Jun Po Roshi on Psychedelics, Guides, and a Mature Spirituality

Erik opened by checking something he'd heard Jun Po say: that he doesn't generally encourage people to use psychedelics, but if they're set on it, they ought to do it somewhere safe and with the right framing around the experience. Jun Po confirmed it, adding that the right support matters as much as the right context.

Asked what that actually looks like, Jun Po described two things: a guide and an environment. The environment, for him, should be fully natural or beautiful in a deliberate way. A meditation hall, a church, somewhere like that. The guide is the harder part. He meant a person who has gone deep and come out stable, someone present enough to notice when you start to lose your footing, who can take your hand, bring you back, tell you to breathe and loosen up. Not a person who grasps the circumstances philosophically, but one who has actually lived through the experience, both its ordinary consciousness side and its depth.

Erik raised the familiar suggestion that traditional indigenous settings might offer a healthier container. He pointed to the Native American Church and its long use of peyote across generations, with its built-in guides, training, and inherited context. Did Jun Po agree?

Jun Po had done both ayahuasca and peyote, and his read on those settings was blunt. The mythopoetic framing, the cultural dressing, the blending with Christianity, all of it struck him as adolescent. He wasn't saying it harmed anyone. He just didn't think those particular vehicles went deep enough. He described going to Peru, working with a shaman there, using ayahuasca as the agent and talking it through with him, and finding the conversations somewhat muddled. For him personally, the depth wasn't there. He kept flagging that this was only his own experience.

The word adolescent led Erik somewhere else. Spiritual traditions of every kind seem to have immature and mature forms, and people move through stages as they develop. So what does a grown-up, adult spirituality look like?

For Jun Po it comes down to knowing who you fundamentally are. On the surface we treat the ego as the self, the thing we point to and call I. But who you are is the awareness itself, the consciousness. The ego, by contrast, is a temporary construction of the mind, a self-referencing product that the mind keeps assembling. This, he said, is where Buddhism is so precise. Its bedrock teaching, the first of the three marks of existence, is impermanence. Nothing lasts.

And if you really sit with that, not as a slogan but as a fact, it rearranges things. Everything in front of you is passing. Everything you're attached to is already slipping away as you look at it. Things come into being and fall apart, all of it in motion, all of it evolving. Get that, really get it, and the response is something closer to Wow than to despair. Things change.