Skinny Dipping in Reality: The Great Hippy LSD Enlightenment Search Party

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted March 25, 2009.

Grave as such propositions appear, one must, to my mind at least, be both serious AND silly about exploring consciousness to get results, do it in the spirit of enlightened philosophical levity. Even after all these years, that spirit – when and if it happens to be available at the moment -- still gets me through the day. It enables me to face the increasing sorrows that come with age. One of the nasty little truths about life is that it gets harder with age, not easier, and that there is no prize at the bottom of the box of crackerjacks. But the good news, as I see it, is that we are inherently capable of becoming stronger and more deeply resonant with the world in a way that swamps personal misery into insignificance. Denial ceases to be the first reaction to uncomfortable truths. There are billion dollar industries in this country based upon denial and our refusal to acknowledge mortal entropy. Even death is supposed to be more or less negotiable through fitness, medical science -- and we are lied to that we are as young as well feel and act. There is no inherent virtue in being either young or old. We are young when we are young and old when we are old, and any attending virtue comes with whether or not we actualize truth.

Enter Buddhism. It is damned near impossible for any literate person to launch off on a teleological trajectory without being sucked into the gravitational force of Buddhism. Especially if the launch is powered by LSD, which is the difference between a journey on foot and a ride in a rocket sled. By the way, there is no Buddhist commandment that says, "Do not take drugs," though most Buddhists do not. Nor is there one that says, "Do not drink," though it's not the most recommendable thing to do. Buddhist leader Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of Boulder's Naropa Institute, got drunk often, got laid too, and was very controversial for it. Our American Calvinism makes us equate morality and rightness with prohibition, especially of pleasure. The Christian church has always been about controlling its followers. Buddhism is not so much about prohibition, except for harming life. It's not even about religion, but more about the ultimate order of the world and liberation.

There are many, many forms of Buddhism, but they all fall roughly into two types. If I may vastly over simplify -- Mahayana and Theravada, "big boat" and little boat" Buddhism. Big boat aims at the enlightenment, over many incarnations, of all sentient beings through, among other things, selfless love. Little boat holds that you are alone responsible for your own enlightenment through your actions, and may possibly achieve liberation in a single lifetime -- enlightenment being the liberation from the desires that create unhappiness and pain in mankind. As I said, I am vastly oversimplifying here, which is sure to put American trust fund babies in ashrams around the country and elderly Theravadan gurus into a snit, generating an onslaught of disputative email, but the essence is correct as far as I'm concerned.

There is a lineage of Buddhism which translates as "crazy wisdom." It is the antithesis of what westerners usually think of in conjunction with religion, and it's purposefully full of irreverence, goofiness, shifting perspectives and absurdity. Crazy Wisdom has been described as the unifying metaphysical force field of "poets, philosophers, artists and gurus and other crazy fools gushing with wisdom." In one variant, the great Japanese poet monk Ikkyu found antidote to Zen formality in whorehouses and bars, i.e., "Her mouth played with my cock the way a cloud plays with the sky." For whatever reasons, the "People of the Book," Judaism, Christianity and Islam, opted out of the wine and blowjobs, which may partly explain the general crabbiness and vindictiveness that inspires them to enthusiastically kill other people who disagree with them, not to mention each other during such things as The Crusades, or more recently in Gaza.

By no means am I an adept at crazy wisdom, thus I am sure thousands of folks sitting zazen in Boulder and San Francisco are livid at my sloppy explanation and less than deeply dedicated application of its principles. "Using crazy wisdom as an excuse to escape the discipline of Buddhism," is the usual charge. Which is much the same discipline ridden thinking as that of my Baptist-Pentecostal boyhood. Lawdy Miss Claudy, the American system instills a psycho-sexual love of discipline in all of us. No sex in the park bushes, no marijuana for Americans, but rather debt slavery and airport cavity searches by direct orders from the Christian police court Yaweh, whose face is now the Department of Homeland Security. It all comes down to just how much discipline is the right amount for an individual. A thirsty man needs but one drink of water to continue his journey, not the whole tank. Drinking the tank not only halts the journey, but in all likelihood kills the traveler. At any rate, as the years go by, what I take or mistake to be crazy wisdom continuously opens inner doors, even given my poor discipline (and small intermittent doses of it at that).

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Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. (Random House Crown), about working class America. A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website.

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