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

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

Crazy Wisdom was brought to Boulder in early 1971 by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a remarkable Chinese/Tibetan guru whose confrontational, unpredictable teaching style was smart, and controversial. Rinpoche ("The Rinp") put away quarts of Johnnie Walker scotch, possessed an overwhelming charisma and humor, and turned your mind inside out, emptying it of its conditioned defenses. Rinpoche was both an enlightened teacher and an intentional charlatan, which if you think about it, is exactly in the spirit of crazy wisdom. He never doubted for a moment that all who came within his presence benefited from the experience. I remember an occasion when he arrived in town dead broke, though already with a couple of followers. "The Rinp" was invited to dinner at the Pygmy Farm, an early commune in Boulder. Upon leaving, Rinpoche gave the commune members a bill for his attendance. Which makes perfect sense when you consider that Crazy Wisdom forces change through confronting convention at every turn and by any means available. Another one of those things you either get or don't get. Although it's about the purest wordless kind of awareness, being literate does help you start to get it, which is why it attracts so many highly intelligent people.

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By no means am I stretching things to say ours was a more literate generation. Most of the hippies I hung with in Boulder followed the contemporary literary scene, had read Hesse, Joyce and Mann, Hobbes, Faulkner, Freud, Jung, Huxley, and had a passing knowledge of such things as Zen and Sufism. Not to mention an expanded consciousness. So when Rinpoche explained how the "mind is emptiness, the true world is empty" and that "the emptiness is permanent and all else is merely passing mental display" they could get their heads around it. And have room to spare.

At the time however, I too often judged Rinpoche from my born-and-bred American perspective and background, so I missed a great learning opportunity, many in fact, regarding Rinpoche Trungpa. If nothing else, I owe Trungpa, for several things, some of them minor, such as coming to understand that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is a manual for living. And some of them major, such as that I'd lived most of my life in my head in an effort to avoid suffering.

All these years later I am beginning to understand the effect living for a decade or so in a genuinely free time and place had on my life. Thanks to an ongoing a ttempt to understanding human consciousness, everything has changed over time. Yet nothing has changed at all, except my attitude toward everything. And yes, LSD had everything to do with it. When it comes to rewiring one's own neuro-circuitry toward ecstatic understanding and perception and playful wisdom, and real compassion, LSD and Buddhism can certainly jump start the awakening. Paradoxically, that awakening is to a dream. You come to see very clearly that the "It is the dream that is dreaming the dreamer." Such liberating insights are big as stars. And like Mad Dog says, "You don't knock down stars with a bee bee gun."

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"But if I never get another look at the face of God on acid or pick up another splinter of insight for the rest of my life, it'll be too goddamned soon for me! Life may be a shit sandwich all right, but brain damage ain't ketchup either!"
-- The Mad Dog in retrospection

Then that arc of electricity in the Himalayas of the New World snapped, and thus began what I call Enlightenment Fire Sale. For almost a decade change had come down like rain through the ozone (we still had some ozone left in those days) and Boulder found itself morphing into a metaphysical beachhead, a seething marketplace of salvation salesmen and exotic snake oil peddlers -- hawkers of truth and burning skyfulls of revelation. The Ten Commandments played in the park, consciousness tramps did Sufi slapstick in the alleys, while more introverted souls curdled their brains as they saw fit, for about a buck a dose. In the throes of the new consumerism Boulder consumed every cosmic thing imaginable, short of a giant asteroid, even though it was surely contemplated during the comet Kahotek. But still no avatars. No ship of deliverance. No change in the price of bananas or sidewinder missiles.

Desire turned to demand, then exhaustion, disillusionment or plain boredom. Having lifted veil upon veil, mortality still grinned across the void, offering no new deals. The Cold War was thriving as much as ever. The murdering bastards in charge still had the upper hand.

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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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