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Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Special Section
Yagé and the Yanas
With more than a little trepidation, my girlfriend Marion and I boarded a flight to Hawaii. Once buckled in, I fell into a deep and unusually restful sleep. Hours later, I raised the shade and, overcoming…
Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Special Section
Leaning into Rawness
I used to love getting stoned. I especially loved to get stoned and read dharma. When stoned I was never bored: Every single piece of my world was reliably fascinating. My curiosity and delight with any-…
Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Special Section
To the Source
When my mother took LSD in 1975, under the amicable supervision of Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax, she had no idea I was growing inside her. Throughout the trip, she commented on the movement in her…
CultureMagazine | Special Section
Results from the Tricycle Poll
Number of responses: 1,545; 63% from the magazine, 37% from the Web 89% said that they were engaged in Buddhist practice. 83% said that they had taken psychedelics. Over 40% said that their interest in Buddhism…
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
The Roundtable: Help or Hindrance
Whether or not psychedelics have any usefulness to someone on a Buddhist path was the subject of four recent interviews, conducted by Allan Hunt Badiner and combined into the following roundtable discussion. Robert Aitken Roshi of Hawaii is…
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
Sacred Antidotes
An interview with Terence McKenna
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
Psychedelics: Help or Hindrance?
Psychedelic use is on the rise again, yet there are unanswered questions from the periods of heavy use in the sixties and seventies. The conversation wasn’t even possible in the political climate of the eighties, and…
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
Sitting for Sessions
Dharma & DMT Research
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
Liberty and LSD
Over the last 25 years, I’ve watched a lot of Deadheads, Buddhists, and other free-thinkers do acid. I’ve taken it myself. I still do occasionally, in a ritual sort of way. On the basis of their…
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
Domains of Consciousness
An Interview with Jack Kornfield
CultureMagazine | Special Section
A High History of Buddhism
The war on at least one drug—the psychedelic variety—has been won. In place of the alchemicals that reigned supreme for a momentarily eternal moment, young would-be mind explorers now toke their way through a fractled marketplace…
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
On the Front Lines
An Interview with Michele McDonald-Smith
MeditationMagazine | Special Section
The Psychedelic Journey to the Zafu
I was nineteen when I first dropped acid. A sophomore at UC Santa Cruz, I was living with my best friend, Kat, in a ramshackle beach cottage. We gave each other a long gaze, wished each…
Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Special Section
A Peak Experience
From the thin, rocky ridge where a few friends and I were resting following a 13,000-foot climb, we could look out over the entire expanse of New Mexico’s Pecos Wilderness, east over the Great Plains, and…
CultureMagazine | Special Section
Entheogens: A Brief History of Their Spiritual Use
To many people, the words psychedelic and spiritual are dissonant on first hearing. Yet the use of psychoactive sacraments in shamanic and religious practices is found throughout history. The word entheogen, used to describe certain plants and chemicals…
Departments
Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Letters
Letters to the Editor Fall 1996
Hop Hop Hooray Thank you so much for the wonderful interview with Jeffrey Hopkins [Summer 1996], reading which I was inspired to consider the implications of imaginary sexual contact with “a man” as some functional identification—in…
CultureMagazine | What Does Being A Buddhist Mean To You
What Does Being a Buddhist Mean To You? Fall 1996
A Collection of Quotes and Excerpts from Buddhist Notables and Literature
Original Dwelling Place: Zen Buddhist Essays
By Robert Aitken
IdeasMagazine | From The Academy
If and When
On the probability of Tibetan liberation from Chinese occupation
In the News Fall 1996
Change Your Mind At 12:30 p.m. on June 8, Michelle Laporte struck a large brass gong 108 times to initiate Tricycle’s third annual Change Your Mind Day. The setting for this day of meditation in a…
Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Afterword
Silent Retreat
I felt like I had embarked on a dangerous adventure. I had the sense of doing something scary that I didn’t fully understand, something that could turn out to be more than I could handle. It…
TeachingsMagazine | Dharma Talk
Our One and Only Commandment
Before the time of Hui-neng, who lived in the seventh century in T’ang China, it was thought that the experience of enlightenment could be attained only after one had practiced and attained some depth in dhyana,…
Just Say Maybe
To celebrate our fifth anniversary, we have chosen to focus on a controversial issue that claims both a complex history and a contemporary revival: Buddhism and psychedelics. Dozens of controversies surround the subject of psychedelics. Some…
The Life of Gampopa
By Jampa Mackenzie Stewart
MeditationMagazine | On Practice
Mudra: What Do Buddhist Hand Gestures Mean?
A mudra is a hand position often depicted in Buddhist art and used in practice to evoke a particular state of mind.
The Monk Who Dared: An Historical Novel About Shinran
By Ruth M. Tabrah
The White Buddhist
Henry Steel Olcott and the Sinhalese Buddhist Revival
Café Nirvana
On the Bookshelf at Café Nirvana
Personal ReflectionsMagazine | On Gardening
The Breakdown Ball
These days I am obsessed with poop. Poop and rot. Walking the narrow trail that traverses the autumn headlands, I pause to break apart the dry scat of raccoon and grey fox to see what they’ve…
ObituariesMagazine | In Transition
The Death of a Philosopher
"Why not? Why not? Why not?"
In the Presence of My Enemies: Memoirs of Tibetan Nobleman Tsipon Shuguba
By Sumner Carnahan with Lama Kunga Rinpoche
Sex, Death & Enlightenment: A True Story
By Mark Matousek
Canoeing Up Cabarga Creek: Buddhist Poems
By Philip Whalen
The Dining Project: The Art of Nurturing
I grew up in Taiwan in the mid-seventies. Most of my free time was spent in the kitchen, not cooking, but serving as a (fat) guinea pig for the family chef. At that time, we knew…
Columns
Tool Kit: Lungs
First on the list of items in the Buddha’s tool kit is a pair of lungs. You may experience lapses in mindfulness many times during a single period of meditation, but the lungs remain faithful to…