Drug War Heroes and Villains

Pat Robertson Supports Marijuana Reform
  
George Will: Legalizing drugs may be worth it

Obama's War on Pot

Is it all One? (LSD research in the 60s)

New Medical Marijuana Policy

One Giant Leap for Kind! AP reports: "The Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws, under new policy guidelines to be sent to federal prosecutors Monday."

If we formulate lofty goals and impose them on our neighbors with force (governmental or otherwise), we increase conflict in society. We reduce conflict by defining and increasing those situations in which we disapprove of what our neighbor is doing, and respond with persuasion at most, taking force off the table.

Part of the genius of the founders of America was the goal of limiting the extreme power of government from intruding on individual freedom. That's why it's argued that this is a country founded on a great idea.

Thomas Jefferson famously wrote in Notes on Virginia (1782): "... it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." The same spirit can be applied to any private or consensual behavior. Those who itch to forcefully impose their superior morality in such situations, ought not to be surprised when it ultimately results in coercion directed against themselves.

Sniff Swig Puff

From the 70s: Rock Hudson and Bea Arthur sing an ode to recreational drug use.

After Death, Before Birth

Riffing off of Seeking Lemonade, who was kind enough to contribute to the comment section of my March 5 post:

Seeking Lemonade said...
So, Stuart, a question. When I am dead, will I know what being dead is (or will I, since I will be in a state of deadness, not know)?

Whatever happens after death, how could we be any less existent than before we were born? And look what happened that time! There we were, minding our own business, not bothering anyone, not even existing fergawdsake... and through no fault of our own, boom, we appeared in this world.

If it happened once it can happen again. It makes more sense to me, anyway, that if we got born out of nothingness one time, it won't be the only time. I mean, it's not like there's any rush. We've got infinite time and infinite space to play with here.

There's nothing to stop us from appearing and disappearing, over and over. Zen Master Seung Sahn would say, "First you were zero. Then you got born, so now you're one. Soon you'll die, and you'll be zero again." In the end, we're back at the beginning.

Peaking on Salvia Divinorum, I once had flash before me all the various ways that existence could be divided: Good/Bad, Light/Dark, Masculine/Feminine, Happiness/Suffering, etc. Like a Yin/Yang. It culminated with a vision in which the entire universe (multiverse?) of name and form was on one side, with total complete vast emptiness on the other.

For a second, it was like sitting on the fence, ready to fall into either side, existence or non-existence. And I felt profound indifference. If I added up everything on the Existence side, the sum was Zero anyway. Perfect balance.

But then it seemed like the Emptiness choice was kinda deceiving. Even if non-existence lasted for eons before I popped back out, it'd be like going into deep sleep. From "my" perspective, it would pass in an instant.

Besides which, I had a tickle in the back of my mind, vaguely remembering that a couple of friends were "baby-sitting" my body while my mind tripped. I wouldn't want to disappear and leave them worried or bored. So here I am.

Early Video of "Magic Mushroom" Trip

Today I learned of an on-line video from the 1961 TV show One Step Beyond:

... director and presenter John Newland ingests psilocybin under laboratory conditions, to investigate whether or not the hallucinogenic mushroom can enhance his abilities of extra-sensory perception.

View the video at this link.

Personally, I don't find the ESP question very interesting. Our ordinary everyday experience of life brings up fundamental questions: What am I? Why am I alive? Magic mushrooms etc may be one tool to examine the Big Questions. This requires no reference to special powers of any sort.

Still, this old video could be an interesting peek at early attitudes towards mind-altering substances, from a time before the modern "drug culture" had emerged. In '61, the spiritual, medical, psychological, and philosophical possibilities of 'shrooms etc hadn't yet gotten entangled with social/political issues.

Hawaiian Trip

I'm back from my trip to Hawaii. I hit some of the great tourist spots: marvelled at the view from the top of Mauna Loa (world's largest volcano), gingerly hiked across solidified lava flows, and communed with the fishes while snorkeling at Captain Cook's Cove. I met various old hippies who had "dropped out" to simple farming lives on the island, awaiting the collapse of modern society.

I'm always just as interested in inner travels as outer ones. So I was intrigued to find that the visionary plant Salvia Divinorum grows well in Hawaii. Over the last decade, I've had a number of mind-exploding experiences smoking the herb, which I try to describe on the Salvia Stories page of my personal site. (My little claim to net fame is that if you Google "Salvia Stories," my trip reports come up #1.)

Aside from smoking, an alternate way to trip on Salvia is to chew fresh leaves. Growing the plant isn't so easy where I live, and besides, I've never had the green thumb. So I'd never had a chance to have a good trip with the chewing method, not till Hawaii.

My 3 friends and I gathered in a dim room with a tray of big leaves picked from the plants minutes before. We shared an intention to be open and awake to whatever the plant showed us, and began chewing. I found the taste awful, and holding the Salvia-filled saliva in my mouth (so the magical molecule could get absorbed below the tongue) to be disgusting.

After a little more than 5 minutes, I was ready to give up and spit it out with regrets. Then suddenly the effects took hold. Initially, it was something like a psychedelic, with swirling body feelings, and translucent mandala visuals. That lasted just a few seconds, till it grew into something unique.

I was trying to stay quiet, so as not to disturb my friends' experiences. I'd usually find it easy to be silent and introverted when I choose to be, but in this case, I somehow couldn't stop uttering moans of amazement, even verbalizing a monstrous "WOW!"

As best I can remember and describe... I saw/felt a tangle of sensations and thoughts that make up the sense of being an individual in a body. It's like strands wound together so tightly that they seem like a solid thing. More than that, this sense of bodily existence is so constant and obvious that I ordinarily don't even notice it.

I have a dim recollection of that tangle unwinding, deconstructing. The thoughts and sensations resolved back to some unknowable source, dissolving all trace of a self. After a minute, I could open my eyes and perceive the world with near normalcy... except that identity and separation were noticeably and marvelously absent. The 4 of us spent 15-20 minutes laughing and babbling about the unspeakable space we were sharing.

I vaguely remembered the physical body, but without the feeling it was "me." When my friend lit a cigarette and passed it to me (no, kids, this isn't a good idea), I couldn't imagine how to relate to my body. But somehow, my arm moved and my hand took the cig; it would have been no more amazing if I'd been able to move mountains with my will.

One of the nicest parts of the trip was the interval in which I was aware of my surroundings, but before the sense of self returned. For at least those minutes, I was able to look at my friends and only have concern for them, unfiltered and unhindered by the slightest thought of "me."

The Crisis of Disappearing American Jobs

I’ve been a computer consultant for decades. During the “tech bubble” of the late 90s, when programmers like me were in great demand, I started working at the San Francisco corporate offices of Gap Inc. Ever since, they've paid me well to design MS Excel spreadsheets, automated with vba code. Aside from a couple of short intervals between contracts, these assignments have been my consistent meal ticket.

A new management team has decided to cut costs by outsourcing all programming work to India. My last day is a week from Friday. Aside from being a possible milestone in my own life… the movement of jobs off-shore is a big issue in the current political debate. I’ll be blogging about the political, economic, and spiritual significance of the phenomenon. It may take a few postings to do so, but I’ll at least get started today. Anyone who disagrees with my views is always invited to comment, letting me know where you think my thought-process has gone wrong.

By sending the work off-shore, Gap is losing my proven skills, and my years of experience with their specific needs. They’re losing my availability to present my work face-to-face, with no language barrier. Due to these factors, it may take 3 or more workers in India to replace me. But since the Indians work for a fraction of what I get paid, Gap can hire several of them to replace me, and still save significant money.

The city of San Francisco requires local businesses to provide certain benefits to all employees, such as sick leave and health benefits. This translates into a few extra dollars per hour in costs that get passed on to the Gap. So even if multiple Indians working long hours run up combined salaries that rival my own, the cost of these mandates could tip the balance, making outsourcing the rational choice for my employer.

Why are the Indians willing to work for so much less compensation than I am? If I demand $50/hour to write computer code, why are they doing it for the rupee equivalent of $10? Mustn’t we conclude that their lives are far less comfortable than my own? That the $10 is more vital to them than the $50 is to me?

A little examination reveals that the correlation between money and happiness is non-linear. (Even the Bible says something like that, though in less precise terms.) For someone struggling to provide a family with the most basic necessities of life, each dollar earned is a meaningful boost to his happiness (or decrease to his suffering, if you prefer). But once we get a beyond having to worry about paying the rent, greater earnings, perhaps surprisingly, have little to no effect on happiness.

To be honest, I don’t expect this job loss to downgrade my lifestyle at all. But who knows. Maybe I’ll never find another job at this level. Maybe I’ll have to spend time and effort learning new skills, making myself more productive and useful, in order to get a new job. While I’m retraining, maybe I’ll have to give up a few trips to Vegas, or downgrade my Netflix subscription. It’s highly improbable that the effect will be much more serious than that.

I may lose some luxuries, while a few Indians get help climbing out of poverty. Who could possibly be such a narcissist, such a jingoist, as to consider this a bad thing??

(Yes, of course, many Americans getting laid off are worse off financially than I, and they must give up more than luxuries. That’s irrelevant to my point, which is that the typical working-class American losing his job is wealthy compared to the Indians who are gaining them.)

So what’s with the furor in the US, particularly among Democratic primary voters, against globalization and outsourcing? Why are the candidates demogoging about free trade causing jobs to “disappear”… as if those jobs cease to exist when they leave our borders? (Tangentially: at an Obama rally, a supporter actually ranted that NAFTA is responsible for his job getting outsourced to India… and Barack had to gently remind him that India isn’t in North America.)

Kindly contemplate this issue, and I’ll share more of my own thoughts in an upcoming post.

[In an unrelated matter: I have a sneaking suspicion that some readers of this blog may be interested in a new documentary, “Peyote to LSD: Psychedelic History,” airing on the History Channel, Saturday April 19 at 10 PM.]

Autobiography of a Boo Boo. 4: Finger in Socket.

This series of blogs explains how I've come to my current Zen-style meditation practice. I'm calling the series Autobiography of a Boo Boo, in homage to the Hanna Barbera cartoons of my youth, and in recognition that I've never been good enough to be called a Yogi.

In the previous chapter, our hero found himself in a moving vehicle with famed Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn (whom I'll abbreviate as ZMSS, and was commonly addressed during his life as "Dae Soen Sa Nim"). ZMSS taught in a tradition that uses difficult, piercing questions, and I'd reluctantly been drawn into a dialog with him that went like this:

ZMSS: How long have you been doing Yoga?

Me: I've been meditating for about 7 years.

ZMSS: After doing Yoga for so long, have you gotten anything?

Me: Yeah, sure.

ZMSS: What have you gotten?

Me: My mind used to give me lots of problems, but as I meditate more, it gives me fewer problems.

ZMSS: If mind is such a problem, why do you make "mind"?

Me: Thinking just appears on its own.

ZMSS: Thinking is no problem; it's like clouds passing through the sky. But if you attach to thinking, you make a mind, and that's a big problem. So when you're doing something, just do it! Don't make "mind." That's true Yoga. OK?

What was that about? "Just do it"? This guy was supposed to be some extraordinary Master. How could he get away with a teaching that said so damn little?

My apartment in Berkeley was coincidentally just a few blocks away from one of the handful of Zen Centers that ZMSS had established around the world. I visited a few times to hear talks by other teachers that ZMSS had authorized, and to read from a couple of his books.

The teaching was always so simple, it was practically invisible. Human beings enter the ocean of suffering when we make something, i.e., when we attach to I/my/me-thinking like "I like/dislike something," "I want to get something," etc. But our original, before-thinking mind always shines purely, like empty space, or a clear mirror. Red appears, and this mirror-mind only reflects red. White appears, only white.

Simplicity shouldn't have bothered me. By my latter days in India, I'd already been pondering how sometimes my spiritual efforts seemed like building a house, by acquiring and stacking together special experiences and understandings. I'd decided that I really needed to do the opposite, to metaphorically tear down that building by throwing away whatever ideas I found myself clinging to.

But still... I guess I'd been holding out hope that as I kept returning to witness-consciousness, it'd eventually lead me to some lasting, substantial attainment. Famous teachers I'd read, like Ramana Maharishi, had spoken about a permanent attainment, enlightenment or self-realization or some such. I think Ramana had said it was like our self-effort was necessary to keep us bobbing on the surface of the ocean, not drowning in the world. All we could or should do is to patiently continue our efforts till God would swoop down and take us the rest of the way. Did I really need to give up all hope of this "enlightenment," and be left with nothing but "just do it"?

Sometime around then I got introduced to a guy who hung out in People's Park selling LSD. I'd had one acid trip in college, but years later, when I described it to an old hippie, she told me, "If your ego didn't completely disappear, you need a bigger dose." True enough.

When I was around 7 years old, a light bulb burned out in our house, and my parents removed it, but didn't have a replacement. For many days I walked past that empty socket, till I finally flicked the switch on and stuck my finger in. It was an awful, frightening, painful few seconds till I managed to pull my finger back out (hence my continued survival). Thing is, in those days leading up to my shocking experience, I may have pondered about when and how I'd stick my finger in that socket, but I never seriously considered not doing it at all. That's my particular mind, or karma; it's just inconceivable to let an opportunity like that pass by.

I took 3 hits of the acid. During the first hour or so, there were some frightening moments, as I/my/me disappeared 90% or 99% and I desperately worried about losing the rest. But then it indeed disappeared completely, and remained that way for hours. The world was revealed as harmless, dream-like mind-stuff. The distinction between "I" and "this" was revealed as far less obvious than previously thought.

At the end of the trip, the world re-solidified, and I/my/me popped back up from somewhere or other. Those few hours in the perfect dream-world were intriguing; maybe LSD could serve as crowbar in my mental deconstruction project. I think I tripped about every other weekend for the first few months, then continued irregularly, several times each year during 1985-87.

Near the end of this period, I took a serious dose, and a couple of hours later found myself seeing the universe and my place in it from a strikingly wide and clear perspective. I saw all those efforts I'd made for years to detach from my wants and opinions, and how that had removed some suffering. Then I saw that it was the nature of the universe that desires arise endlessly. The best I could ever hope for was a temporary break in the suffering, till new desires and delusions appeared and continued the cycle. It was like mowing a lawn in which the grass never stopped growing. Like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, and finding that as soon as you finish one end, the other end needs painting again.

I was never going to escape suffering. My whole life direction was like running on a treadmill. I was like a hamster on one of those hamster-wheel thingies. It wasn't just tragic, it was meta-tragic. I mean, Hamlet is a tragedy, but it's OK, because at least people can watch the play and get touched by existential insight. In my tragedy, the tragedy of all beings, the tragedy of struggling to find a lasting refuge from suffering and never ever reaching it, there wasn't even any audience to appreciate the epic story. OK, maybe the occasional acid-head could watch it for a few minutes, but that didn't count for much.

As I languished in this hell, trapped in this box of hopeless existence, I heard a voice whispering. I'd rarely gotten auditory hallucinations, and I'd never put much stock in disembodied voices. But this was a desperate time, and I was ready to listen to anything. I concentrated on the voice, which was repeating the same phrase over and over, gradually getting louder. I recognized it as ZMSS's voice, saying with a light and amused attitude, "Don't make anything."

Suddenly it was clear: the horrific universe I was perceiving, the "me" trapped in it, all of it, was made by thinking. Just one moment of not thinking, and that whole world of infinite suffering never existed. Dang, that was something. That simple little teaching phrase had saved me from a hell that had no possible escape.

Every year, right after New Years, ZMSS would come to that Zen Center near me and lead a week-long retreat. I had good reasons to avoid it. The intensity of Zen practice, the sheer number of hours of sitting meditation, was greater than anything I'd contemplated previously. All my years in ashrams, meditating at most a few hours in a day, couldn't prepare me for it.

The Zen forms (sitting posture, chanting style, rules, etc) would be new and different. I'd gotten comfortable with the Yoga style, but this new style would be difficult, even physically painful. At Yoga, I had some expertise, I'd been an old-timer at the ashram. At a Zen retreat, I'd be starting over as a rank beginner. I could recite philosophies from Yoga scriptures decently well, but if I went to the Zen Master again, there'd be those horribly uncomfortable questions, and I had absolutely no bloody clue how to respond or what it was all about.

But there was a major curiosity factor. And I couldn't deny that the teaching had proven its usefulness. Lots of teachings will work in most ordinary situations, but "don't make anything" had helped me even in the midst of the weirdest and worst of extreme bad trips. Crap. As with the light socket, I'd have to go to that retreat. It was January 1988.

Next time, I'll blog about this first retreat, which included difficult and amazing experiences during sitting practice, and formal teaching interviews with ZMSS that hit my mind strongly.

Understanding Spiritual Experiences

Over on Marta's blog about her years with Gurumayi (current guru of the late Swami Muktananda's SYDA org), there's some discussion of big special spiritual experiences. Lots of people were intrigued with Muktananda because of stories of people having trippy mind experiences around him. (I myself was influenced to follow Mukt in the late 70s by reading about a special experience that Ram Dass had when he met him.)

FWIW, here's what I just contributed to that blog discussion:

anony wrote:
I have met people who saw some gurus in their dreams when they (the people) were children, and people who heard the word "Muktananda" over the phone and got a blast of Shaktipat.

It's useful to remember that millions or tens of millions of Americans report having a huge spiritual experience at least once in their lives. It's just part of life, of being human. Sometimes it happens that people have amazing big non-ordinary experiences, psychotic breaks, spiritual epiphanies, etc.

There are millions of diverse situations when such things occur, and yeah, among those millions are a few who had them after having a dream or reading a book or hearing a funny-sounding Indian name over the phone.

After such an experience, there's a huge amount of interpretation that goes on. If you meet someone through SYDA, and they had some big experience earlier in their lives, chances are when they came to the ashram, they got lots of subtle and explicit peer pressure to interpret or re-interpret their memory of that experience according to "shaktipat" theology.

Maybe someone had a big experience when they were talking about Muktananda and eating yogurt. It's a matter of interpretation, of embracing a belief-system, that they end up thinking that they got the experience from Muktananda, rather than from yogurt.

It's useful to be literate about statistics. Someone says that 30% of all people arrested for reckless driving have marijuana in their system. That means precisely nothing; maybe 40% of all good drivers have pot in their system! So the fact that a few hundred people got an experience looking at Muktananda's photo means nothing unless you take it in the context of the millions of people who had some crazy experience thinking about Jesus, or seeing a flower, or looking at a child, or eating oatmeal.

It would be interesting to understand such phenomena.

Considering that our situation as human beings is that we get born into this world not knowing where we come from, where we're going, why we're here, or who we are... I wouldn't get too optimistic about understanding things.

Also, what's the need for understanding? The only point to understanding these special experiences would be to use that understanding to get more of those experiences. But why consider those big wow experiences so important?

OK, I like having them on rare occasions, but it's not like they're the purpose of life. I got a big experience from doing formal sitting meditation and self-inquiry for 3 or 4 days. It was cool, but took lots of effort. Also there are drugs that will give such experiences quite reliably. Some of these drugs are even legal, and compared to getting involved with SYDA, they're far far less expensive, dangerous, or addictive.