The Tao of Christ
Psychedelics and Nondual Awareness
In this episode today I will explore how the use of psychedelic drugs relate to nondual awareness.
I recently read an article in Baptist News Global about a seminary professor who was a subject in a an experimental study of psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University. I also watched the interview with her by Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global. Her name is Jaime Clark-Soles, and she teaches New Testament at Perkins School of Theology, which is a United Methodist seminary. She is an ordained Baptist minister and a member of a Baptist church in Dallas. So she is a mainstream scholar. Finally Baptists and also Methodists, I guess, have discovered psychedelics!
That is humorous for those of us who came of age in the 1960’s and 70’s. I was a hippie back then. Psychedelics were a rite of passage fifty years ago. Timothy Leary and Carlos Castañeda were counter-cultural icons who connected psychedelics and spirituality. Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley and Be Here Now by Ram Dass were popular reading.
Even by then psychoactive substances were no new. They have been a part of some indigenous people’s spirituality for centuries. The counterculture rediscovered them in the 60’s. Now finally mainstream religion is discovering that these substances may have something to contribute to religious experience and understanding.
There is a psychedelic renaissance going on. Articles are being written about it. It is being studied for medical and psychological benefits, particularly in treating PTSD. It is being used in religion. There are even psychedelic chaplains. The Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality says that by 2030 there will be a need for 30,000 psychedelic therapists. In this episode today I will explore how psychedelics relate to nondual awareness.
First I want to say that I respect this seminary professor and what she is doing. Especially since she is a Baptist minister like I am. I am encouraged that she is seeing and talking about how psychedelics can be a doorway to mystical experience.
One important thing psychedelics do is reveal that our normal way of viewing the world is not the only way. It gets people out of the rut of everyday consciousness to see that there is another way to see the universe. That in itself is very helpful.
It opens people up to mystical experience, which is the heart of all religious traditions. This NT professor sees mystical experiences in the writings of the New Testament, especially the apostle Paul. She is also exploring how this type of experience can be supported in Christian community. She knows that mainline Christians are hungering for genuine spiritual experience and see sees psychedelic as one such avenue. All this is great.
But the mystical experiences prompted by psychedelics is not the same thing as nondual awareness. I am familiar with both, and this is very clear to me. There is a scene in Ram Dass’s classic book Be Here Now when he gives his Indian guru some LSD and he takes it. The only thing it did to him was give him a slight headache. That is how different nondual awareness is.
Psychedelic drugs produce experiences. Dramatic visual, auditory, sensory, emotional, psychological and spiritual experiences. As I have said many times, unitive awareness is not an experience. Experiences have to do with the body and mind. They all happen within the body and mind. Body and mind happen within nondual awareness. Therefore all experiences – psychedelic or otherwise – happen within nondual awareness. Nondual awareness is the ground and source of all experience; it is not itself another experience of state of consciousness.
Psychedelic experiences can open the mind and body to new insights and ways of perceiving ourselves and the world. And that can be helpful. Some of the lessons learned from those experiences are like the insights perceived in nondual awareness. So there is some crossover here. But psychedelic experiences come and go as the drug takes effect and wears off. The insights gained from the experiences may linger and the memory of the experiences remain, but the direct seeing wears off for the most part.
Nondual awareness does not wear off. It does not come and go. It is constant. For the last twelve years nondual awareness has been the constant backdrop of life for me as an separate individual. This separate human identity of Marshall Davis is seen as simply an expression of this larger nondual reality which is the only true reality. We are nothing more than ripples in this reality.
Nondual Reality is always here now. As a human being I dwell in and as an expression of this constant reality. Nondual awareness is not dramatic. It is not like being on an acid trip or taking mushrooms. It is not a constant high. It is very ordinary. Hence the Zen saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Or as we might say today, go to the grocery store, take out the trash.
When this shift in awareness happens the self drops away and is seen as a mental fiction. The initial shift in identity from separate temporal entity to universal eternal identity, from small self to Big Self, is dramatic. It is disorienting and takes getting used to. There is a period of integration. That is what Jesus forty days in the wilderness in solitary retreat after his baptism was all about. It takes a while to adjust to Reality after living in an illusion. But in time one settles into the new reality.
As another Zen saying goes: “Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; at the moment of enlightenment mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
It feels normal and right. Like it has always been this way. Not like one has entered a new land, but as if one noticed where one has always lived for the first time. Like the T. S. Eliot quote: “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.”
It feels like awakening from a nightmare and realizing one is safely in one’s own bed in one’s own home, like Dorothy after returning from Oz. There’s no place like home. Hence the spiritual term awakening. It is like transition from darkness to light, hence the term enlightenment. It is like being set free, hence the term liberation.
Yet it is also completely ordinary and normal. One realizes that this has always been living in this reality and at some deeper level always knew that, but we just didn’t realize it. Hence the term realization. We have always been this, hence the term self-realization. One sees that one’s essential experience of life is not any different than anyone else's. We are living the same reality. The only difference is that some seemingly separate body-minds notice this. Notices what other body-minds know but do not realize that they know.
Because there is no self, there is no spiritual pride involved in this realization – no spiritual one-upmanship or religious elitism. Some guru does not have something that others do not have. We all are the same. The same Buddha Nature. Paul says, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” We are all part of the one Body of Christ, as he says elsewhere. Anyway there is no separate person have anything and everyone already has everything anyway. We are all the same one.
Psychedelics can give us momentary glimpses of our essential oneness. They can give us the physical sensation of this spiritual reality. They can give us dramatic psychological and emotional and sensory experiences. But then the drug wears off, and we are left with memories. They may be wonderful memories, but they are still memories. At best such experiences give us the desire to know this reality constantly without altering brain chemistry. That is a good thing. The foretaste of glory divine, as the old hymn says.
It is kind of like going to the theatre and seeing a movie of some faraway exotic land. It gives you a taste of a new land. In some people it inspires them to take the time and money and effort to travel to that land. But in the case of Nondual Reality, we already live in this spiritual land – the Kingdom of God. It is all around us and within us, Jesu said. It is just a matter of opening our eyes. In the end this permanent shift happens only by grace and not by dropping a pill.