 ...
opening the mind field
'There is no doubt about that (relief
in psychedelics). Psychedelics are an extraordinarily powerful tool for
opening the mind field. I look at psychedelics as a kind of phase through
which we pass when we're trying to become more truly who we are, more authentic,
and more genuine. I feel like I graduated from psychedelics, but they were
definitely part of the evolution of my own psychological or developmental
maturation. But it's really a different kind of mind that is cultivated
in meditation, where the qualities of stability, and loving-kindness, and
clarity, and humbleness are the primary qualities. Psychedelics don't necessarily
cultivate those qualities.' (Joan Halifax in 'Tricycle') |
... a certain kind of experience
'We were in San Francisco right
in the middle of the whole scene from '61 on. What Suzuki Roshi and I noticed
was that people who used LSD - and a large percentage of the students did
- got into practice faster than other people. Not always, but usually it
opened them up to practice faster. But we also noticed that for the most
part, those people leveled off after a couple years and didn't advance
much in Zen practice, particularly those people who used it a lot. My feeeling
is that psychedelics create a taste for a certain kind of experience. It
seems that, because of the way their mental space was so strongly opened
and conditioned by LSD, Zen practice was only fruitful when it related
to this mental space. People who used it a lot, i.e., fifty trips, two
hundred trips, didn't advance much past what a good practitioner would
after two years. Also in part because of a familiarity with such strong
inner-mind language, it was harder for these student to recognize the more
subtle inner-mind language that one learns to recognize in Zen practice.'
(Richard Baker in 'Tricycle') |
