The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 118 of 125
Psychedelics as door openers
Earlier we looked briefly at the career of the American teacher Ram Dass. Here was someone who had been deeply involved with psychedelics who, while continuing to acknowledge the importance of the role they had played in his life, returned to more traditional forms of religion . . . and insisted there was a clear cutoff point, beyond which psychedelics were no longer beneficial. After some three hundred trips, Ram Dass said the drug stopped doing anything much: “I found that if I kept taking LSD every month, I’d plateau, I’d get the same experience over and over again, and I’d get bored with it all.” His conclusion was that psychedelics could decondition, heal, and initiate, but that was the extent of their power. “They are a catalyst, a door opener,” he said. “I will still do it, all things being equal, but I don’t feel like I’m learning something that new anymore.”1 Accordingly, Ram Dass adopted a more traditional approach to spiritual life: first devotion to a guru, to Neem Karoli Baba; then, after Neem Karoli’s death, to various awareness-training practices in the Buddhist vipassana and dzogchen traditions.