How psilocybin, queerness, and trauma introduced me to the Dharma
I first came to Buddhism in the midst of deep life rupture. I had recently found myself in profound crisis after being displaced, almost overnight, from Seattle to San Francisco through an unexpected and traumatic loss of housing. Trying to make it in a place like San Francisco while in the throes of active PTSD is not easy, so I recruited what help I could. First, I tried psilocybin. Then, needing to deal with what that unearthed, I turned to Buddhism.
My entrypoint was at the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco’s Castro District, mere blocks from where I lived. It’s an institution of distinction in that it was the nation’s first queer sangha, founded by Roshi Issan Dorsey, a Sōtō Zen priest whose past included drag, sex work, and drug addiction. Dorsey and the center established Maitri Hospice, which cared for gay men dying of AIDS-related complications, to which Dorsey himself would succumb in 1990.
The HSZC introduced me to the basics of Zen practice: zazen, dokhusan, mindfulness. Nonetheless, as my life unfolded and my chaotic work schedule kept me from most events, and I would return to Seattle within a few months of setting foot in their zendo, the HSZC became more of a waystation than it did a training ground. The real work was going to be done on the streets and while surfing couches in Seattle.
What this is all to say, is that in the way my life has unfolded, I’ve learned acutely a core truth of the way that Dharma functions when it takes genuine root in a person or place: it arises from the actual lived conditions of a place and its people. In San Francisco, that meant the conditions of a queer community plagued with structural erasure manifesting as addiction and the HIV/AIDS crisis. In my own life, that’s meant the conditions of housing crisis, being initiated into psychedelic San Francisco where you can literally buy mushrooms from street booths and storefronts, and the wandering aftermath that made connection with traditional or institutional sangha–especially of the white, culturally liberal, socioeconomically affluent, predominantly heterosexual sanghas of North America–impossible. It’s not that they have better and I have worse karma, it’s that we have dissonant karmas.
(You need to understand, as will become clear in the course of my writings: my life is not just gay, its GAY-gay, and that puts me in a very strange position relative to the makeup of most sanghas and Buddhist communities.)
Psychedelics, queerness, and karma
In Dharmic terms, we call that kind of dense, patterned conditioning karma. Karma is an easy concept to misunderstand, especially given its distortions in Western culture. All it means is the way that personal, collective, and historical conditions influence and are influenced across time by thoughts, words, and deeds. There’s no escape hatch from the way that karma works. It’s cause and effect. It simply has to be met, witnessed, and integrated. While that can initially sound disheartening, that is actually the key toward liberation. When karma is met, metabolized, and recognized as empty, there are none who fall outside of the possibility for awakening.
That’s not just a core Buddhist truth, that’s the very scandal of what the Buddha taught. There is no caste, class, or type of person to whom awakening is not a possibility. But the way that institutional Buddhism actually works, someone like me–poor, at the time homeless, steeped in psychedelic and queer cultures–would be written off as “bad karma.” “Maybe you need a few more lifetimes before you reach awakening, so focus on being reborn in better circumstances.” Except, that’s not what the Buddha taught. That’s not how karma actually works. And that’s certainly not what reincarnation means. Awakening is for this very life. Karma, all karma–for me, queerness, poverty, psychedelics–is the very field of awakening.
When I face that karma, something jumps out at me that becomes blindingly, startlingly clear: my first encounter with the Dharma took place during the dissolution of a mushroom trip. What got me to that point of “going under” were the conditions in which I found the Dharma taking root. Those conditions aren’t just “mine,” but they belong to a wider field of which I’m a part. That field, as far as I’m aware, is one that has never existed in any other time or place in human history. And what makes the Dharma meeting that field such a salient point is that it involved psychedelics, something which Buddhism has never met as practice before.
The actual work ahead
The meeting of Buddhism and psychedelics is ironically etched into popular Western imagination. As with many distortions involving Eastern religion and mind-altering substances, we have the counterculture of the 1960’s and 70’s to thank for that. When that movement put these two things together, they did so with little critical awareness for the nuances of either. Psychedelics and mediation both were escape and spectacle. Despite some revisionist approaches to history and practice that have gained some traction, Buddhism has always emphasized gradual cultivation, discipline, ethics, meditation. There is no “hidden lineage.” We may want our novelties to be validated by tradition, but in this case, that’s not the path forward.
Instead, we have to admit that psychedelics as a means of Buddhist practice are an innovation, and that’s okay. That doesn’t invalidate psychedelics in Buddhist practice. It keeps us honest about the actual work we’re doing: rooting ourselves in the here-and-now, and meeting the Dharma in exactly this time and place. This is not work that we can do well if we don’t acknowledge the conditions in which we work. We have to honor our path as it is, not as it would be in ideal circumstances.
This gives us the opportunity to articulate something important. Why psychedelics, here and now? What is it about them that uniquely enables us to meet the conditions of our lives as they are? How do they not simply arise from our karmic conditions, but allow us to “cut through,” metabolize, and see through them into deeper liberation? I’d offer, that if psychedelics don’t actually gives us a means for that kind of work, then to hell with them.
But I strongly believe that they do. They come from our cultures, our lands, and our histories. When emptied of distortions and seen free of karmic delusion (colonialism, individualism, hedonism, nihilism, etc.), they emerge as an opportunity to see the Dharma growing from our own soil, luminous and intact, when recognized as such. It just appears the brightest when all other light from our karma is dimmed, our vision is clear, and we know what we’re looking at. It’s the decay around us, glowing. It’s the luminosity of things passing into impermanence.
It’s foxfire.
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