as possible. But what happened was counter-intuitive. The more states I’d been in, the less of a difference they made.

The morning my first kid was born was the highest I’d ever been in my whole life. If you’ve ever fried eggs while the sun was coming up after being on acid all night, you know what happened that morning in SOME sense. But surely you can appreciate how little the STATE mattered.

When I returned to formal Zen practice — as a way of carving out time to be with the Fabric, so I could touch it throughout the day as I handled the hardest, most beautiful thing I had ever done — as much as it nauseates me to put it this way, I had skipped ahead some steps.

Completely gone was any attachment to anything HAPPENING. What the hell else could happen?

I had already eaten pancakes with the Aztec sun god (they didn’t share their name).

The woman I would marry and I watched each other’s face grow old, die, decompose, and be reborn as an infant, over and over, without saying a word until the next day about what we had seen.

Honestly, I was about ready to stare at the wall while nothing happened every morning for the rest of my life.

Because that wall is DRAPED in the Fabric.

As was my whole experience.

And so now I sit, I uphold the Precepts as best I can. And I watch my kids explore reality.