Mysticism for Normies

On the utility (and limitations) of cultivating momentary peak experience flashbacks while at your kid's gym class. Plus some exciting career news.

“If you think you’re enlightened,” said the legendary spiritual teacher Ram Dass, “go spend a week with your family.”

Just imagine if he’d had children.

Actually, that Ram Dass quip comes from experience.  After his great spiritual awakening in India in 1967, but before Be Here Now made him famous in 1971, Ram Dass was a little rootless.  He spent time living with his family, who were still the same, neurotic American Jews as before — only now dealing with this meshuggeneh wayward son who had once been a Harvard professor. “Quick, get in the car before someone sees you,” his father said upon picking up his bearded, robe-wearing, 39-year-old son at the airport.

(Sidebar: Two of my other heroes – Lou Reed and Allen Ginsberg – had similar periods in their lives. Post-Velvet Underground, Reed moved back in with his parents on Long Island and worked at his father’s tax accounting form as a typist, and after graduating Columbia, Ginsberg moved back to Paterson, NJ, and worked for five years at an advertising agency.  A wishful-thinking part of me believes that I’m just still in this in-between phase myself, though it’s now been twenty-odd years...)

And so Ram Dass found out for himself that expanded states of mind are, in large part, dependent upon conditions.  Surround yourself with spiritual seekers in India, and the mind is full of spiritual feelings and thoughts.  Surround yourself with complicated family relationships, and the feelings and thoughts are different.  “The mind is like tofu,” taught one of my mentors, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.  “It takes the flavor of what it marinates in.” (Reb Zalman adapted this from Ramakrishna, by the way, who said that the mind is like fabric that takes the color of the dye in which it soaks.)

This may seem like common sense, but I can speak from experience that the lure of permanent enlightenment — the notion that, after an intense enough spiritual experience, the human body/heart/mind/spirit transforms in an irreversible way — is widespread. It’s a bit of a Hollywood myth: after the team wins the big game, their lives are irreversibly changed. Well, maybe, but there’s always laundry after the ecstasy, to paraphrase Jack Kornfield. For almost all of us, the changes are real, but incremental. We’re a little kinder, a little less reactive, a little wiser. But there are no lasting ecstasies unless you radically reshape your life (e.g., by becoming a nun or monk).  In the ordinary, relational world, one oscillates between expanded mind and contracted mind, as the Hasidic masters put it — between a sense of union and a sense of separation.  This is how human life is.

For that reason, the name of the spiritual game is “integration.” At first, it’s important to have those powerful experiences. They don’t have to be exotic: it could be as simple as a profound insight in a half-hour meditation or therapy session. (In my case, they were exotic: more on that below.) But after the Big Wow moments come and go, the question becomes how that spiritual experience, emotional catharsis, psychedelic experience, meditative insight, or other transformative moment be integrated into the rest of life? How can it lead to growth, happiness, and care and concern for others?

It won’t be because you’ll live happily ever after. Here’s a cartoon I came across by the brilliant Jeremy Nguyen on this point:

This is the most relatable cartoon I’ve ever seen: I have had exactly this thought, in exactly this posture, while emptying the dishwasher. And yet, it’s hard to interpret the guy’s expression in the cartoon. Is he despondent, or content? Maybe both. I’m not sure.

At the very least, it’s super unhelpful to expect that every moment will be “deep, or meaningful, or vibrating with energy.” That is a recipe for disappointment and self-judgment. Even worse is when someone narcissistically thinks every moment really should be “vibrating with energy” and avoids anything that might mess with their vibes. I can’t empty the dishwasher right now, because I’m on a higher vibration than this, and I need to honor that.

Please, not that.

One expression of integration is found in Zen Buddhism’s ten oxherding pictures, which tell the story of the spiritual path.  Picture 8 would seem to be the path’s consummation: complete union with the ineffable, paradoxical being-and-nothingness, form-and-emptiness of reality.  All concepts drop away, the self drops away, there is just the is and the not which are the same somehow.  Satori, kensho, awakeneing, mu. 

But the series doesn’t end there.  After enlightenment, one returns to the world with new eyes.  (“Our life is ordinary and just as it is, but we look at it differently,” writes Buddhist teacher Martine Bachelor.)  One returns even to the marketplace, whatever that might mean for you, but still sees everything, especially other living things, as manifestations of that same nothingness/oneness. The absolute is superimposed upon the relative.  Emptiness reemerges as form. 

(For an excellent contemporary version of this kind of path, check out Loch Kelly, who has a handy app, Mindful Glimpses, to practice in this way.)

That sounds great, but the bar still seems too high. I live a normie life now, with a husband and kid in the suburbs. I’m even writing the first draft of this essay at my daughter’s gymnastics class.  And while I’m definitely happier and less reactive than I was twenty years ago (my family and friends agree!), I still get frustrated as hell, still compare myself to others, still long for things and feel lonesome and scared. I get angry and fretful about politics, relationships, financial concerns, and my longstanding neurotic patterns of not feeling good enough without amassing clout and achievements.  

Again, as I wrote about many times back when I worked at the Ten Percent Happier podcast/app/startup, I’m definitely some percentage less reactive than I was before I started meditating, and that is worth the effort. But the steadiness comes and goes. And, to be honest, this is how it is for pretty much all the highly accomplished spiritual practitioners I’ve met over the years. Everyone I know ebbs and flows. 

For the last few years, integration has taken two forms (Both/And, if you will), which map onto what contemplatives call the “gradual path” and the “direct path.”

The gradual path means slow, incremental work on my relationships, behavior, and other ‘stuff,’ which in my case happens mostly in insight meditation, therapy, conversations with close friends, and work on myself, among other modalities.  This terrain is probably pretty familiar, and so I won’t spend much time talking about it here. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s often about stuff that is simple to read about, hard to actually do. Like learning to coexist with difficult emotions, even anxiety and anger; to speak and act less quickly; to let go more quickly; to be more open to love, conflict, compromise, and hard work; to appreciate small moments of joy and love that could easily escape notice. 

The “direct path” is a bit less common. It’s about re-accessing those sacred, sublime mindstates and experiences that happened in the past — now. This is a process of “small moments, many times,” as some Tibetan Buddhist traditions teach, an act of active remembering in which the perspective of the peak experience is re-experienced in the present moment. As the title of this newsletter suggests, it’s a kind of mysticism for normies.

In my case, as an Enneagram 7, I have a deep reservoir of such experiences to call upon. In jhana meditation, on long vipassana meditation retreats, on psychedelics, in ecstatic Jewish and earth-based practices, in intense somatic-energetic work, and even, once in a while, at peak moments in life, I have been fortunate to experience what sometimes gets described as mysticism.  These are some of the most joyful and generative experiences of my life.  I’m amazed that so few people seem that interested in them, but if you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you might be.

At this stage in my householder life, it’s unrealistic to pursue some of those experiences. In fact, one of the reasons I became re-interested in psychedelics a few years ago was that, unlike weeklong meditation retreats, they can provide powerful, generative experiences in a relatively short amount of time — though they fade quickly as well.

So, over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time consciously remembering and reenacting these experiences. (In Hebrew, the verb lizkor, to remember, often denotes an act taken, not merely a memory recalled.)  I can’t do this all the time — it’s hard if I’m particularly stressed, or in an interpersonal moment, or sick — but I can do it a lot of the time. As my jhana teacher Leigh Brasington taught me, once the mind knows where the doors are to certain ways of being, it can open them even without a lot of preparatory work.  

That’s true even now, in the gymnastics class waiting room.  Everything here is just as it appears (which is often hilarious, by the way) and also I can incline my mind toward the unchanging, constantly changing presence that I came to know on meditation or medicine retreats. The integration described in the oxherding pictures arises, for a moment anyway. And then it goes.

These small moments are usually not as powerful as the original peak experiences were, though even a small amount of cannabis can make the “flashback” quite profound.  But even when the moment is fleeting, it’s pretty great to be able to cultivate it here in the gym waiting room.  I relax, I stop seeking, and I plant a seed of memory, and the tree grows anew.

I’m not particularly interested in theologizing, explicating, or deconstructing what ‘expanded mind’ really is. Maybe it’s a religious moment, or maybe it’s just a neurological event. Maybe both. It’s definitely very refreshing.

This is how psychedelics and contemplative mysticism actually operate in my life today. Most of the time, I’m doing “gradual path” work: trying to be more present and patient with my daughter and partner, appreciating everyday beauties and joys, allowing feelings like grief and fear to unfold as they need to, and so on. But some of the time, I’m dipping into the mystic river, and it is delightful.

In my experience, the gradual, incremental work is still more important from an interpersonal point of view. Mystical experiences and being a mensch are often orthogonal to one another: this is the lesson of spiritual bypass, and one reason many “direct path” teachers have ethical lapses.  You’ve got to do the work of careful ethical discernment, reasoned reflection, the cultivation of compassion, seeing the ‘other’ in relationship, and so on. But it’s also true that after spending a few seconds in expanded mind, I am likely to be more patient and considerate. It can help a little bit.

So, Ram Dass was right: even if there’s some Reality that doesn’t come and go, the experience of the “enlightened” mind definitely does. If I were to offer a less poetic commentary on his pithy phrase, I might say this: If you think your experience of enlightenment will result in either permanent bliss, equanimity, or skillful actions in relationship, go spend a week with your family – especially if you have kids!  Fortunately, though, you can keep doing the work you need to do, and along the way you can draw from that well of expanded awareness, which can offer both a glimpse of the sacred and the inspiration to do the work of the mundane. 

Oops, gym class is over.

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Alright! Here’s that career update.

Speaking of Ram Dass, who worked on psychedelic research at Harvard, I’m going to be working on psychedelic research at Harvard — in particular, I'll be the Gruss Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, and will be an affiliated researcher at the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics.

That's a lot of words and titles. What I'll be doing is teaching two courses (one on antinomianism, another on psychedelics & law); co-organizing a symposium on law, religion, and psychedelics; and doing a bunch of research and work on that intersection. On the Jewish law side, I'm honored to be following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Ruth Calderon, Daniel Boyarin, and Moshe Halbertal. And on the psychedelic law side, this work grows out of my continuing role as a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, and my work on that same intersection in the Jewish community.

More broadly, this is an exciting new phase in my long-term efforts to bring the two sides of my professional life -- the legal/political and the spiritual/religious -- together. As readers of Both/And know, sometimes these two proceed in parallel to one another, and sometimes they intersect -- this, like this newsletter, is one of those intersections. As with meditation and other forms of spiritual practice, I think the deep use of psychedelics is a profound technology of personal and hopefully societal growth. And alongside the medical and recreational uses of these compounds, I find the religious/spiritual one to be both profoundly promising and deeply aligned with my own interests and practices. So, rather like Klinger says at the end of M*A*S*H, "I'm going back to law school!"

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Since that was a long note, I’m going to recommend only one Substack article this week, which is

Alex Ebert

’s “Build the Wall and Other Progressive Ideas.” This is one of those pieces that is at once batshit and brilliant. Since irrational fears of crime and immigration help conservatives win elections, Ebert observes, anything that quells those fears helps liberals win elections. Including a stupid wall. I love this piece because it shares my obsession with the nexus of neuroscience/psychology/religion and politics, and takes itself just unseriously enough.

See you next week.