Jun Po Roshi: From Psychedelics to Zen (Interview Archive)

I wanted a real discipline, so I went looking. I studied with Ray Chung under Trungpa, and I trained in the yogic lineage of B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois. I got certified to teach yoga in the Iyengar tradition. Then Eido Roshi came into the picture. I'd read something he wrote, Eido Shimano Roshi, and one line in it stayed with me: don't send me any more PhDs, he said, I already know everything. That cut right to the center of me. Something in it landed, and I went to meet him.

Dai Bosatsu Zendo is about as beautiful a place as you'll find. It sits in the Catskills at the end of two miles of private road, 1,600 acres of hard-rock maple and mixed forest, the second highest lake in the range, an old Victorian house on the water. Up on the hillside they built a 25,000-square-foot monastery. That became my training ground. I was there on and off for 17 years, six of them as head monk, then as Vice Abbot, until I received lineage recognition in 1992.

The road there ran through frustration and confusion before it reached any discipline. I drank. I used drugs. I went the whole familiar route before I understood I needed something deeper, a genuine realization. Zen suited me, the Rinzai school in particular, with its koan work and the kind of concentrated practice that presses until insight breaks open.

Erik: Jun Po, before we get into Zen and what's become your life's work, I want to ask about psychedelics and spirituality. People hold very different views. Some think they're dangerous, a distraction. Some think they're necessary. Some see them as a kind of door. We're devoting a day of the event to psychedelics as a possible medical treatment for PTSD and related conditions. Coming from your years inside the Zen tradition, how do you see their value?

Jun Po: Speaking spiritually, with a pure psychedelic, and I mean pure, I'm talking about completely clean lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD 25, not some adulterated version but an absolutely pure compound, taken in a ritual setting with the right support, you can dissolve the ego and come to a realization of the pure receptive consciousness, the spirit within, dhyana. That can happen. And beyond that you can arrive at a non-dual realization, an integration with everything around you. One breathing, living thing. Call it God if you want, or the Universe, or simply reality.