Finding Enlightenment Through Disenchantment
Episode Summary:
Episode 8 of Redesigning The Dharma by Sahaja Soma features a conversation with Erik Davis, an author and founding member of The Alembic at Berkeley. The discussion begins with an introduction to Davis’ recent work on an upcoming book about LSD blotter art and his Substack 'Burning Shore.' They delve into the contemporary dharma scene, the strengths and weaknesses of the younger generation of practitioners, and how psychedelics play a role in this landscape. Erik shares about the intersections between Zen practice, the non-dual awareness traditions, and psychedelics, emphasizing the importance of a pluralistic and open-minded approach to spirituality. The dialogue encapsulates a rich discussion on the challenges and opportunities within modern spiritual practices, the evolving landscape of psychedelic experiences, and the balance between tradition and innovation.
Episode Highlights:
00:00 Introduction, Guest Background, Erik’s Current Projects
02:18 Insights From The Alembic: Observations on Young Dharma Practitioners
12:16 Disenchantment and Enchantment in Psychedelic Experiences
30:42 The Participant Observer: A Journey of Discernment and Non-Duality
44:10 The Open Source Approach to Spirituality and Its Challenges
50:55 Embracing Pluralism and Mystery in Spiritual Practice
Guest Bio:
Erik Davisis an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is the author of five books, including High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s; Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica; The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape; and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV. His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, a cult classic of visionary media studies that’s still in print.
Erik’s scholarly and popular essays on California, music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into over a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He currently writes the Substack publication Burning Shore.
Full Transcript
Adrian: Welcome to Redesigning the Dharma. I'm your host, Adrian Baker, and today I'm speaking with Erik Davis.
Erik is a scholar, an author, an award winning journalist, a podcaster, and a popular speaker based in San Francisco. Erik grew up in California, spent 10 years on the East Coast, including studying literature and philosophy at Yale undergraduate, and then working in the freelance trenches of Brooklyn and Manhattan before moving back to San Francisco, where he currently resides.
He's the author of five books, the most well known of which is "Technosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism In The Age Of Information," a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages and most recently republished by North Atlantic press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, techno culture, and contemporary spirituality to over a dozen [00:01:00] books.
And he's also a popular speaker, including at psychedelic conferences, which is how I originally met Erik. His forthcoming book is a book on LSD that will be coming out in April in time for bicycle day, the Anniversary of Albert Hoffman's Discovery of LSD, which looks to be a very interesting book.
And he is also the host on the Expanding Mind podcast for over a decade. He got his PhD in religious studies from Rice University in 2015. More recently, he also has been writing a publication for Substack called Burning Shore. And without further ado, my conversation with Erik Davis.
Well, Erik thank you so much for speaking with me on Redesigning the Dharma, and it's really nice to connect so thank again, so thank you for your time.
Erik: Oh yeah, absolutely. I still remember our conversation. How long ago was that? That was a little while ago.
Adrian: It was, I think it was 2018. I will have read your, bio but if you want to say just a little something about what you're up to these days, your most recent work, [00:02:00] especially with regards to dharma or psychedelics or anything you're doing, would love to hear.
Erik: Yeah, well I have a book coming out in a couple months that is a illustrated history and analysis of LSD blotter art uh, which was a very fun archival project. And other than that, I've been working on my Substack which is called Burning Shore.
And I've been writing there more and trying to kind of play with the form and It's not really quite like what most people do with their Substacks, but it's fun and we touch on these topics. Like I recently had a piece called "You Are The Eyes Of The World," that looked at the Grateful Dead song "Eyes of the World" and translation of Longchenpa that uses that as a title and I was kind of thinking about why that happened, and what about these lyrics, and how do we think about psychedelics and Zogchen and you know that kind sort of playful explorations.
And that's what I try to do, is not write position papers I'm not really like an [00:03:00] opinion guy or a pundit in that sense, but I like to write essays in the classic old sense of the word of attempts.
Of let's bring some themes together and try to write well and evocatively and richly around these complex, subtle, and sometimes funny and absurd topics.
And have that be a sort of place, because there's just so much opinion, you know? And there's so much writing that is didactic or informational or positional, trying to build up a kind of argument for something. And there's just so much of that that I prefer to bring, like, a looser and more evocative sense of writing to these really serious topics that I actually have a lot of opinions about. But I don't I don't tend to write opinion forward.
And then the other thing that I'm doing that's quite interesting to me, both as a personal practice and a sort of vocational [00:04:00] opportunity but also actually, frankly, as a kind of anthropological thing, which is that I'm involved in a on the ground, brick and mortar meditation slash movement slash culture and arts center in Berkeley called "The Alembic."
The Alembic is like a chemical vessel or they use it in laboratories even today. It's like a vessel of transformation. And so we've, I've been doing a lot of programming there and working on the place and trying to figure out what it's, what's its sensibility? How does it serve today?
And you know, getting a lot of younger people coming in who are interested in psychedelics, interested in meditation. A lot of them coming from a very different place than in my generation or my life. So I'm learning a lot about the contemporary dharma and strengths and weaknesses about today's sort of younger crop of practitioners.
So that's really been a very interesting and rich and rewarding part of my sort of work over the last couple of [00:05:00] years and will probably be, you know, definitely a big part of what I'm doing for the next few years. I don't think I'm going to write another book for a little while, but I like writing for my uh, Substack, so
Adrian: Nice. I'm so curious, that last thing you said, what are you noticing about some of the, we can call it, strengths or weaknesses or, or even just what you're noticing about contemporary or younger generation among generation of Dharma practitioners?
Erik: Sure, well it, it's definitely a Bay Area situation.
Adrian: Right.
Erik: So what I'm going to say would be filtered through that. I suspect it would be different even in Los Angeles, let alone
Adrian: Oh,
Erik: Milwaukee or Atlanta or whatever, because for a variety of reasons, we attract a particularly Bay area set of people who will work for technology companies. Who let's say are, I mean, we have Open AI people who come to The Alembic. We definitely have people who are on the spectrum. And you know, I say that as a great lover of people on the spectrum of [00:06:00] fascinating with that
Adrian: I'm on the spectrum, ADHD, no problem.
Erik: reality. Yeah. And it's, it's a you know, and it actually has a lot...
You know, in a way, that's the most concrete thing I can say in answer to your question is because there's a lot of people who come who You know who are not neurotypical in some ways, they actually have some real advantages in Dharma practice.
So it's a really interesting thing and I actually think that if you look at like, the sort of mutation in contemporary Dharma over the last five to ten years, let's say it's represented by Daniel Ingram, Hardcore Dharma, or TMI... that one feature of it, and I think this is very true of the Hardcore Dharma world, is that it actually introduces a kind of a sort of spectrum-y quality to certain aspects of practice.
With the [00:07:00] discovery, the laser pointed capacity to drill down and be, despite the scatteredness, be extremely focused and clear about what's happening has actually helped super drive contemporary dharma practice.
Like I get the sense from people coming and this is I'm just generalizing now beyond the diagnostic category, which is so problematic and some people it fits, some people it doesn't it's... you know it's a mess to try to use that language but I do it out of a fascination and a conviction that this is actually one of the major things about contemporary culture and in the 21st century is actually incorporating neurodiversity into the sort of range of things.
So you have to kind of risk making generalizations and getting things a little wrong to point out something that's really happening. But my sense is that there actually is an acceleration of certain aspects [00:08:00] of the awakening process in people, including people who are relatively young to the practice and there's a different degree of not just enthusiasm, but a real conviction that, change can happen not just insights, but awakening a real phenomena.
And we might actually get there like next Yeah. in a year. And that can go too far and that's something else to talk about, but I think it's worth reflecting on just how exciting that is, how valuable that is, and how it's different. And here's, here's the way that I would describe its difference from the past as a Gen X-er. Someone who is on the upper end of Gen X, so I'm fairly close to the boomers, but I'm definitely not a boomer.
So, the boomers get to have their youthful naivete. That enlightenment is just around the corner or that they actually were enlightened last night on LSD. And now they're just kind of mopping up with their Zen or whatever.
But there's a real sense in the [00:09:00] late 1960s and the early 1970s that, man, we can do this. We're going to wake up. And there was a lot of awakenings. Whether they were legitimate or not doesn't really matter, but there's a lot of people who are like, "oh my god, like I broke through and this is happening and this is not happening. And what am I going to do? What's the nature of the self? Who am I?" You know, like this big explosion.
And those people, you know, doesn't quite pan out the way they thought over time, uh, they have to deal with taxes and children and jobs and blah, blah, blah. And so as the Dharma matures from that explosion, when so many people were drawn to it because it had some resonance with psychedelics or with mysticism or the occult, and then as that matures, as the teachers are making money and they have a job and they have families as the mainstream world goes, "well, I guess something's okay about this Buddhism stuff, we can kind of bring that in."
As all these things [00:10:00] happen, it starts to mature, but it also becomes more ordinary. And you get the great Jack Kornfeld book title, and I have big props to Jack. He's a great teacher and to his credit, he was kind of the first one, like leaving aside Ram Dass, he was kind of the first mainstream, well established Dharma teacher who was vocally pro psychedelic when he didn't have to be.
He could have just kept his mouth shut and been like, "yeah, we did all that back in those day. It was good, but we're not going to talk about it now." You know, it's..." and that's not the way that a lot of Dharma teachers from that generation, the boomer Dharma teachers were. Dharma teachers were And he didn't do that, so he gets extra cred in my book, but he's got that great title like, "After The Ecstasy, The Laundry."
So From a Gen X perspective, for people coming up in the 80s Into the 90s, the dharma scene has this kind of [00:11:00] compromised vibe. There's all these scandals. People are getting older. They didn't wake up the way they thought. So, you know, maybe it's really kind of a little bit more ordinary. It's ordinary mind. It's ordinary life. It's doing the laundry.
Which is also part of the Dharma. It's also part of truth. I totally recognize that, but to get stuck there, especially for young people, is lame. Young people should go for the gold. They should...
You know, go out there and like snarl and, you know, and hopefully their teachers and their traditions can sort of temper that or refine it or point it in the right direction.
But to come up with a kind of after the ecstasy of the laundry attitude, that's a little weak sauce.
Adrian: Mm.
Erik: now that's not the case anymore.
People are like, no, no, I can read this book and I can do this practice. And then smoke a little 5-MeO and I might actually make it.
I don't think that's necessarily true [00:12:00] personally, like I'm a little bit more of a ordinary mind guy, but I think that that energy is great and that it's more again about like refining, targeting, pointing out the blind spots.
But using that energy, which partly has to do with a certain confidence, a certain quality of secularism, a certain kind of transparency about what we're doing, like a step away even farther from the guru model, or from the mysterious model of the unspoken ineffable, towards more explicitness, more practice, more method, more down to earthness, and a more peer to peer kind sensibility around things.
All of those have their shadow sides, but it's definitely a different, a different energy and psychedelics play an important role in that. But it's different than the way they played a role in the 60s and 70s. Quite different in some ways, I [00:13:00] think.
So it's a very interesting time and working at The Alembic, interfacing with younger people who are serious practitioners, and having awakening experiences, and getting lost in interesting ways it's been quite an eye opener for me.
Adrian: I mean, there's so much. First of all, I'd love to come back to this with The Alembic, because it sounds like one thing that it's very much doing is an open source approach to Dharma and Tantra, which is really what I'm interested in.
One thing I want to, invite you to elaborate on is just sort of something that you said about the way your perception or your view tends to be a little more old school with respect to psychedelics and awakening and in researching to prepare for this podcast, I sense that actually our views are quite similar in this respect.
Um, there was one quote that you said, might have been speaking with Michael Taft, and you basically said, "With psychedelics, disenchantment is as important as enchantment."
And for me, when you said that, I have a sense that that, spirit is the view that you're conveying. That's certainly a big part of my message but I'm curious if you could [00:14:00] elaborate on that and if you could say a little more about that quote or why psychedelics or maybe even waking up is as much about disenchantment as enchantment.
Erik: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I remember when I said that the first time I was like, "Oh yeah,
Adrian: Mm
hmm,
Erik: something like." I'm not even sure. It's like one of those things. Sometimes I'll say stuff and I'm not even sure if I know all the ways that it's true, and so it kind of stays with me as a kind of co on or, or like probe to like, okay, what was that? Cause that, that landed, but what did you actually mean? And I meant different things about it.
One, in a way, slightly more superficial thing, is that I was writing an early, you know, piece I wrote called " The Paisley Gate" was about the connection between psychedelics and the Dharma through the lens of Tantra.
And while I didn't know very much about Tantra then, I only know a little bit more now, including how little I know. But I have a better sense [00:15:00] of the territory. And there I was really kind of just pulling out a few things that I still think I got basically right. Which had to do with how because they were illegal, and I mean, there still are basically illegal, but they were like illegal and forbidden, that psychedelics had a kind of extra tantric charge just because of the social fact of their being forbidden.
Adrian: It's transgressive Yeah
Erik: Yeah, it's transgressive against an actual social agreement about what's right and what's wrong. It can't just be transgressive because you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm doing it in my own way." It's got to actually be transgressive the way that like, eating a cow in 9th century India is like really transgressive. But it's not that transgressive in, you know, like, you know, in Milwaukee,
Adrian: Certainly
Erik: like, what? You're having a hamburger? What's the problem?
So there is a kind of social factor and [00:16:00] that was true about psychedelics. So you were a criminal by using them. Your Dharma communities probably didn't want to hear about it, and maybe they were actively opposed to it. So those people who were Buddhist practitioners, but who kept their faith with psychedelics, also had a kind of shadowy role in a lot of Dharma communities.
And so I was talking about these relationships, and that's, by the way, largely gone. Even though the drugs themselves are illegal, the whole cultural story around them is utterly transformed. And while that's groovy and hopefully fewer people go to prison because that sucks it's just the fact that there is no longer a charge.
In fact, not only is there no longer a charge, there's actually like a kind of other charge that has to be dealt with. But that's a another topic. Let me answer your, go back to this question about disenchantment.
So one thing I was writing [00:17:00] was that like if you compare the path of psychedelics and the path of Dharma, let's say, and by the way, I want to make this real clear, I don't think they're the same thing.
I follow Patrick Lundborg here wrote a wonderful book, he was an independent researcher, writer, a scholar of psychedelic music, like he was a big music collector, record collector, and he died, unfortunately. He was Swedish, or maybe Danish. I don't know, anyway, sorry.
He wrote this great book and at the end he talks about how many people have used religion or mysticism or the occult to map or model psychedelics. And he's like, "Yeah, that makes sense. Totally, especially Eastern mysticism, totally makes sense, but it's wrong."
And he's saying wrong, not that it's not useful, but that it's really, really important for him, and I kind of believe this, to just let psychedelics be their own thing. They're their own path. There are multiple paths, but it's not the same thing as practice. [00:18:00] And by making that distinction, I think we actually help both things along more than trying to say they're actually kind of the same thing or they're pointing to the same thing. And it's like well, maybe they're ultimately pointing to the same thing, but in some fundamental ways they're different practices.
And just the way that I can be a Zen practitioner and a musician, and I bring some of my Zen into my music and you know some of my improvisation into my Zen, but they're not the same thing. That would be dumb.
That, I believe, is a kind of healthy model for psychedelics and its relationship to the Dharma. But there's some advantages to psychedelics over the Dharma. And one of them is that if you're a Dharma practitioner, and it's the fourth day of your session, and you have a profound mystical experience, and you see a spinning wheel of Buddhas and light pouring down, and it illumines your heart, and the whole hall is radiant, you're gonna be pretty fucking attached to that thing. You know, you're [00:19:00] gonna, inflation, attachment, I'm special, something's happened, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, that kind of stuff can obviously happen with psychedelics. People have breakthroughs and then they think they're Jesus or they think they're an enlightened being. That does happen all the time, so in a way it's not really a perfect analogy. But for me, and my milieu, and the kind of people that I knew, and the kind of people that I respected, and the kind of people that I read, were more sophisticated.
And they knew, that whatever marvels happen, you are on a metabolic journey, and as your body metabolizes these materials, the phenomenology is going to change. You get a window, and then the window closes.
So the next day, you're like, "wow, that was pretty intense. That encounter with the cosmic all mind." And here I am, I'm looking out the window, I gotta get some cash together to go get [00:20:00] some coffee. It contains within it a kind of downbeat or realism as part of the envelope of the phenomenology.
And so, in that way, it actually has a leg up over the kinds of mystical experiences that happen to people when they're just focused like on the nat(ural). Because then anything that happens has got to be real like, "oh my God, like I really deserve that vision of the, of the spoked wheel with the buddhas and the light. I mean, that was like me, man. That was like, I was on the nat."
So it's like, yeah, maybe. But I don't know that. But it could also just be like, well, that was a good day, or you got, you got a boon, or you know, the cosmic cards fell outright.
So in a way, there's a kind of realism about visionary experience within, let's call it sophisticated psychedelic use that I think it actually gives you an advantage.
So part of it is that. Is that the, the highs you [00:21:00] want. The ecstasies you want, because we all want them, we all love it when they're happening, "oh my god, finally, this is great." That those things are part of the path. They clearly have a role to play. But they're not the whole story. And in fact, for me, psychedelics are kind of more interesting the farther away you are from the experience. You know, the psychedelic experience.
And it's like, yeah but it's what's more interesting is kind of what happens like, I often say to people I'm less interested in psychedelic drugs or psychedelic experiences than I am in psychedelic people.
Like what happens you keep doing this to yourself, you're gonna change whether you want to or not. And some people don't change that much but even then there's this sort of openness, there's this sort of quality that shifts.
And then other people, they really change a great deal. I mean, the way that Dharma practice can make someone change. Can lighten your load, can open your view, can let you hold [00:22:00] things more lightly or engage on multiple levels. So that's sort of one kind of obvious dimension.
But then there's, some more subtle phenomenological ones. Which is that, and this is, again, I'm just talking from my own experience, is that part of my tutelage with psychedelics, and by the way, I think that's actually a really, that's actually in a way the most important model, is that whatever psychedelics are, whatever their value for you, however much you see them religiously or in a secular context, it's a teaching relationship. You are learning how you respond to these opportunities.
And it, it loops, you know, you learn things, and then that shifts the next situation, and you can kind of build on it over time. And that learning may be very cosmic and very metaphysical and involve gods and dimensions, and that learning can be [00:23:00] very physical, can be very psychological, and it's usually some mixture of both.
But in both contexts, for me, there's very important lessons about, in a way, deconstructing and disenchanting the visionary. It's not the whole story. And in fact, it's a little delusional sometimes.
And what's more interesting to me is this kind of the interstices of these experiences. There are gaps. the ways in which they relate to you know, your own experiences, your own set and setting, your own programming, your own metaphysics.
So we know that set and setting have a huge role to play in people's experiences. What does that mean? That means that it's not just about taking four grams of psilocybin mushrooms in a room, it's like, "well, what is my attitude about that going into the experience? And where am I?"
And where am I is not just the room with its lighting and it has music and this kind of music and not that kind of music. [00:24:00] All that programming stuff. It's also the larger cultural story. What are mushrooms? What are they good for? What do people use them for? What can they afford? What can they not afford?
So there's all this context that we bring into the encounter and that context has a real impact on the phenomenology of the experience. Well that means that I should not be taking my phenomenology at face value.
That means that my own experience, in a way, is material to be reworked, even to some degree, analyzed, or integrated, if you will, based on my own expectations, my own stories, my own hopes and dreams.
It's a little bit more like dream interpretation. And in doing so, disenchantment is a really powerful tool to clarify. To identify, to discriminate the various features that are going on, rather than just sort of reveling in the emotions [00:25:00] of wonder, and awe, and joy, and fear, and the sort of memories of these extraordinary images or beings that you felt you had a contact with or insights or you know, all that stuff's great, but if you don't also start breaking it down, that teaching loop that I was describing only goes so far.
And you're more likely to become inflated. You're more likely to become delusional. You're probably more likely to get stuck in a kind of like, I gotta go back to that place where I experience awe and wonder again.
And so again, to my mind, there's something about disenchantment, not in the sense of like, " Oh, life is meaningless." Although the meaningless void is, to me, a very important place, both in dharma and in psychedelics. But more the sense of a kind of not just irony, but a certain way, a kind of humor, and a kind of, like, awareness of the constructiveness of [00:26:00] our experience.
And you really get to that insight about the constructiveness unless you are willing to disenchant the sort of surface story of what is happening.
Adrian: I think especially what you're saying towards the end there, what jumps out to me is so many people come to think of psychedelics or awakening to your point about meditation, though it's more obvious with psychedelics, is about chasing peak experiences. And of course that's what we can do in life, and then that gets projected onto the spiritual journey.
And so I think one can relate to it that way, but what I find from working with psychedelics, it's really more and more to appreciate how it's changing my perception in ordinary life when I'm not on it, just like meditation. And for me, a lot of awakening is about appreciation of beauty, and aesthetics, and art, and savoring experience.
And I think that if we relate to it in that way, psychedelics can be a real enhancement, but the critical aspect and it's, [00:27:00] it's interesting, I really would have resonated I think, and I still do in some ways with what you're saying about separating psychedelics and Dharma. And I've come to have a bit of a different view, but it's only quite specific to Ayahuasca and Ayahuasca analog, Soma, but this is just my meaning making as well. And it just so happens with those plants. The plants themselves seem to mirror quite perfectly Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya in that union of appearances.
So I think there's something that lends itself to that, but you know, it's the same thing with meditation. You know, meditation without the view is like one leg without the other, I say in Dzogchen and Mahamudra. And I find that is absolutely critical when working with plant medicine or psychedelics, whether we're talking about how to shift from chasing peak experiences to really savoring the nature of mind that's always and already here. And really magnificent in this beautiful display in its own right.
And I'm really curious, perhaps related to this topic is, as a Zen practitioner, how do you relate to plant medicine, and if you can even say specifically [00:28:00] Ayahuasca, in a non dual way? And in what ways is that aligned or not aligned sometimes with the way it's offered?
Because it's offered in a different context, which has a different view. And I'm curious how you make sense of that, integrate that with your sort of non dual Zen practice.
Erik: Have a lot of respect for people who have done a long, deep apprenticeship, particularly with ayahuasca. And I do not put myself in that category. I mean, I have had a decent amount exposure, I've had quite a range of experiences, but I don't have that kind of depth that some people do.
Which itself is kind of interesting the way in which it's it's sort of becomes kind of a special category like it's sort of like there's psychedelics and then there's Ayahuasca.
Adrian: Mm hmm
Erik: And why that is and what it has to do with the phenomenology and with the culture and there's a lot of interesting things to say about it, but I understand the distinction.
And I would say that one of the reasons that I've always been attracted to Zen and Zen is such an important part of my [00:29:00] practice, although more and more forms of Ddzogchen and Mahamudra are really key, as well as, non dual Shaiva Tantra. But all of those sort of, you know, non dual awareness orientations.
But the one I liked about Zen is that there's just, they just don't go into a lot of stuff. So you can just kind of like, you can just plug it in, you know?
it has a certain sensibility about minimalism and a certain kind of lack of rococo elaboration, but you know, then you can just do that anywhere. That's why there's all that cliche of like, whatever, the Zen of motorcycle maintenance or sailing or you know, programming computers or whatever.
It's like a sensibility you can bring to anything, including sitting in a group of global northerners who are in some ways tapping into a mestizo tradition from the Amazon and bringing forward some mixture of actual apprenticeship with songs, [00:30:00] with remixes and subtle and not so subtle shifts in the overall idea of what we're doing with this medicine, as opposed to its mestizo or indigenous context.
So you know, my anthropologist is fine with this situation. Like I'm fine recognizing that i'm in this kind of curious mixture zone and that the drive that I bring with it is just a kind of devotion to like, clarity and honesty.
And a friend of mine said something very interesting that I've been sitting with about ayahuasca recently where she said because we were talking about different allies and different dimensions of those worlds, and she goes, one thing about ayahuasca is it really keeps you honest.
And that, that I really appreciated. I was like, okay, I, I think I know what you're pointing out there. And so then along those lines, there's a, kind of, I think, support for the groundedness and clarity of simple awareness that is not framed in the same [00:31:00] way in other situations.
That said, you're in a situation often within the West where there's a kind of quasi religious character and people have certain assumptions and they personify in certain ways. And so, you know, it's that, that interesting blend. But for me, it's like, I've always been very comfortable being, let's call it a seeker who is also a participant observer. Or who's also an anthropologist.
In fact, to me, I think that's actually one of the great skills to develop as a seeker. Because then, rather than going into a situation with, like, the seeker's question, Is this true? Is it not true? Is this going to help illuminate my path? Is this not going to help illuminate my, you know, I don't know.
But you go in there as an anthropologist, as a participant observer, and you're going, I'm just going to check this out and see where it goes. See what happens.
Adrian: It invites discernment.
Erik: Yeah, it invites discernment, but also it doesn't, you can, you know, from that perspective and if we're really [00:32:00] being non dual about it, you can have profound insights at a NASCAR race, Right?
Adrian: yeah,
Erik: Right? Why wouldn't, why couldn't you? I mean, you don't, it might be unexpected, might be unusual, probably more likely to happen at the Zen session. But, and, and I say that with an extreme example because then when you go into any kind of religious context where people are seeking, where people are trying to get down to like ultimate truths or, you know, the highest values or insight or awareness, whatever you want to call it, even if it's also kind of messy in other ways or problematic, you know, you can sort of take what's good there.
You can like participate in what you want to participate. And observe what you want to observe.
So being a participant observer allows you to lean in to the degree that you're comfortable or that it resonates. And when it doesn't, it's fine. Whereas if you're a seeker, you're like, oh, this isn't working for me. Who's that shaman? Who did, is he really a shaman? It's just some white [00:33:00] guy grew up in LA. What?
You know, but if you're a participant observer, you're like, wow, this is really resonating for me. That's powerful stuff. And like, yeah, isn't it funny? Like, I don't, I don't even really know where this guy's coming from. Like, what, what does that mean?
But so it creates a, a kind of comfort with ambiguity as well as a commitment to discernment and a kind of generosity. Cause you're like, well, let's just see what's going on here. Like, I don't, I don't need it to be pure. I don't need it to be perfect. I don't need it to be authentic even.
Because I've had profound experiences in inauthentic places, under inauthentic conditions. So, that, you know, and I'm not saying that has really anything to do with Zen necessarily. It's just that that's the way that I have come to be in these situations. And so, while there's usually some degree of alienation in having this kind of approach, and it can be lonely in some ways, in, you know, some contexts.
In general, I feel pretty good with that and indeed, the more you're sort of then bringing what's [00:34:00] really at heart for you to the medicine, like, ah, I'm gonna like, this is a wake awareness now, man, we're not, I'm not gonna, I'm not screwing around. Like great, gods. Great, Icaros. Songs. The phenomenology of the group, sure, wonderful, but I'm serious.
You know, this is what my work is right now. And you can't always get there, but when you do, then it's like you're doing your thing in this other context. If it doesn't work out, then that's not clearly going to be a very fruitful path for you, but if it does, it almost doesn't matter what other people are constructing there, whether it's a spirit, whether it's, you know, this kind of message, whether it's demanding this kind of work or not.
Yeah. So yeah, and in that sense, I think that ayahuasca in particular is very supportive of a kind of direct presence. And that for me, a lot of the work in it and it [00:35:00] is a lot of work, more than I think other things in some in some fundamental ways that for me, the work is often about the visible almost incarnate, almost carnal distinction between presence, awake, aware, present to the now, and then all the bullshit that I wrap myself in to hide from it all the time, which in a way is just the normal condition.
Adrian: Absolutely and the medicine just amplifies
Erik: It it just amplifies it. And it's just like, Oh shit, this is just this. In fact, they're like in the midst of some grueling.
You know, three, hour three of like, oh god, this is fucking grueling. It was like, I realized that part of what made it grueling, is that for all the bells and whistles, all the wild phenomenology, it was totally familiar, because it was really just the same basic challenge. Which is this, every day, you know, the night time, insomnia, [00:36:00] whatever, like, presence.
Oh, here's the story. I'm attaching. I'm like, I got a loop who I'm, oh, the narcissism and all... I mean, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. There's something going on here. Oh, you know, to a point of like, like kind of almost absurdity because it's amplified so much. But in that very amplification, it's also extremely clarifying.
And when those, spaces of presence were unable to sort of percolate and develop in their own way without struggle or strain, there was a particular excellence to the sense of yeah, to this, to the sense of the, of the deep, of the deep mind of the similarity, let's say, the resonance between the environment and the internal state. And so, you know, quite, quite remarkable in that sense as well, but also a little bit, a little bit ordinary, you know, I [00:37:00] mean, my practice is always like, you know, sometimes you can't be in the room, but like I'm in the room, like, yeah, there's other stuff's happening, but I'm in the room. I'm in this room in this place. There's some bodies. There's this guy over there. This woman over here. There's the thing, you know, like and a lot of people I think I just they're ready to go. They just want to go.
Adrian: Like up and out?
Erik: Yeah, up and out or whatever, which is great. It's fine But it's just my way partly because of participant observation, partly because of having being kind of a natural anthropologist is, that I'm also like aware of the room. But the good side of that from a practice point of view, is is that I'm always ready, I'm always up for ordinary mind.
It's not disappointing.
I'm perfectly happy to be like aware of like, okay, they're running, they, they got their little flashlight over there because they got to decide who's going to sing the next song. And there's a little bit of tension about who's going to sing them, you know, and the person next to me is in, you know, is in like some [00:38:00] far away castle.
I mean, I like the castles too. If the castle show up, I'll go hang out. But like, I'm also very resonant with like what's actually happening in the room. And it's the same thing that I've had with a lot of meditation spaces or even, even ceremonial magic. I was just telling a story today where I was like, I was in a ceremonial magic, Western, occult order for a number of years.
And I got a lot out of it. I really liked the people. It was really fun. But there was a moment when I kind of realized that I'm not, I'm not really a magician. And that was like, we had set up the hall and, you know, we're all in robes and we've just invoked the gods. And, you know, it's this whole kind of elaborate theater of gods.
And we were just going to have like a sort of meditation in the middle of it. And, you know, a lot of people were like flying with their associations and later on they were telling these stories about the spirits they saw or the, the patterns they saw or the messages they got about this and that symbol or whatever.
And so I was, I was sitting there in the middle and I was [00:39:00] like, okay, I'm having a, here we go. And I'm like meditating. And I'm like, I'm in a room, the carpet's stained, the fluorescent lights are buzzing, I have nowhere to go, and I'm totally content. That's what was happening.
And so I'm like, yeah, like, I can keep doing this, but in a way, like, that's, like, kinda just the way I lean.
And I, I think there's an element of that that happens in these extraordinary circumstances that is, you know, sometimes a little disappointing because it. is fun to go to the astral palaces and, and meet the gods and swim with mermaids and all that kind of stuff. And those things do happen sometimes, but there's something that's more like a kind of ordinary mind, which is right next door to non dual, to Rigpa.
And that's, I guess, a part of what I really love about Zen.
It's like, you know, that the way really is ordinary mind, and it doesn't mean just like the ordinary mind, like, oh, I got to do this today, [00:40:00] and, you know, the oh, I hate Bluetooth because it causes static or whatever. It's, it's something else, but it's right there. And that right there ness points, points to something that is, Yeah, it's got a, it's got a salty feel to it. It's got a this here ness quality to it.
It takes it even more out of the mystical reification that our minds constantly project in order to make something special and make it exotic, make it, you know, outside the norm. So yeah, so that's, I think, the way in which the Zen stays with me as I move through spaces that are extraordinary and ordinary kind of at the same time.
Adrian: Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, equanimity is certainly emphasized in all Buddhist traditions, but just thinking about it from the Dzogchen or Mahamudra, I mean, , all four measurables or measurables sort of, are qualities of, of resting in Rigpa, but equanimity is absolutely foundational. So it's intrinsic to that [00:41:00] recognition.
Minutes ago, you were talking about, you know, this desire to get back to authentic. I think you were saying it in a plant medicine context and it just brings up, how long there's this very strong impulse within the human psyche to get back to what's pure, original, authentic.
And it brings me back to what you're doing with The Alembic and this sort of open source approach to dharma meditation, Tantra.
Because I think there's such a healthy conversation discussion there. You know, we hear a lot of voices within, I guess that have always been there in traditions resisting innovation or change because there's fear of losing the pure, original, true teachings, but where was the point when there was the original pure buddhism, or whatever it is?
Erik: Yeah, that's a, that's a great issue. And I don't, yeah, I don't have an, easy answer for it, because in that sense I have a great deal of respect for traditionalists and [00:42:00] conservatives. Like I, in the sense that I really get what their worries are about. And I think a lot of it is actually true.
It's just that for me, both with my upbringing in the era that I was, in California, in the sort of after wave of the spiritual counterculture and all of the mixture and all of the cults and all of the, you know, flim flam men and women and the whole thing. It's like, I can't pretend to get back to that place, but I appreciate deeply the critique. And I see it as like an unresolvable conundrum.
The problem of the more accessible you make it, the more you make it workable for contemporary people. The more you lose, I wouldn't even say necessarily authenticity, I would almost say character. Becomes more efficient, becomes more clear, [00:43:00] becomes more transparent. It's more what's the word, kind of explicable.
So the way that I approach, it personally is recognizing the way that the modern condition can erode the juice, the spark, the authentic, pure thing, if you want to call it that way, but really more just like the power of transmission and the power of encounter that modern conditions, a desire for explicitness, a desire for clarity, for method, for a lack of mystic augury, all those kinds of impulses, which make a lot of sense, it's probably what the modern world's about, they also lose things, and lose some very significant things.
And one way I think that I have come to be around to deal with that is to insist on the mystery. Insist on not knowing. You know, it's almost like you go so [00:44:00] far in the direction of like, look, nobody knows what's going on, we're all making it up as we go along. All the traditions are invented. It's all bullshit. We're all just doing our best. Like almost you take that so far so you don't know anymore.
So yeah, you can use this method, but come on, just a meth, what, what, you think it's really going to do that for you? But it, you know, that's, that's my per, kind of personal way to sort of handle this problem, because once you've acknowledged the mystery and the limits of your own hubris, the limits of your own knowledge, the limits of your own conviction about some particular method or some particular teacher, that you actually, that then, the mystery returns and you're once again, there's synchronicity.
Once again, there's not knowing. Once again, there's intuition. Once again, there's all of these things that sort of pull you outside of your ego's sort of knowledge and desire to control.
So that's sort of what I see because one of the problems I see with the modern [00:45:00] open source method is just that it just empowers the individual to be more in control and to be more knowledgeable what's happening.
So there's a great fetishization of particular methods. There's a resistance to anything that's kind of supernatural or that involves gods or involves dreams or involves all this sort of like fuzzy analog stuff. That was once much more dominant in the kind of occult, mystical 60s and 70s. Now that stuff is, it's there, but it's not there.
It's like, there is an occult resurgence, but in other ways it's kind of, a lot of things have this sort of digital gloss. That involve a certain kind of um, explicitness.
Adrian: Yeah. And one thing that strikes me is that the open source approach need not go in that direction of totally demystifying everything.
But I can see the tendency and I can also see, given what you shared earlier about the tech crowd at The Alembic, how [00:46:00] in particular perhaps the demographic in this area, other things about their background, their training might really bias towards that.
Erik: that. Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one. I mean, I think, well, there's still. It's not necessary, but let's just stay with it because it's an interesting problem, that it's about this idea of explicitness.
So one way of describing what the Enlightenment is, you know, in the Western sense of science and reason, is a basic commitment to explicitness. That anything that's worth saying is worth saying explicitly and clearly.
So if we're going to talk about science, we don't need to use poetic metaphors. That's not going to help. We want to say as much as we can, what we see. That's the gambit.
And you know, there's a lot to be said for that on a lot of dimensions, and most of us are to some degree creatures of that move. So that then gets interesting when you come to Spiritual paths because then you know, what is what's being explicit?
Well the methods themselves [00:47:00] and a sort of resistance to traditional modes of poeticizing, of acknowledging mystery, of acknowledging the unknown, of non rational features, you know, that gods are real and they can interface with us through our dreams, or, you know, all that kind of stuff. You're like, yeah, maybe, but that's not really true to the spirit of explicitness.
Whereas if I take, you know, Theravadan Buddhism and kind of break it down and create a kind of method of that, that's super explicit. And so it works really well in the modern context. So the whole story of buddhist modernity is the way in which these currents that were full of magic, and mystery, and obscurantism, and supernaturalism and all this kind of stuff, all of them, including Theravadan, that, that they became recoded as explicit and visible and to some degree rational.
Yeah. And so we're kind of [00:48:00] in this weird zone where we're like, that's not sufficient, but we also don't really want to like go back to like, you know, gurus and authoritarian masters who know everything and tell you the way things are going to be. That's not, that's not really going to work either. So we're in this really funny, weird place, that I kind of like, in a way.
And, the fun thing about the open, when you say open source, it also makes me realize that the magical order that I talked about earlier was named, the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn. And what they had done is they had gone back into the Golden Dawn traditions, which is in a way kind of the most significant single ceremonial magic order in the, at least the English speaking world of the last 150 years.
But those those ceremonies were actually kind of published, even though there's a lot of secrecy, they're kind of published, and they went in they actually changed them. They said oh we didn't like we don't like all the Christian stuff. We're gonna put like more [00:49:00] pagan stuff back in there and throw in some Aleister Crowley and you know, whatever so they were actively re piecing together the tradition.
And they call it open source because it's all available. You can read the ceremonies. They're online. They're they're in this different kind of moment where secrecy, it's not that there's no secrets and it's not that the secrets that are necessary for the power of rituals to be effective are overwritten, but the secrets are kind of like, they're embedded in a larger commitment to explicitness that has a peer to peer kind of quality to it. Like, we're all in this boat together. We're all bozos on this bus.
And to me, that's the part of it that I really relate with. There's a, there, like you say, there's, it doesn't need to be just tool based, which it does tend to be, it's like open source means here's the tools and you can use the tools however you want, and that doesn't, in a spiritual context, that doesn't, that doesn't undermine the tool [00:50:00] user, which is the ego, which is the one who always wants to be in control, the one who knows, the one who can make things happen according to what they want to do, even if that's enlightenment.
And you need that guy around. But it's got to be in its place too. So the other kind of open source is really more of this sort of sense of peer to peer spirituality where I may know something you don't. You may know something that I don't. I'm, I'm hanging out and you give me a teaching or I give you a teaching.
So, you know, in that sense, I have the authority or you have the authority. I'm the student, you're the teacher. But the overall, the larger context within which we are playing out these relationships, is a peer to peer situation. And we can describe that as being, we're all gonna die, nobody knows what's gonna happen when you die, if you say you do know what's gonna happen when you die, you're full of shit. You don't. Sorry.
Yeah, maybe, you know, whatever. But like, there's a fundamental like similarity in our condition, our existential condition. And we're [00:51:00] all bozos on this bus. And yeah, I know something about posture and zen, and you know something about Ddzogchen teachings and Bluetooth headphones, and I know something about septic systems. And, you know, whatever. We know, we know things. We can teach things.
But that the larger open source is also this kind of spirit of, of peer to peer. And that is something that we're trying to bring into Alembic, but it's of course, it's not easy.
Because if you have young people who are so full of themselves that they know what everything is, but you don't have a system of tradition where they're, that's being knocked out of them, like in a traditional monastery where you go there and you just like, if you were like full of your own piss and vinegar, you're gonna get knocked down.
And, you know, you got to pull up your piece, you know, you got to figure it out like based on not being the one so it's, it's tough. You know, we're in a very strange kind of transition. And for me, one of the keys is one to always acknowledge mystery and the limits of our knowledge and for the people who have authority to [00:52:00] give that authority away, not like dispense it, you know, like not carry it at all, but to constantly remind Um, people in the situation that there's a limit on what the authority is or it's an authority in a certain context within a larger context that is not authoritarian.
Adrian: Hierarchies are flexible, is what I'm hearing, and contextual.
Erik: Contextual, democratic, if you will. And so that's an interesting game. And in the other way into that spirit, along with not knowing, it's related but it's a little different, is pluralism. And you know what that word means it means different things to different people, it's seen nowadays as kind of a liberal strategy for society that's no longer sufficient given the crises that we face. Like that was the old, you know, way of thinking, oh, we have a pluralistic society, particularly in the United States likes to think it has a pluralistic society, but I still think there's just a [00:53:00] lot to be said for having a genuine, deep, ontological pluralism.
And so I'm deeply pluralist. Like, I don't know what it means to say there's like one thing. That it's all one. It's all one mind. I'm like, I don't know. The traditions, even the non dual traditions that I'm most attracted to, like, like Kashmiri Shaivism or Zen. Yeah, they're non dual, but they also have a lot, bring a lot of attention to multiplicity, the ordinariness matter,. relations to inanimate objects, birds, shit.
You know, I mean, it's, it's like, that's the kind of non dual I'm interested in because it makes so much room for the multiple. Which is also making room for the plural.
You know, I was just reading Christopher Wallace's great translation of what he calls the recognition sutras. And he makes a really interesting point about this [00:54:00] really wonderful book you know, written 10th, 11th century, is that there's a certain part where the author goes through and lays out all the other traditions and what they say and this is a classic thing, you see it in Buddhist texts all the time, it's like, oh, here's the pratyekabuddhas and da da da da da da da da and how they always get it wrong, except for us.
But in this
Adrian: Setting up the rebuttal.
Erik: He's like, yeah, these guys actually kind of get it right. They might actually be able to go all the way with this. You know, it's not what I say, I have this other stuff I want to tell you...
But it's like genuinely pluralistic and you're like, man, my gods 11th century, you got to be like genius level to be able to have, tolerate that degree of diversity at that period of time. So in a much more modest way, for me, part of that is to like, when you're having a meditation center, you have different meditations. You have different body practices.
And we're, in this [00:55:00] sense, very inspired by aspects of the old school Esalen from the, you know, 60s, 70s, 80s. Where, you know, one of the great lines, if you, if you know anything about Esalen in those years was Michael Murphy's line that nobody captures the flag. And what that meant was that there was a lot of dissension and conflict in Esalen between the people of the Gestalt people over here and the, you know, the Tai Chi people over here and the psychedelic people over here and whatever. I mean, that's not quite right, but like you get the idea is that there's there's not a single kind of way.
And so at The Alembic, even though we have, you know, a resident teacher, we have our own biases towards, you know, towards Tantra, towards essence traditions, nonetheless, we're really committed to like having that pluralism because then when you come into it, you're like, you know, even if you really want to believe your view of the thing is, is right, [00:56:00] in order to socialize, in order to be part of that community, you have to acknowledge that there are these multiple views.
And while in some ways that's sort of like not that profound, in a way in our world today with, with polarization and with people's seemingly inexhaustible ability to believe they know what's true. It's actually kind of almost, almost radical.
So that's another way that we try to create an environment that makes room for mystery, makes room for not knowing, and the things that can only come with not knowing in that kind of profound way.
Adrian: I love that. I think that's a great note on which to conclude.
And, Erik I want to thank you for your time and give you the chance to let people know where they can find you about any upcoming offerings that you have.
Erik: you have. Sure, thanks for the opportunity, Adrian. It was a great, great conversation. I have a substack, it's called Burning Shore.
And I, it's a couple times a month and I put out long essays about cool shit and, I always put all my [00:57:00] announcements in my classes right now. Like I'm teaching a class on philip K. Dick at The Alembic and it's partly streamable and partly in person.
The Berkeley Alembic is the name of the place. That's our, our website, berkeleyalembic. org. And we have, you know, lots of classes, and again, a lot of them are available for streaming and there's lot of really nice stuff coming up. So that's the main stuff that I'm having right now. And then in April, my next book called Blotter: The Untold Story Of An Acid Medium, which is a history and analysis of LSD blotter art, from the street origins to today's collectible will be out from MIT press and that should be fun. I forward to that.
Adrian: Great. Looking forward to that. that's exactly the kind of niche topic I love.
Erik: Yeah, super niche.
Adrian: Yeah, cool, Well, thanks so much Erik, appreciate your time.
Erik: Well, very much.
Adrian: All right. Take care. We'll be in touch.