Secret Drugs of Buddhism

Secret Drugs of Buddhism
Author: Michael Crowley
Publisher:
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780907791744

Secret Drugs of Buddhism explores the historical evidence for the use of entheogenic plants within the Buddhist tradition and calls attention to the central role which psychedelics played in Indian religions.

Zig Zag Zen

Zig Zag Zen
Author: Allan Hunt Badiner
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2002-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780811832861

Buddhism and psychedelic experimentation share a common concern: the liberation of the mind. Zig Zag Zen launches the first serious inquiry into the moral, ethical, doctrinal, and transcendental considerations created by the intersection of Buddhism and psychedelics. With a foreword by renowned Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor and a preface by historian of religion Huston Smith, along with numerous essays and interviews, Zig Zag Zen is a provocative and thoughtful exploration of altered states of consciousness and the potential for transformation. Accompanying each essay is a work of visionary art selected by artist Alex Grey, such as a vividly graphic work by Robert Venosa, a contemporary thangka painting by Robert Beer, and an exercise in emptiness in the form of an enso by a 17th-century Zen abbot. Packed with enlightening entries and art that lie outside the scope of mainstream anthologies, Zig Zag Zen offers eye-opening insights into alternate methods of inner exploration.

Buddhism and Medicine

Buddhism and Medicine
Author: C. Pierce Salguero
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 541
Release: 2017-09-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 023154426X

From its earliest days, Buddhism has been closely intertwined with medicine. Buddhism and Medicine is a singular collection showcasing the generative relationship and mutual influence between these fields across premodern Asia. The anthology combines dozens of English-language translations of premodern Buddhist texts with contextualizing introductions by leading international scholars in Buddhist studies, the history of medicine, and a range of other fields. These sources explore in detail medical topics ranging from the development of fetal anatomy in the womb to nursing, hospice, dietary regimen, magical powers, visualization, and other healing knowledge. Works translated here include meditation guides, popular narratives, ritual manuals, spells texts, monastic disciplinary codes, recipe inscriptions, philosophical treatises, poetry, works by physicians, and other genres. All together, these selections and their introductions provide a comprehensive overview of Buddhist healing throughout Asia. They also demonstrate the central place of healing in Buddhist practice and in the daily life of the premodern world. This anthology is a companion volume to Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources (Columbia, 2019).

Secret Buddhism

Secret Buddhism
Author: Kalu Rinpoche
Publisher: Clearpoint Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 1995
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780963037169

Sex, Drugs, Enlightenment

Sex, Drugs, Enlightenment
Author: Alex Walking
Publisher:
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780692881026

This insider¿s autobiography exposes secret Buddhist practices, both traditional and current. Expect to learn things you couldn¿t imagine. After this ride that you¿ll always remember, reality will never look the same again.

One Breath at a Time

One Breath at a Time
Author: Kevin Griffin
Publisher: Rodale Books
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1635651816

Merging Buddhist mindfulness practices with the Twelve Step program, this updated edition of the bestselling recovery guide One Breath at a Time will inspire and enlighten you to live a better, healthier life. Many in recovery turn to the Twelve Steps to overcome their addictions, but struggle with the spiritual program. But what they might not realize is that Buddhist teachings are intrinsically intertwined with the lessons of the Twelve Steps, and offer time-tested methods for addressing the challenges of sobriety. In what is considered the cornerstone of the most significant recovery movement of the 21st century, Kevin Griffin shares his own extraordinary journey to sobriety and how he integrated the Twelve Steps of recovery with Buddhist mindfulness practices. With a new foreword by William Alexander, the author of Ordinary Recovery, One Breath at a Time takes you on a journey through the Steps, examining critical ideas like Powerlessness, Higher Power, and Moral Inventory through the lens of the core concepts of Buddhism—the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, mindfulness, loving-kindness, and more. The result is a book that presents techniques and meditations for finding clarity and awareness in your life, just as it has for thousands of addicts and alcoholics.

Demystifying Awakening

Demystifying Awakening
Author: Stephen Snyder
Publisher: Buddha's Heart Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2022-03-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 173478105X

See the potential that is within each of us—the realization and embodiment of our true nature With Demystifying Awakening, senior meditation teacher Stephen Snyder skillfully marks the subtle path of the Awakening process. With loving care, personal examples, and gentle suggestions, Stephen plants the seeds of practice and meditation by: - explaining Awakening in an accessible way that draws on Zen and Theravada Buddhist traditions; - guiding readers through more than thirty foundational and advanced meditations and practices that support each step on the path of realization; - offering advice for identifying and working with resistances to Awakening; and - encouraging the embodiment and lived expression of realization through an exploration of the pāramīs, the Buddhist perfections of behavior. Demystifying Awakening transmits a practice path for Awakening in this lifetime.

Altered States

Altered States
Author: D. E. Osto
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016-04-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231541414

In the 1960s, Americans combined psychedelics with Buddhist meditation to achieve direct experience through altered states of consciousness. As some practitioners became more committed to Buddhism, they abandoned the use of psychedelics in favor of stricter mental discipline, but others carried on with the experiment, advancing a fascinating alchemy called psychedelic Buddhism. Many think exploration with psychedelics in Buddhism faded with the revolutionary spirit of the sixties, but the underground practice has evolved into a brand of religiosity as eclectic and challenging as the era that created it. Altered States combines interviews with well-known figures in American Buddhism and psychedelic spirituality—including Lama Surya Das, Erik Davis, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei, Rick Strassman, and Charles Tart—and personal stories of everyday practitioners to define a distinctly American religious phenomenon. The nuanced perspective that emerges, grounded in a detailed history of psychedelic religious experience, adds critical depth to debates over the controlled use of psychedelics and drug-induced mysticism. The book also opens new paths of inquiry into such issues as re-enchantment, the limits of rationality, the biochemical and psychosocial basis of altered states of consciousness, and the nature of subjectivity.

Breaking Open the Head

Breaking Open the Head
Author: Daniel Pinchbeck
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2003-08-12
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0767907434

A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe. Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival. Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule

DMT: The Spirit Molecule
Author: Rick Strassman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2000-12-01
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1594779732

A clinical psychiatrist explores the effects of DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. • A behind-the-scenes look at the cutting edge of psychedelic research. • Provides a unique scientific explanation for the phenomenon of alien abduction experiences. From 1990 to 1995 Dr. Rick Strassman conducted U.S. Government-approved and funded clinical research at the University of New Mexico in which he injected sixty volunteers with DMT, one of the most powerful psychedelics known. His detailed account of those sessions is an extraordinarily riveting inquiry into the nature of the human mind and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. DMT, a plant-derived chemical found in the psychedelic Amazon brew, ayahuasca, is also manufactured by the human brain. In Strassman's volunteers, it consistently produced near-death and mystical experiences. Many reported convincing encounters with intelligent nonhuman presences, aliens, angels, and spirits. Nearly all felt that the sessions were among the most profound experiences of their lives. Strassman's research connects DMT with the pineal gland, considered by Hindus to be the site of the seventh chakra and by Rene Descartes to be the seat of the soul. DMT: The Spirit Molecule makes the bold case that DMT, naturally released by the pineal gland, facilitates the soul's movement in and out of the body and is an integral part of the birth and death experiences, as well as the highest states of meditation and even sexual transcendence. Strassman also believes that "alien abduction experiences" are brought on by accidental releases of DMT. If used wisely, DMT could trigger a period of remarkable progress in the scientific exploration of the most mystical regions of the human mind and soul.