For those not into Zen, kensho is a glimpse of enlightenment/Satori, and when a meditator can stabilize the kensho state Satori is achieved. All the descriptions of kensho seem to describe the Shulgin peak experience (minus the visions of some psychedelics, but 5-meo-dmt induced ++++'s especially apply here). Here are some quotes describing the state:

“A perception, sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one, will lead to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding; and by this understanding will you awaken to the truth of Zen.” – Zen Master Huang-po

From wikipedia:

Dennis Genpo Merzel states he had what he described as an "awakening experience" in 1971:[web 3]

It was in February of that year, and I was 26 years old. My second serious relationship was ending, and I was feeling very confined and conflicted. I needed to get some space, so I went out to the Mojave desert for a three-day camping weekend with two friends. On the Friday, I hiked up a mountain alone. I knew nothing about meditation or spiritual practice. I was just sitting there, thinking about my life and the things going on. I felt I had gotten pretty screwed up for such a young age.

I could see my VW camper, my home for the weekend, parked a few miles away, . But at the same time, I was aware that my home was back in Long Beach, California. And a natural koan came to me: Where is home? All of a sudden, I had a kind of breakthrough. I felt myself fall away, and I became one with the cosmos, one with the universe, one with all things. I knew in that moment that wherever I am, that is home; home is everywhere. I also knew who I was, beyond description, but let’s call it Big Mind.
That experience completely changed my life.[web 3]

Also from wikipedia:

Hakuin gives this description of his first kensho, when he was 21:[64]

At around midnight on the seventh and final night of my practice, the boom of a bell from a distant temple reached my ears: suddenly, my my body and mind dropped completely away. I rose clear of even the finest dust. Overwhelmed with joy, I hollowed out at the tops of my lungs, "Old Yen-t'ou is alive and well! [...] After that, however, I became extremely proud and arrogant".

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If you are interested in this topic I leave it to you to find further descriptions. What I am getting at in this topic is *if* the similarities between egodeath (particularly 5-meo-dmt egodeath) and kensho descriptions are not coincidental then having a pharmacological door to predictable kensho experiences could in theory rapidly accelerate the achievement of satori. Accelerating Zen progress by chemical means is not a new idea,
Nicholas Saunders from the Council on Spiritual Practices (csp.org) recounts the following:

"Most religious leaders are strongly opposed to the use of drugs, preaching that drugs can be misleading or damage the psyche, destroying the benefits of years of meditation or prayer. However, besides the Benedictine I also interviewed a rabbi and two monks from different Zen disciplines who believe that Ecstasy is a valid tool for teaching and mystical experience. All four have written religious works, three teach their religion and two are abbots, but none has revealed their use of Ecstasy in public.

The Rinzai Zen monk felt that Ecstasy had genuinely helped him on his rise to becoming an abbot. He had experimented over the years, and concluded that it was most effective on the second day of a seven-day meditation, as there was a danger of becoming distracted by blissful sensations.

The Soto Zen monk also maintains that drugs like Ecstasy can help with meditation: "Being still when taking MDMA helps you to know how to sit, as it provides you with experiential knowledge", he said, adding that the great majority of his students had sought his teaching as a result of a drug induced experience, and he was sure that the same was true of most schools of meditation in the West."

If MDMA can speed up the Zen process without inducing direct peak experiences, but meanwhile acting on the same serotonergic systems that heavy ego shredders like mushrooms, dpt, & 5-meo-dmt (notice 5ht1a agonism in all these), and the reports of tryptamine ++++'s closely resemble kensho experiences in all excepting visuals and entity contact (5-meo-dmt again excluded) then I think there is very likely a correlation here.

The way to test this hypothesis would be to find a zen monk who can achieve kensho predictably and take an fMRI scan and compare it to the brain of a person having a religious experience on mushrooms (like the John Hopkins studies) or have someone smoke 25 miligrams 5-meo-dmt in a lab setting with fMRI monitoring. OR find a zen practitiioner with experiential kensho experience willing to smoke 5-meo-dmt to compare, which is probably an easier task. The excessive banning of 5-meo-dmt will make this difficult however.

If this is found to be true it is conceivable that a regimen of smoked 5-meo-dmt coupled with meditation (or the oral+rue route espoused by Larry Hoover on bluelight) on a semi regular basis could cause the stabilization of satori in short order. I believe the ++++ afterglow can be in some cases the stabilization of that state, Morninggloryseed on bluelight maintained a ++++ for monthes after his iboga flood. After my mushroom induced ++++ the bliss and overpowering love and power lasted for many months (extended by daily meditation and non-dual literature I think) until I started to fear I was falling behind financially in my god-fever and disapointing my family. I was also afraid I would white-out while driving (probably an irrational idea). The fear chains soon began to wrap around me again and I was normal and numb shortly after.

Thoughts on this topic?

A shulgin ++++ experience:



The definition suggests that this is a state rarely attained and rarely attainable, and not necessarily repeatable. The last sentence of the definition says it all.

It could be a kensho, but in my school of Zen satori is only the beginning, not the end result. After that you use life as koans to deepen your practice. I am Soto Zen btw.

On the other hand it could just be delusion provoking, for example after a powerful LSD and mushroom trip I accidentally listened to christian music and get in a religious trance for a few months..

IMO the best way to get "there" is to just to practice Zazen on a daily basis, and or be mindful as possible.

It's kinda late at night here, and I will be uncharacteristically brief in my reply. But yes, I fancy your ideas quite a bit! It is both plausible and reasonable to deeply consider such an approach to shifting one's attention to the degree of eclipsing within a Kensho-like/Satori-like/Savikapla Samadhi-like state of conscious-awareness.

Still, the chemical route is eventually most impermanent and not exactly the way, essence or core principle of what has been traditionally practiced, as Zen (or whatever we really mean when we bring this Japanese Buddhist tradition into our discussions or personally for several of us, with our regular practice of Zazen), as one path is a slowly cultivated, endogenous process of unfoldment... then KABOOM, a flooding and sudden awakening blooms (one which shakes the very foundations of the known self). And the other path is exogenous and the Medicine Way. Most of us seem to walk both roads, one foot in sheer emptiness and one in the mystical fractal universe.

Frankly, while I had thought I had been training in the Seon (the traditional Korean school of Chan/Zen Buddhism) version of mindfulness meditation for several years, do to my involvement in Korean martial arts... it wasn't until taking LSD-25 a few times, that I could even remotely grok the experience of the Void or the kind of stilling/quieting/silencing of the routine thinking habit, which effectively stops the mind and it's endlessly spinning thought-loops (to the point that no self remains in one's focus of cognizance to bar a clear and empty understanding of simply existing).


Agreed. I never really expect that just by imbibing a psychedelic or by practicing a routine and ongoing session of sitting meditation... this will yield anything "transcendental" in result. Human conspicuousness sprouts so spontaneously, all over the gamut of possibilities and sadly, often these potentially limitless experiences default to old patterns and overtly conceptual tendencies, cycling through the mind's myriad ramifications, appearing as a real phenomenon, to the receptive human eye. And I honestly feel that one of the greatest aspects of the profoundly mystical epiphanies, whose blooming surge shakes our egos to a near-death state of urgency, is our surrender at the infinite behind all of this diversity we perceive in living our lives. The miracle that these experiences occasionally impart, is that we have always been what the Yogic Advaitans refer to as "That".... whose essential nature is surely, the universe observing itself, observe itself.

As thinking beings, fixated upon conceptualization, we must own-up to a paralyzing fear that we have no true control of reality... for we are all dreaming. On some levels, we are mere shadows frolicking in sheer delusion, energy pulsations overlaid upon the unbound field of the Omniversal. 17th century Zen Master, Bankei Yotaku, called the source of all existence, "The Unborn" Perhaps merging within this stateless state, this enraptured stillness of self, is the aim of Satori/Samadhi? Regardless of our willingness towards immersion, it's infinite nature eludes our human grasp. This cosmic energy dancing through the dream-sequences projected by our fellow kind, echo and reflect the limitless forces of creativity (for good or ill).


Absolutely, I wholly concur with much of your viewpoint. Kensho/Satori or Savikapla Samadhi states of "enlightenment", strike me as endlessly opening windows of expanding conscious-awareness, leaving behind the crusty husk of the mortal ego and the fixation of the parameters of the mental body which dominates our compressed awareness. Thus, You may be correct to imply that these are the initial and arguably, early stages of awakening into the full-bloom of permanent peace of Nirvikapla/Savikapla Samadhi or Buddhahood. But I believe that any paradigm we perceive is wholly superseded by the next, far subtler one, ad infinitum... as well as our human notions of the Absolute (with our frozen concepts of Buddha Nature or Christ Consciousness).

Ergo, blossoming of ones centered attention is our path and in such a way, we sit quieting the inner witness and exercise an endless embracing and exponential modification in the attunement of very being. The sprouting of our eclipsing within the effulgence of the indwelling Spiritus... so as to play more freely and experience our own unique existential paradigms, with less misery and suffering. Furthermore, I feel that beginnings and endings are simply passing states of mind, those things which can be viewed from many perspectives, angles of perception and interpretation. Satori wihtou our expectation or ideologies, must surely lead to Buddha nature and a glorious dawning of eternal, unshakable peace.