Ego Tripping

Rolling Stone recently published an investigation into comedian, musician and psychedelic advocate Reggie Watts that included serious allegations involving coercion, manipulation, abuse, heavy drug use and the suicide of his former partner, Katherine McCollough. Watts disputes the claims, which focus on his alleged responsibility for McCollough’s declining mental state and, ultimately, her death.

I wasn’t drawn into this as celebrity scandal. The story is obviously tragic, but what tripped my wires was the supposedly spiritual aspect of Watts’s persona, and how he has discussed ketamine and psychedelics in terms of ego dissolution, expanded consciousness, openness, intimacy and inner development.

The allegations are disturbing and disappointing. I’ve followed Watts for years. I enjoyed him on the television version of Comedy Bang! Bang! and found him an extraordinary improviser, musically and comedically. His live looping, character work, language play and absurdist pseudo-discourse are all remarkable. It’s pretty easy to grok the formula, but almost nobody could do it the way he does.

I was also curious about his boho-guru persona, which increasingly seemed to swallow the art. He’d appear on Joe Rogan at the drop of a hat as psychedelic evangelism began to eclipse his creative output. He’d show up on skeezy guru-influencer podcasts with his gnostic Fozzie Bear act. Then there was the shilling for Amazon Pharmacy. Dude, you can say no.

Taken together, these things don’t necessarily imply anything sinister, nor are they retroactive evidence for the article’s allegations. But they made me increasingly skeptical of the worldview accompanying the persona. The Rolling Stone account brought that skepticism into focus.

None of this is particularly new. For generations, self-appointed psychonauts—mostly men—have made expansive claims about “mind-manifesting” drugs and consciousness. If you read my forthcoming book Dead Dharma, you’ll meet plenty of them.

Look, I’m what they call “experienced,” so I’m not scandalized by altered states. These days I’m psychedelic agnostic, if sometimes antagonistic, particularly toward claims about what drug-induced consciousness actually indicates.

Psychedelics can undoubtedly produce astonishing states, including feelings of unity, luminosity, limitless love, dissolution of subject-object boundaries, and apparent nonduality. I’m not the arbiter of whether any particular experience is authentic. But I do know that any experience, “positive” or “negative,” can easily be distorted and reified.

The error, as I see it, is confusing a transitory state with realization, and then confusing realization with ethical development.

In the Buddhist lineages in which I’ve trained, we are explicitly taught about nyams: temporary experiences arising in contemplative practice. They may involve bliss, clarity, nonconceptuality or other states unusual from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness. They aren’t necessarily false, meaningless or undesirable. Some may even accompany development in practice.

How do you know something is temporary? It appears. Everything perceivable—from the tangible and material to the internally felt—is conditioned. That includes extraordinary experiences. They arise through innumerable and often indeterminate causes, and they pass. So we don’t get hung up on them.

I see it as basic spiritual hygiene. Don’t inflate an experience into “enlightenment.” Don’t chase experiences to manufacture a sense of attainment. And most importantly, don’t make a fucking identity from one. Just because something extraordinary happened to you doesn’t mean you’re extraordinary. Not for that reason, anyway. The fact is, you’re already extraordinary. You just don’t recognize the miracle of thusness in yourself and everything else from which you are inseparable.

In other words, ego dissolution may be an experience, but it can also become excellent raw material for building a new ego around the idea that you’ve transcended the old one.

Things get especially dangerous when money, sex, celebrity or teacher-student dynamics enter the picture. Watts has a genius for contriving the sound of profundity. At some point, it became difficult to tell performance from prescription.

Even genuine realization doesn’t establish ethical maturity. Insight doesn’t automatically resolve wounds, appetites, or status-seeking. This is why Buddhist practice includes vows, precepts and the repeated aspiration to free not merely oneself from suffering, but all beings. If realization automatically produced ethical behavior, none of that infrastructure would be necessary.

Maybe psychedelics provide authentic glimpses of nonduality. It’s possible those glimpses can transform lives by reorienting how we choose to live. But a glimpse isn’t a credential. Experience isn’t realization, and realization doesn’t exempt anyone from ethics.

I don’t give a fuck how completely someone’s ego disappears under extraordinary pharmacological conditions. I’m interested in what their ego does under ordinary ones. How do they act when frustrated, contradicted, embarrassed or inconvenienced?

Most importantly, how do they behave when someone tells them no?