Luminous Numinous

Do you identify as a mystic (Zen Buddhist, Vedantist Hindu, Gnostic Christian, Kabbalistic Jew, Islamic Sufi)? Does the Perennial Philosophy speak to you?

Are you an advocate for the responsible use of psychedelics to achieve creative solutions to problems and to reach “peak” zones or states?

Are you an advocate of consciousness evolution, cognitive development, and transcendence?

If so, now that the NBA playoffs are upon us, I hope you are rooting for The Los Angeles Lakers. Because, and you may not realize this, the Lakers stand for LSD, mysticism, and self-realization.

Let’s look at the LSD connection first. Even if you’re not into basketball, you probably know the name of the Laker’s head coach, since Phil Jackson, a.k.a. the “Zen Master” is the most famous coach in all of sports. Phil has the highest winning percentage of any coach in the history of the NBA (both in the regular season and in the playoffs). He has more playoff wins than any other coach in history and is tied (for the time being) with Red Auerbach for the most championships of any NBA coach, having won it all an incredible 9 times (out of 11 trips to the Finals)–6 with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and 3 with Kobe Bryant and the L.A. Lakers. To further put Phil’s greatness in perspective, out of the last 18 years, Phil has won 50 % of the championships. And if not for injuries to Karl Malone and Andrew Bynum, Phil might have as many as eleven championships during those 18 years. All speculation aside, if the Lakers win this year (and they just might), Phil will have won MOST of the last 19 championships. That is truly astounding.

Phil admitted, in print, that an LSD-induced vision helped him to see basketball in a new way. While tripping, Phil envisioned a new brand of basketball where the players were more versatile and the positions more inter-changeable. Phil realized that, since players often have to switch on defense, you would want tall, strong guards, and active, skilled centers. On offense, too, it helps if your centers can pass and shoot and if your guards can post up and play with their backs to the basket.

Phil would later become the most famous advocate of Tex Winter’s Texas Triangle Offense for just these reasons. (Tex is a consulting coach for the Lakers.)

There is an LSD connection on the roster, too. Lakers Forward Luke Walton has a Grateful Dead tatoo, and he’s the son of UCLA legend and NBA standout Bill Walton, a long-time, vocal advocate of LSD use. You do the math.

And let us not forget the acid head watching the game from center court near the visitor’s bench, heckling the opposing players and working the refs during all important games (and most of the trivial ones, too). For if the Lakers have the most famous coach in all of sports, they certainly also have the most famous enthusiast. No team in all of sports has a marquis fan even remotely like Jack. Jack Nicholson has been sitting courtside at Lakers games for decades.

Jack is quite possibly the most beloved actor in the history of cinema. Even bad impersonations of Nicholson are instantly identifiable by their nasal tone, slowed rate of utterance, and flattened vowel sounds. Jack is so famous that people commonly refer to him by his first name alone.

How did Jack become so famous? Well, to begin with, he wrote a screenplay for a B movie that was directed by Roger Corman. Jacko’s script was called The Trip and it’s about…you guessed it…an LSD trip. The Trip put Jack on the map in Hollywood, but as a writer, not as an actor.

However, when Rip Torn was fired from Easy Rider, after getting in a heated argument with Dennis Hopper, Jack took his place and rose to stardom soon after. Easy Rider, which is flat out one of the best films ever made (it won the palm d’Or–the most prestigious award in all of film–at the 1969 Festival de Canne), is largely about drugs of course. The two protagonists pick up a hitch-hiking hippie who gives them 4 strong doses of LSD for their kindness. The protagonists end up eating the LSD in a cemetery in New Orleans with a couple of hookers. Their acid trip is one of the most avante-garde scenes in the history of American cinema.

But the movie that really made Jack famous was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack won his first of 3 oscars (Jack’s 3 acting oscars, including 2 for “Best Actor,” are most among male performers–only Katherine Hepburn has more). Cuckoo’s Nest was written by Jack’s friend, Ken Kesey.

Kesey of course was one of the original LSD advocates. His psychedelic beginnings are most interesting. While in graduate school as a creative writing student at Stanford University, Kesey had volunteered to take part in a CIA experiment called MK-ULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The CIA was trying to find an ideal mind control mechanism (the CIA would later conclude that the best mind control mechanism was television). As a participant in the study, Kesey was given an array of psychedelics: LSD, psyllocybin, mescaline, and even DMT. While the experiment proved a failure for the CIA (because psychedelics make the idea of authority ridiculous and even hilarious, they are not great mind control drugs), the experiments were very fruitful for Kesey, who quite liked expanding his mind with chemicals and continued using LSD and other entheogens illicitly long after MK-ULTRA had concluded. Kesey and his acid-eating cronies became famous as the “Merry Pranksters” and their antics were documented in Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test. The “acid tests” were simple. If you had a good time and “turned on” after drinking the dosed cool-aid, you were alright; you were hip. But if you freaked out and panicked, then you were wound too tight; you were a square.

My point in mentioning The Trip, Easy Rider and Cuckoos Nest, which were Jack’s three most important early projects, and all of which relate to acid in one way or another, is that connecting Jack Nicholson to LSD is about as difficult as connecting Kevin Bacon to other movie stars (like Jack for instance….let’s see…A few Good Men…. I got it in one!)

I can’t prove that Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss has taken acid, but he earned his PhD in CHEMISTRY when he was only 24, just as the psychedelic sixties were about to explode. Again, you do the math.

But the Lakers don’t just stand for acid. They stand for Eastern religion and mysticism.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar, long-time Lakers center and current centers coach, is a Muslim.

Phil Jackson self-identifies as a Zen Buddhist.

Phil was the first coach in major sports to have his players meditate and do hatha yoga. He also has them do positive visualizations. The results are hard to argue with, given that Phil’s record is unparalleled in history.

But beyond acid and Eastern spirituality, the Lakers stand for self-realization, cognitive development, and transcendence.

Owner Dr. Jerry Buss is a master strategist. A self-made man, Buss started off with a $1000 real estate investment and steadily parlayed his dividends into millions.

Buss’ strategic mind manifests not only in basketball and real estate, but in tournament poker. Buss has previously come in 2nd and 3rd in the World Series of Poker, no small feat by any means.

Kareem, too, is a genius.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar was arguably the most dominant basketball player ever. Kareem was always in motion. He always kept you one step behind. If you favored toward his right, he’d beat you with his left, He kept you fighting for position so that when he went up for a shot, you had no chance of measuring it or accurately timing a block because you were still trying to stand your ground when he took to the air. And even if you did measure or time his shot–and you couldn’t but if you did–it didn’t matter because his infamous sky-hook was indefensible. Even Wilt Chamberlain couldn’t block the skyhook and Kareem could hit his silky smooth signature shot out to twelve feet. Kareem scored an incredible 38,387 points during his tenure in the NBA; that’s more points scored than by any other player in history. Kareem also won three rings in college with legendary coach John Wooden at UCLA, winning an astounding 88 games and losing only twice. Even Kareem’s high school team once won 71 straight games.

A standout scholar at UCLA, Kareem was highly regarded as an essayist by his English and History professors. Kareem is, like Phil Jackson, a published author, having written an impressive scholarly history of the 761st Tank Batallion in WWII, called Brothers in Arms.

Kareem’s stardom extended beyond the Hollywood hardwood to the silver screen. He appeared in Fletch with Chevy Chase and also in Stephen King’s apocalyptic mini-series, The Stand. However, Kareem is most famous for his classic roles in the comedy Airplane! and as the antagonist in the epic Bruce Lee film, Game of Death.

To return to the Eastern Philosophy/Spirituality thread, Kareem is a devout muslim as his name quite obviously implies. But what you may not know is that he’s also an expert in Shaolin Kung Fu. He learned Kung Fu at UCLA in order to keep his arms and legs strong. Not only do the Lakers have the only Buddhist head coach in major sports, they have the only muslim coach in the NBA in Kareem, their center’s coach and mentor to Pau Gasol and young Andrew Bynum.

Lastly, a word or two needs to be said about Kobe Bryant. Kobe is not a Sufi or a Mahayana Buddhist as far as I know (although he practices concentration and insight meditation). But With Jackson as his coach and with a chemist who came of age in the sixties as his owner, anything’s possible. And I can’t connect Kobe to acid, although one wonders when he sinks 62 consecutive free throws (he had a separate streak of 50) or goes apeshit and hits an NBA record 12 three pointers in a single  game!

(There is, after all, a basis for such theorizing in sport’s history. You will recall that Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while tripping on Acid in 1970.)

People argue, but there has never been a perimeter player as talented as Kobe in the history of the game. No one has ever been as transcendent at putting the ball in the basket from anywhere (and everywhere) on the court. Say what you want about Michael Jordan, MJ never had to play against (”illegal”) zone defenses and quadruple teams! And he still never scored anywhere near 81 freaking points in a game.

My friends Jay and Alexis and I once saw, in person, Kobe score 62 points in only 3 quarters of an NBA game! That’s simply unheard of. No one else has ever scored 62 points in a whole game at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. (This year Kobe also set a new record at Madison Suare Garden in NYC with 61 points) and Kobe scored his 62 in 3 against a Dallas Mavericks team that was the best in the NBA that year. The Mavs had the best record in the league that year, went to the Finals, and got jobbed by the refs who were told by commissioner David Stern to hand the series to the Miami Heat on a silver platter as reported by whistle blower (double entendre fully intended) Tim Donaghy. Can you wrap your head around that? 62 in 3 against the Western Conference Champs (and the League MVP, Nowitski)?

I tell you that everyone in the building was in awe. Defenders would be frozen in astonishment, watching as though they, too, were merely fans in attendance. Even Mavs fans, at a certain point, began chanting “Kobe” (like the Russians chanting “Rocky” in Part IV), hoping and knowing that each shot was going in, because they too were witnessing a miracle and becoming a part of history.

The player assigned to guard Kobe that night, more than embarrassed or shamed, was also awed. Following the game, he asked Kobe for his shoes. Kobe happily took off his sneakers and signed them. Can you imagine: a professional athlete who makes millions of dollars a year asking another player, who had just bested him, for his autographed sweaty sneakers? Rather than being humiliated, Kobe’s rival just wanted to be able to give his own son a piece of memorabilia signed by Kobe. That’s amazing.

Talk to anyone who has seen a game like Kobe’s 81 against the Raptors or 62 in 3 against Dallas and they will all tell you that witnessing such greatness is almost spiritual; it’s trans-personal, transcendent, numinous.

Take it to the bank, no perimeter player will ever score 81 again. And if someone does, it will be Kobe himself.

NBA stats analyst John Hollinger says that the three most impressive basketball games ever played by a single player are, in descending order, 1.) Kobe’s 62 through 3; 2.) Kobe’s 81 against (triple and quadruple teams in) Toronto; and 3.) Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point game in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Hollinger has taken into account each game’s pace, the number of possessions, and so forth. In Chamberlain’s day, there was no zone D, there was a much faster pace, and there were many more baskets scored at both ends of the court. And don’t forget that Chamberlain was HUGE and was playing two feet from the basket, not launching 32-footers like Kobe and leaping over people 7 inches taller than himself to dunk on them. Keep in mind Hollinger is an admitted San Antonio Spurs fan and no Kobe-lover. He’s just a mathematician who calls it like he calculates it.

Love or hate Kobe, he is the most transcendent scorer in the game’s history, Kareem is #2, Wilt Chamberlain is #3 and Michael Jordan, sorry, is #4. But either way, is it merely coincidence that both Bryant and Jordan are meditators, yoga practitioners, and students of acid-head Jackson–The Zen Master?

Again, maybe you don’t really care about basketball. Or maybe you root for some ordinary team that, like almost all sports teams everywhere, stands for……I don’t know…sitting on couches, gorging yourself on beer and potato chips…or the military industrial complex….or just sad, boring, overweight white people in bland mid-western towns passionate and angry because they have nothing else in their lives to cheer for. Go ahead and root for mediocrity. I can respect that.

But me, I’m rooting for LSD. I’m rooting for meditation and mysticism. I’m rooting for transcendence. I’m rooting for self-realization. I’m rooting for greatness. I’m rooting for the L.A. Lakers.

This post is respectfully dedicated to Sgt. Jay Soccoccio, to the vivacious Vivian Garcia, to Joey “The Toad” Genitti, to Ed Lee, to Lil Abner and Joel Navar, to Michael Sopko, to Geoff Robertson, to Dr. Syd Gris of Opulent Temple, and to Alexis Forni who has purple and gold in her veins even in India. Go Lakers!!!