How Psychedelics Helped Make American Buddhism: My Interview with Michael Pollan
The author of 'How to Change Your Mind' on how psychedelics and American Buddhism intersect, how the psychedelic movement of the '60s fell apart, and why we need psychedelics now more than ever.
Photos by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.
Psychedelics’ takeover of mainstream American culture in the 1960s had one massive lasting effect that’s often overlooked: the spiritual movements that grew in psychedelics’ wake, full of seekers who wanted something beyond traditional Judeo-Christian practices. Particularly, American Buddhism and its ripple effects, like the mindfulness trend and widespread acceptance of meditation practice. I talked to Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind and the man partly responsible for bringing psychedelics back to the mainstream this time around, about the inextricable link between American Buddhism and American psychedelia. This was for an article about Buddhism and psychedelics for Lion’s Roar magazine, but I’m sharing more of the discussion here because it was such a good one. (This has been edited for clarity and length.)
What do you see as the relationship between Buddhism and psychedelics?
MP: There’s a lot of interesting traffic between Buddhist culture, as I understand it, and psychedelic culture in America. One of the avenues I explored in my research, though didn't write much about, was the fact that so many of the people who brought Buddhism to America in the ’70s and ’80s did so after transformative experience with psychedelics.
I did a long interview with Jack Kornfield [a Buddhist leader, co-founder of Insight Meditation Society, and father of American mindfulness], and it was fascinating, his conversations about psychedelics and how his experience with that had shaped his outlook. And Joan Halifax [founder of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico], also, I talked to about this. She too was very involved in the psychedelic community.
And what I took away is that these were people who had these very important spiritual experiences on psychedelics, and then went looking for ways to turn them into a practice, because psychedelics are not a practice. You're not going to do it every day, you're not going to even do it every week, like at a synagogue or something. And there's a very organic path from psychedelic experience to meditation. Many of these people walked it.
I walked it myself in that my psychedelic experience unlocked meditation for me. I was a very indifferent meditator beforehand, and struggled with it. And one of the things that happens in psychedelic experience is that you get a sort of sample of these different mental states that can arise during meditation. And, and it's a way to recapture certain ways of thinking that you felt during psychedelics.
Something that is a huge part of your book is talking about this history of the ’50s and ’60s, when there was this push towards study and acceptance before, quite some time ago. And it seemed like we were like getting there, and then it all fell apart. How do you think Buddhism fit into the whole arc of study and acceptance of psychedelics the last time?
MP: Well, there was a kind of Orientalizing of psychedelics that happened really early. I mean, I would trace it to Aldous Huxley—although he wasn't really specific about what tradition he was drawing from, he was definitely drawing from Hindu or Buddhist traditions in his descriptions of the experience in The Doors of Perception. And he influences everybody who comes after.
And so then you have Timothy Leary [Harvard psychologist turned radical psychedelic advocate], who's trying to look for a kind of philosophical framework, and he reaches for the The Tibetan Book of the Dead. And he sees the experience in those terms. So, you know, it's an interesting thought experiment, whether there could have been a much more westernized Christian tradition in psychedelics, but as it turned out, it was much more Eastern. [There is a syncretic religion, Santo Daime, founded in the 1930s, that combines Catholicism and shamanism.]
And so was that inevitable? Was that something inherent in the drugs? Or inherent in the mind? Or was it just accidents of culture, where the first accounts were soaked in Eastern mysticism, and, therefore, it took root. It’s hard to say in those kinds of things, what's inherent in the experience, and what is the cultural overlay?
Do you have any sense of whether this association with Buddhism helped or hurt psychedelics’ journey toward mainstream acceptance?
MP: I think they each helped each other in some ways. I think that one of the reasons that Buddhism came to America and came to America in the form it did was because of psychedelics. And there are just so many of those early founders of American Buddhism that had used psychedelics that it's fair to ask whether there would be American Buddhism if not for psychedelics.
And then what did Buddhism do for psychedelics? Well, it's probably made it feel more acceptable and respectable to certain people.
Most people feel you leave psychedelics behind at some point, that you shouldn't need it to achieve those states of consciousness, but that they might help you get over the hump at the beginning. I think that's a very interesting idea. And it doesn't seem at all far-fetched to me.
Why do you think the time might be right, this time, for mainstream acceptance of psychedelics?
MP: Uh, because we're desperate. Because we have a mental health crisis, and the tools we have to deal with it are just failing us, the pharmaceutical tools. So there's an openness on the part of psychiatry to psychedelics that I don't think you would see otherwise. I thought there'd be a lot of mainstream resistance to psychedelics, and I did not encounter that at all. I mean, people were just like “no, bring it on, we need some new tools.”
So I think that that's part of it. And I think that it's a period of crisis in many ways—climate crisis, mental health crisis. You know, pandemic. People want to work on their heads. And Buddhism is one tool, and Buddhism obviously requires a lot of work and commitment, and psychedelics is faster.
Many people will tell you it's a shortcut. There may be some truth to that. But I think it's been historically a productive relationship in America. And I think it'll continue to be. It’s interesting, too, that Buddhism does have some prohibitions on intoxicants, right? So it's interesting to see how the Buddhist community works their way through that. Some people will say that psychedelics are not an intoxicant. And you can make that argument. But there was a period when a lot of these Buddhist leaders in America would not talk about their psychedelic experience.
I found that they, by the time I got to them, they were ready and willing. So something changed, I think it became more acceptable to talk about the chemical origins of your enlightenment. I just think in general, the taboo around psychedelics is lifting pretty quickly.
There's a lot of talk in psychedelic circles about the importance of integration after the experience, about how you draw lessons from and apply it to your life. And it seems to me moving people from that psychedelic experience into meditation and mindfulness makes a lot of sense. So I do think Buddhists will have a lot to say to people who are processing psychedelic experiences.