REFLECTIONS ON LSD, ZEN MEDITATION AND SATORI

Abstract

In the March 1961 issue of Psychologia Dr. Wilson Van Dusen presented LSD as a new means of arriving at satori, the Zen experience of sudden enlightenment. He said that the use of LSD is a faster method than years of meditation and suggested that the drug "could perhaps be used in a monastery in conjunction with conventional Zen practices to facilitate the student's development. ... " (1). From a background of some limited experience with Zen and several firsthand experiences with LSD as a normal subject under widely varying conditions I shall respond both favorably and critically to Van Dusen's ideas as I develop certain tentative reflections of my own. In this article I shall not attempt a general description of LSD and the whole range of its known effects. Information of this sort can be found elsewhere, for example in Dr. Janiger's "The Use of Hallucinogenic Agents in Psychiatry," in the July and August 1959 issues of The Californian Clinician (2). Because of the importance of personal background factors to the direction and mode of development of LSD experiences I shall present the emergence of my reflections in autobiographical sequence. Others' accounts of their LSD sessions as well as my own experiences have convinced me that Van Dusen is right when he says that "in a sense" one's LSD experiences are fabricated out of one's prior interests and desires (3). I do not think, on the other hand, that either LSD or Zen experiences are necessarily "nothing but" personal subjective projections. One of my observations simply has been that the individual subject and his background are among the most crucial elements determining the nature of the experience. I have used this observation to help give order to several diverse ideas. These ideas are tentative, and I present them mainly in the hope that they will provoke further discussion from others familiar with Zen and I or LSD. For several years before my first LSD session I had studied Zen academically and had practiced Zen meditation (zazCll) under the guidance of a couple of Zen monks in the United States. Shortly before this initial experience with the drug I had read Aldous Huxley's account of his first mescalin session in The Doors of Prrceptiotl, and I had talked with two or three normal LSD subjects who had had "good" experiences of an enlightening nature. I approached the experiment hoping that I also would have a "good" experience but additionally anticipating an adventure of unknown dimensions somewhat like a trip through uncharted country. The adventure began about thirty minutes after I had swallowed \ 75 gamma of LSD in a psychiatrist's office. During the day I was given freedom of \'1ovement within a suite of five rooms and an outside yard. In the cot\se of this first session I often saw movement in such things as walls, concrete, rocks, etc., ana generally perceived the world as brighter than ordinary. There was one frightening mom\nt when I felt that I might be caught on a habit-forming narcotic.