thank you so much for this article... I have avoided the drug thread in the buddhism group for this very reason, there is no arguing with stupid.

As I've recently added to the drug thread in the Buddhism group... and since damn me, I started it, I don't have an awful lot to add except to say thanks for this article- its very balanced and, of course, true.

There's no shortcut to enlightenment and really anyone who wants one isn't looking for the same thing as I am!
As with everything else, I believe drugs are fine in moderation, but they are one of those things with which you really have to practice very good good mindfulness.
Personally I don't take drugs at all anymore- I don't think they did anything for me and although the high can make you feel like you're in some kind of meditative state, the low equals that out and in any case, the 'meditative state' is not a particularly deep or helpful one.
Each to their own... but there's no reason for anyone to think Zazen and drugs lead to the same place- they don't.

It just so happens I've read your book. And I enjoyed it. I'm also a reverend. Just thought I'd say I agree fully with your views on drugs to find "god".

Thanks Brad... once again and great piece... your column here on SG is very much appreciated.

It seems people don't like the thought of hard work anymore... everything needs to be gotten instantaneously.

Meditate people! Meditate everyday, live a good life and just stop attaching to all the shit you don't need... easy!

Well, it's all well and good saying that drugs have no place in Buddhism, but frankly it smacks of cultural and religious intolerance to imply that people can't take drugs for spiritual purposes.

Spirituality is a subjective experience, and to try and impose your own subjective experience on to someone else as if you are the arbiter of objective reality is what's bullshit. So you had a shit time on acid, and didn't learn anything from it, well that's fine but you are not me and I have got *exactly* what I wanted from the use of entheogens - not enlightenment, but mystical experience and deeper insight into myself and others.
Your error is in assuming that the buddha-dharma is the only dharma, and the goal of enlightenment is the only goal, when you should remember the old hindu saying "Truth is one, though the sages know it variously"

i'm curious what you guys think of Walter Pahnke's experiments with psilocybin and harvard divinity school students, the so-called "miracle of marsh chapel":

http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/pahnke_walter/pahnke_walter.shtml

later, the lone dissenter changed his mind:

http://www.csp.org/practices/entheogens/docs/young-if_change.html

i remember that in april of '91, one of the test subjects published an editorial in the boston "globe" proclaiming his day in the chapel the most profound religious experience of his life, and decrying the official impediments to further studying hallucinogens in a controlled setting. who are we to dispute his subjective experience?

last thing: i think you unfairly characterize ram dass's take on the whole issue. give credit where credit is due--his initial experimentation with hallucinogens was the direct cause of his spiritual awakening, but after that he was all about service and and various meditative disciplines. he realized as well as anyone that the only way to integrate peak experience is to practice, practice, practice.

I agree that your article is intolerant. As a person whose life is pretty much defined by medication because of a stroke I had before I was even 20, I fight (and I use this term sincerely) idiots every day who tell me that I don't need medication to function. Clearly you are educated and experienced, and yet for some reason you also seem to hold the few that psychotropic medication is in all situations negative?

I am not familiar with your work, but I did read Be Here Now, back when I could still read, and I found it extremely helpful in living my life completely regardless of the level of my chemical alteration.

The chapel experiment was replicated fairly recently by researchers at Johns Hopkins. It's a fairly interesting paper, and I think will lead to more interesting research, especially in the field of drug research. Harvard is obtaining funding for further studies along the same lines.

Research with MDMA, LSD, Psilocybin, &c. all have a great deal of research potential that could yield new drugs and/or therapies for people suffering from all sorts of mental illnesses. It's a shame that Leary and the rest of those guys were so irresponsible, and in being so set back legitimate scientific inquiry into this stuff by many decades.

I agree with most of the essay's main points-- though I think it would be foolish to dismiss the role of drugs in spiritual practice out of hand. There's a lot of history in terms of drugs being used in religious ceremony, from the Dionysian frenzies to Amazonian shamanism to who knows what else. William James made several interesting arguments in The Varieties of Religious Experience about the possibility that chemically-induced altered states might have had a lot to do with some Christian mystic traditions.

That said, one will probably not, for better and for worse, find enlightenment in a piece of blotter acid. And it's only a little more likely that they'll find it down the street at their local zen center or yoga studio, at least not without putting in some serious time. Like Kerouac said, "Coach Leary, walking on water wasn't built in a day."

Brad, I'd encourage you to check out some of the research being done at UW Madison on the functional differences in brain states in those who practice Buddhist meditation by a guy named Davidson. Is there really a qualitative difference between those states obtained by practice and those states obtained by chemistry? I don't think so. I think the difference probably lies in what you get out of the experience. Kinda one of those "The journey is the destination" type things.

You seem to have a better wording for this argument each time you make it. Thanks.

I avoid Buddhism groups anymore cause it turns into "no rules" hippies and dogmatic straight-edgers who want to beat you up for taking Tylenol. For anyone missing it, Brad is not the latter. There's nothing in there that says all medication is wrong. The whole point of Buddhism is a rational middle ground. Use common sense.

Thanks for your column. I bought your book a couple years ago, read part, got distracted and am now going to go back and read it. I finally began a daily practice a little more than a year ago after having read shelves of books about it. Finally sitting, even for a short time every day has changed my life immesurably. Well, you can measure some things, like how much weight I have lost, or how many miles I run now. But that small commitment has seemed to unlocked all sorts of areas of my life where I previously could muster no discipline to follow through with. For years I have carried around the misguided belief that if I went through the right ritual or rite of ascencion I would be transported to a reality much better than the one I was in. What I have found instead are moments of contentment in the present moment, where I feel the need to change nothing, despite having a hard day at work and my feet hurt and my wife isn't acting how I think she should. I am sober by necessity but wouldn't have it any other way.

Brad Warner is published by Wisdom Publications.

"Spirituality is a subjective experience, and to try and impose your own subjective experience on to someone else as if you are the arbiter of objective reality is what's bullshit. So you had a shit time on acid, and didn't learn anything from it, well that's fine but you are not me and I have got *exactly* what I wanted from the use of entheogens - not enlightenment, but mystical experience and deeper insight into myself and others."

Psh. Are your mystical experiences going to clean your dishes, write your report for work or get the orange stuff off the toilet? The reason Buddhism harps on this stuff so much is because these so called mystical experiences are nothing more than ideas...harmful ones at that. And yeah, Buddhism has a bunch of ideas too. But ideas about Buddhism are not the same as practicing Buddhism. The most important thing about Buddhism is living your day to day life in a moral and honest way, doing the things that you have to do.. It must seem wonderful to learn so much about the cosmic nature of the universe, but those ideas are not going to go to work for you or mow your lawn. And like Brad said, they may even make you think that doing those things isn't important. So what use are they?

mystical experiences are *not* just ideas. they are (duh) experiences, and often transformative experiences at that. beyond the interesting bits of ontological revelation that might accompany such an experience, the visceral experience of non-duality, by whatever name you call it (satori, samadhi, baqaa, entering into the cloud of unknowing, etc) is the very basis for the superior morality espoused by all the great religions. one simply can no longer act in a selfish manner when one recognizes that the world is the self (which is just a positive way of expressing the truth of no-self). again, you do have to work at integrating that experience into your daily life--because, to this point in our evolutionary history, individual survival has tended to rely on differentiating between self and, say, hungry lion--but the cognitive shock of that breakthrough experience is where it begins. dishes, reports and orange stuff all need attending to, but thank god there's more to existence than that.

"During a Dharma course with (the old) Kalu Rinpoche (decades ago) in Germany i heard a conversation by two young females, they did discuss his suggested advise quitting smoking would be beneficial for both females in the long run. I heard the pro and contra of the discussion and the final result was, to quit smoking was an impossibility for them both, because they still enjoy it too much.
This was the initial starting point for me to quit smoking for ever. I just stormed the room of Kalu Rinpoche and told him the before heard conversation and i told him i felt inspired to take this opportunity of the before heard advise (original told to the two females) but follow it by myself.
{I think the psychological effect which did tricker out my final decission was the absurd conversation, the childish play of two young females on the cost of their health by neglecting one good advise of a wise man}
Kalu Rinpoche granted his blessing and i never touched any tobacco after again."

by Dave
From: Cologne, Germany
http://www.lioncity.net/buddhism/index.php?showtopic=25672

Brad Warner speaks for most Buddhist traditions here. I remember someone asking the previous Karmapa about attaining Enlightenment through using the right kind of drugs - this was on his first visit to the West in the early 1970s - and both he and his monks fell about laughing. Some of his Western audience were quite annoyed. Not what people wanted to hear.