![]() I regularly enjoyed Friday night dinners at the Shulgin home, where the Bay Area psychedelic community gathered. ![]() Sometime later, I experienced MDMA and got to know Alexander Shulgin. We became friends, and I visited him at his home in Hawaii where he treated me to yagé, or ayahuasca, the so-called vine of the soul. He accused me of being an “armchair Buddhist” and challenged me to try sacred plants, such as psilocybin mushrooms. I was writing a column called “Mind and Spirit” for the LA Weekly while working on my Buddhist studies, and had a plan to interview Terence McKenna. I took classes with a senior Buddhist monk, studied Pali, the original language of the Buddha, and earned a Masters degree at the College of Buddhist Studies, a small Theraveda university in Los Angeles-all because I was trying to understand how to return to the blissful state I had experienced on the retreat. But I had been “bitten” by the Buddhist bug. ![]() I was overtaken by a subtle but persistent wave of ecstasy, and felt a diminished sense of separation from others.Īnd how were you exposed to psychedelics?Īfter that I trip I returned to California, and the meditative glow eventually faded. Suddenly, when the ten-day retreat was almost over, I felt free of any pain and almost ecstatic- and not just because I was leaving. My bones ached, the only food was stewed greens, the venue was overrun with bugs, and the bed was a blanket over wood boards. I’d never had any interest or belief in any religion, but when I was in my early 30s, I spent a year traveling in India, and right before returning home I took some advice to enroll in a Buddhist meditation retreat in Sri Lanka. Badiner, a contributing editor of Tricycle, is a longtime supporter of MAPS.-Jennifer Bleyer A new edition of Zig Zag Zen was published in 2015. The tacitly acknowledged connection took a leap forward in 2002 with the publication of Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, a collection of essays, interviews, articles edited by Allan Badiner, which examines the two realms and their similarities and differences. This article by Jennifer Bleyer first appeared in the MAPS Winter Bulletin 2017.īuddhism and psychedelic use have been linked since at least the 1950s, when influential thinkers and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Watts experimented with both as avenues toward understanding the mind.
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