My research for “Retreat” was pretty exhaustive, however one thing you find researching a particular era is that all the references within books and among the rest of the material (interviews, articles, documentaries etc) only relate to then-contemporary or historic writing. So while it’s natural that research will lead you further into the past, it’s harder to discover more recent things which might be relevant to you.
In writing “The Garden” the case in point was the Cuban urban organic growing revolution which happened in the early nineties with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with its horto intensivos and Organopónicos. It wasn’t that I missed it out of the book where it should have been included – I mean, it wasn’t countercultural as such, but the phenomenon was so fascinating within the context of “The Garden” that I had to double-take when I first came across it. I’m sure all the countercultural growers and farmers I interviewed would, in the nineties, have been incredibly excited about it. But no one ever mentioned it to me!
So, there are things that one misses out… And this book “Zig Zag Zen” first published in 2002, and then updated in 2015, was definitely one of them. It looks at the interface between Buddhism and psychedelics, most explicitly against the background of the counterculture. I read it with bated breath, nervous that I was going to have missed something significant out of my own history, and was genuinely relieved that I didn’t. I had read Rick Fields’ book “How the Swans Came to the Lake” (1992) but Fields’ excellent and entertaining article “A High History of Buddhism in America” is one of the neatest historical summaries I’ve read of the confluence.
Trungpa.
Throughout the book, there are a lot of mentions of Chögyam Trungpa which didn’t surprise me, but was nevertheless good to see. Someone I hadn’t come across was Neem Karoli Baba’s student, the controversial Lama Surya Das. L.S.D, geddit? If there’s one omission it would be him, but the beloved Bhagavan Das, who I did discuss and interview, is a more significant character from the same niche.
Besides Fields’, the other strong article was an interview with Terence McKenna. McKenna is a magnetic personality and a very powerful orator, but what I’ve read of his writing, “Food of the Gods” (1999) is nonsense. Maybe because this article is a transcribed interview with Allan Badiner (Zig Zag Zen’s compiler), and flows with McKenna’s diction, it’s much more coherent.
What might be the most commonly acknowledged role of psychedelics is as a waystation. Alan Watts puts it, “many of us who have experimented with psychedelic chemicals have left them behind, like the raft which you use to cross a river…” McKenna summarises his own position in the interview that, “Psychedelics give people the power to overcome habitual behaviours.” He wanted to see this combined with the compassion of Buddhism, “Buddhism and psychedelics are together probably the best hope we have for an antidote to egotism and materialism.”
I wrote “Retreat” in what was the summer of the psychedelic renaissance. Michael Pollen’s book “How to Change Your Mind” (2018), probably the high-watermark of the enthusiasm, came out somewhere in the middle of my research. If you’ve read it, you will know that my chunky little book pulls no punches in what is a brutal depiction of the aftermath of psychedelics in the sixties. The book could not have been much more negative about psychedelics, and especially the power-play around it.
I remember the distaste with which this presentation “Psilocybin & LSD: Lessons from the Counterculture” was received the first time I gave it to the Psychedelic Society. And at least two people who I had approached with “Retreat”, who I now notice are contributors to “Zig Zag Zen”, went from initial interest in “Retreat” to frostiness and anger upon reading it.
However, and I take no pleasure in this, in the five years since the book came out in 2020, when I haven’t been much preoccupied by psychedelics, there have been a depressing litany of abuse and scandals associated with them. There’s been a lot of coverage of this, and I don’t feel like adding to the censure, so google it if you are curious. The major culminating event might have been the FDA rejecting MAPS bid to legitimise MDMA-assisted therapy.
In retrospect, what’s cool about “Zig Zag Zen” is the surprisingly open platform it gives to a lot of psychedelic sceptics. There is an extensive refutation of the drugs’ importance in an interview with Esalen’s Michael Murphy (who is chaperoned by his friend George Leonard), and a very powerful essay by recovering marijuana addict China Galland, in which she concludes as she avoids an ayahuasca ceremony, “I did not go to the jungle.” My favourite essay, however, is by Zen Buddhist Brad Warner, who I have only just discovered, and, a fellow nerd, am greatly appreciating.
In “Retreat” I took the angle that it was the process of the subject’s descent from the etheric heights that mattered; what Jack Kornfield describes as “the laundry.” This grounding, or alignment, in the process of descent constitutes the real “learning”. These lessons are not impossible, but harder, to glean from the quick comedown of psychedelics. Whether more likely to be grasped coming down from the spiritual high, or harder to learn from the psychedelic experience, this lesson might be described as a more-willing readiness to accept existence for what it is – with less compulsion, even, to go clambering up further mountains: “I have seen the peaks, thank you. There is a great deal which needs accomplishing in the valley.”
…unlike the tourist who will comfortably get back into the cabin and be delivered again to the valley, for the mountaineer (like Jung for instance) the return journey is fraught. Gone is the adrenaline that swept him to the summit, his rations are exhausted, the sun has begun to set, and the weather has closed in. It is raining. He may have figured out the path to the top slowly over a long period of time from the comfort of the valley, possibly even trying a number of routes before finally reaching the peak. To avoid becoming a statistic, the mountaineer will need to rally all their human resources to find their way down in the dark alive.
Me “Retreat” p 105.
What I didn’t know writing that passage was that a study in 2017, by Dr Martin Faulhaber at the University of Innsbruck of mountain climbing in the Austrian Alps, revealed that the most common cause of accident when climbing is falling, and that 75% of falls happen on the descent.
Just like I did, Brad Warner used the same analogy of the trip being like a helicopter ride to the top of the mountain. But his angle is slightly different. He says:
To a mountain climber, the goal is not the moment of sitting on top enjoying the view. That’s just one small part of the experience. It may not even be the best part. To a mountain climber, every view, from every point on the mountain is significant and wonderful. People who think that the pinnacle of the experience is that moment of being right on the tippy-top, don’t understand the experience at all.
Brad Warner “Zig Zag Zen” p182.
Brad’s big takeaway is that what Buddhist practice is about: “Learning to wake up by yourself.” He argues that you can’t just take “medicine” to achieve that.