If Nāgārjuna, the great Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher, is known for anything, it’s his doctrine of the emptiness (śūnyatā) of all things. But in his most famous work, Nāgārjuna warns his audience about emptiness: “Misperceived emptiness ruins a person of dull intelligence, like a snake wrongly grasped.” (MMK XXIV.11) If you know how to pick up a poisonous snake properly, you can move it to a place where it will do less harm, or even milk it to help produce an antidote. But if you don’t, then trying to grasp it will get you bitten and maybe killed. Likewise, if you perceive emptiness wrongly, that’s worse than not perceiving it at all.

Nāgārjuna had good reason to be worried. As Ethan Mills noted years ago, the later Indian thinker Jayarāśi adopted a skepticism much like Nāgārjuna’s but without any Buddhist commitment, dropping our philosophical commitments and leaving us back in pre-theoretical everyday life (“the worldly path should be followed”). From Nāgārjuna’s perspective, that’s a disaster: it’ll leave you even more trapped in suffering than before. In that regard I think it’s significant that Śāntideva and Candrakīrti, Nāgārjuna’s later followers in the Madhyamaka school, both wrote texts that combined metaphysics and ethics – and put the metaphysics after the ethics. First you learn to follow the ethical path, controlling your cravings and attachments, and only then do you start reflecting in detail on how all things are empty.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Nāgārjuna’s point quite a bit in a psychedelic context. I think that a core commonality between many psychedelic and classical mystical experiences is an experience of self-transcendence, one that feels something like a “transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness” (in the words of John Hick, a philosopher of religion) – where one forgets oneself and merges with some sort of larger reality (God, dao 道, emptiness). Something seems like it should be ethically positive about this – shouldn’t such a vision make us less “selfish”? Indeed, in Hick’s view, the transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness is a fundamentally ethical one: to be far enough along it is to be a saint, one who has had “a transcendence of the ego point of view and its replacement by devotion to or centred concentration upon some manifestation of the Real, response to which produces compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.” (Interpretation of Religion 301) But I think we need to be very careful about that sort of claim.

The point came up in my interview with Osheen Dayal of MAPS Canada, where I pointed to the example of tycoon Elon Musk. It is publicly documented that Musk has used psilocybin, LSD and more, and given his known involvement in psychedelic spaces like Burning Man, he’s probably done far more than the documents let on. He has almost certainly had multiple psychedelic experiences of self-transcendence in the face of a larger reality. And yet Musk is about as far as one could imagine from “compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.” Rather, he is practically a caricature of a self-absorbed egoist, so confident in his own rightness that he used his brief time in government to destroy thousands of military veterans’ lifelong careers and end the lifelines of thousands of desperately poor people around the world in the name of saving a tiny fraction of money and sometimes nothing at all. Musk is to today’s generations what Charles Manson was to the baby boomers: a sobering reminder that psychedelic experiences can leave you a terrible person.

And that brings us back to the snake wrongly grasped. One commonly reported reaction to Griffiths’s Johns Hopkins psilocybin experiments was a sense of certainty: an utter lack of doubt that what one encountered or became in one’s experience was real. But certainty is dangerous: indeed, it can itself be a narcissistic expression of one’s own hubris, as Musk and Manson exemplify. I have tended to think that certainty is something we are better off without. While I have had some powerful psychedelic experiences, I’ve never had the sort that’s accompanied by a feeling of certainty; if I ever do, I want to make sure that I keep my old concerns about certainty at the front of my mind. Because to me the psychedelic experiences of Musk and Manson confirm Nāgārjuna’s warning: they very likely have seen their self dissolve and merge with emptiness… and they grasped that snake entirely wrongly.

All that said, I don’t want to say that there’s no connection between mystical experiences of self-transcendence and a more ethical or selfless way of life. I have found my own experiences open me up more to the joy of serving others. Classical mystical texts do tend to indicate that there is something ethically worthy about the one who has had these states (like in Zhuangzi’s passage where the one who sits and forgets has surpassed Confucius). Here, I think, we can turn to the other side of the metaphor: if you grasp a snake rightly, you can collect valuable medicine from it. That’s why Śāntideva and Candrakīrti tell you to work on your ethical conduct before you strive to perceive the emptiness of all things.