The Six Yogas of Naropa didn’t describe the reducing valve from the outside.
They dissolved it from the inside. Permanently. Not in an afternoon, and not through a molecule.
In Part 1 of The Reducing Valve we watched Huxley see three flowers as they actually were and arrived at a question: the Tibetan tradition had been working with this mechanism for a thousand years before Bergson named it and neuroscience confirmed it. How?
Part 2 answers the question.
The two veils — what Buddhism mapped in the 4th century
Buddhism didn’t just name the reducing valve. It mapped exactly what the valve is made of.
Two specific veils. The klesha avarana — the veil of emotional afflictions, the layer of craving, aversion, and confusion that colours every perception before it reaches awareness. And the jnana avarana — the veil of conceptual obscuration, the layer of fixed frameworks and categories through which the klesha-filtered signal then gets further processed into what we call ordinary experience.
Bergson described one mechanism. Buddhism found two layers inside it, and specified the order in which they dissolve.
The technology for dissolving both is the Six Yogas of Naropa.
The scientists who noticed
Before we go to Naropa, a brief detour into the 20th century.
Kary Mullis — Nobel laureate, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction that made modern genomics possible — said openly that his LSD use in the 1960s contributed directly to his scientific thinking. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix, was reported by colleagues to have been exploring psychedelics in the same period. Timothy Leary began as a Harvard psychologist doing serious research before the cultural circus overtook the science.
And Ram Dass — still Richard Alpert then, still Leary’s colleague — eventually left the laboratory behind and went to India.
What he found there made the laboratory irrelevant for a different reason entirely.
The Maharaj-ji story — 900 micrograms and a laugh
Ram Dass gave Maharaj-ji 900 micrograms of LSD. A dose that would floor almost anyone.
Maharaj-ji sat in an orchard, took it, laughed, and asked for more.
One sentence covers the entire arc from Huxley to here: a valve that had never been closed has nowhere left to open.
This is not a dismissal of the molecule. The molecule does something real — Carhart-Harris measured it, Grof mapped it, Huxley described it better than anyone. But the molecule opens a window temporarily. Maharaj-ji was living in the open field. There was no window left to open.
The Six Yogas — waking, dreaming, dying
The Six Yogas of Naropa are not six separate practices. They are a single journey through every state of consciousness available to a human being.
Tummo — the inner heat practice — begins in the waking state, working with the body’s energy channels directly. Dream yoga — Milam — continues the work through the sleeping state, training awareness to remain present through the dissolution of ordinary waking identity every night. Bardo practice and Phowa — consciousness transference — extend the same awareness into the dying process and what follows it.
Huxley took mescaline on a Friday afternoon in Los Angeles and saw what the valve had been filtering. He died the same day as John F. Kennedy — November 22nd, 1963 — and by his own prior request, his wife gave him LSD as he went. He died consciously, narrating the experience to the end.
The tradition he had glimpsed from outside had been training for exactly that moment for a thousand years.
The 16th Karmapa and the Clear Light
The 16th Karmapa died in a hospital in Zion, Illinois in 1981. The medical staff were not prepared for what happened. He had removed the klesha avarana and the janna avarana decades before; his reducing valve could not be any more open.
His body showed none of the usual signs of post-mortem biological decomposition for three days. His chest remained warm. The nurses recorded it. The attending physicians documented it.
In the Tibetan tradition this is called thukdam — the state of remaining in Clear Light awareness after clinical death. A practitioner who has dissolved both veils does not lose awareness at death. There is nothing left to lose.
The molecule opens the window. Practice builds the house. You walk through on your own will.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Prefer to read? The full transcript is available below. But I recommend listening first – my delivery adds context that’s hard to capture in text.
PART 2
PART 2 LEAD-IN
[GONG] [OM IN]
In Part 1 we sat with Aldous Huxley in a Los Angeles living room and watched him see three flowers as they actually were.
We followed the thread from Henri Bergson’s reducing valve philosophy through Huxley’s afternoon through Robin Carhart-Harris’s neuroimaging at Imperial College London.
Three descriptions. One mechanism. The brain as a filter. The full signal of reality being quietly, efficiently, comprehensively suppressed your entire life.
And we ended with a question.
The Tibetan tradition had been working with this mechanism for a thousand years before any of them. Not describing the valve from the outside. Dissolving it from the inside.
How?
Welcome back to Quantum Awareness — Sound is Emptiness, Emptiness is Sound. I’m QP, your Quantum Preceptor.
Today we answer the question.
Buddhism didn’t just name the reducing valve. It mapped exactly what the valve is made of. Two specific veils. Two distinct layers of obstruction between you and the tathatā of things. And more importantly — a complete technology for dissolving both of them permanently.
Not in an afternoon. Not through a molecule.
Through the sustained cultivation of the quality of attention that makes the valve open and stay open.
Let’s go.
SECTION 4: THE VEILS
Buddhism identified this mechanism not through chemistry and not through neuroimaging.
Through direct investigation of the mind itself.
In the laboratory of meditation, using various available technologies.
In Yogācāra philosophy — the Mind-Only school, one of the great intellectual traditions of Mahayana Buddhism — there are two veils that obscure the nature of reality.
The first is kleśāvaraṇa (kleh-SHAH-vah-rah-nah) — the veil of afflictive emotions. Desire, aversion, ignorance. The emotional weather that distorts perception before it even arrives.
This is what psychological work addresses — the shadow, the wound, the pattern.
What we talked about in EP12 when we said it is easier to wake up from a good dream than from a bad one.
Clean up the emotional veil and the signal gets clearer.
The second is jñeyāvaraṇa (nyeh-YAH-vah-rah-nah) — the veil of knowable objects.
This is subtler and more fundamental.
It is the conceptual mind’s compulsive tendency to replace direct perception with a representation.
To see flower instead of the flower.
To hear your interpretation of words instead of the words.
To meet a person and immediately replace them with your idea of them.
Huxley’s reducing valve is the jñeyāvaraṇa (nyeh-YAH-vah-rah-nah) described mechanically.
Carhart-Harris’s REBUS model is the jñeyāvaraṇa (nyeh-YAH-vah-rah-nah) described neurologically.
Mescaline loosening the valve is the jñeyāvaraṇa (nyeh-YAH-vah-rah-nah) temporarily dissolving.
And what is revealed when the veil lifts — when the valve opens — when the top-down predictions relax?
Tathatā. (TAH-tah-TAH)
Suchness.
What Huxley saw in those three flowers.
What Mahākāśyapa (mah-HAH-KAH-shya-pah) saw when the Buddha held up the lotus.
What every genuine contemplative tradition has been pointing at from the inside.
The tradition has been asking for a thousand years: what if you could dissolve the veil not in an afternoon but permanently?
Not through chemistry but through the sustained cultivation of the quality of attention that Mahākāśyapa (mah-HAH-KAH-shya-pah) had developed?
What if you could see the flowers that way every time you looked at them?
That is what meditation is for.
That is what the Paramitas are for.
That is what the entire path is for.
The molecule shows you the territory.
Practice gives you the territory.
And only you — nobody else, no molecule, no teacher, no tradition — only you can do that practice.
Only you can live the practice and bring benefit to others.
SECTION 5: THE SCIENTISTS WHO NOTICED
Huxley was not alone in noticing that the opened valve produced something other than delusion.
Someone I met on the path reported a phenomenon called synesthesia — when your doors of perception mix or merge.
Think: the colour red tastes bitter.
The roses are singing softly.
I can hear the sun’s rays as they fall gently on my face.
Another felt herself regress back to childhood, seeing all the people she had hurt along the way — but from their side of the story.
Not hers.
Theirs.
Others report increased creativity and have made important discoveries.
Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for the invention of PCR — the polymerase chain reaction.
The technique that made modern genetics possible.
That underlies every COVID test, every DNA analysis, every forensic investigation in the modern world.
He stated explicitly, publicly, without apology, that he could not have conceived of PCR without LSD.
That the molecule allowed him to think in the non-linear, associative, multi-scale way the invention required.
A Nobel Prize.
A technique that changed medicine forever.
A direct causal claim.
Francis Crick — co-discoverer of the DNA double helix — reportedly conceived of the helical structure under LSD.
Those who knew him have confirmed this.
The structure of life itself may have been first seen through a temporarily opened valve.
Richard Feynman — one of the great physicists of the century — openly explored sensory deprivation and altered states with the same rigorous curiosity he brought to quantum electrodynamics.
He wanted to understand the observer.
Not just the observed.
None of these men were claiming the molecule did the work.
The molecule opened the valve.
The trained, disciplined, rigorously prepared mind of a scientist did the work.
The quality of what came through was determined entirely by the quality of the mind it came through.
This is the Buddhist principle exactly.
The practice prepares the ground.
The recognition comes when the conditions are right.
Chemistry can create conditions.
It cannot create recognition.
It cannot create the prepared mind.
It cannot create the capacity to hold what comes through and work with it and live from it.
And this brings us to the most important thing that needs to be said clearly.
Timothy Leary took what Huxley had explored with philosophical rigour and Osmond had investigated with therapeutic seriousness — and handed it to a generation with the instruction to tune in and drop out.
Drop out.
The dharma says the opposite. And always has!
You open the valve so you can see more clearly — not so you can leave.
The Bodhisattva doesn’t drop out.
The Bodhisattva goes back in.
Back into the world.
Back into the relationships.
Back into the mess and the beauty and the difficulty of being alive in a body with other people.
But now with cleaner eyes.
With more of the signal getting through.
Leary’s slogan did more damage than anyone has fully accounted for.
It associated the opened valve with irresponsibility.
It gave Nixon the ammunition to shut down legitimate research for decades.
Grof’s work was interrupted.
Hofmann watched his discovery become a war.
An entire generation of potential scientific and contemplative progress was lost.
Dropping out never made anything better.
No drug can create happiness.
The only thing a drug can do is condense the happiness you already have into a short amount of time.
There will be amazing music, world-changing discoveries — but no lasting happiness.
No lasting freedom.
No liberation.
Ram Dass gave his Lama a very large dose of LSD.
His teacher — Neem Karoli Baba, Maharaj-ji — took 900 micrograms in front of him.
Three tabs of 300 micrograms each.
A dose that would floor an experienced practitioner.
Maharaj-ji showed no sign of intoxication whatsoever.
None.
He sat there.
He smiled.
He laughed at Ram Dass.
He said — and I want you to hear this carefully — “Only one whose mind is entirely fixed on God could be unaffected by this medicine.”
The valve was already open.
Had always been open.
The molecule had nothing left to show him.
But here is what makes the story even more remarkable.
Maharaj-ji did not dismiss the medicine.
He said: “These medicines were used in Kullu Valley long ago.
But yogis have lost that knowledge.
They were used with fasting.
Nobody knows now.”
He was not saying the molecule is worthless.
He was saying the container — the knowledge, the preparation, the tradition that held the practice around the medicine — that has been lost.
What remains is the molecule without the map.
The window without the house.
The opening without the capacity to navigate what comes through.
That is exactly what this episode is about.
SECTION 6: THE SIX YOGAS AND THE DEATH OF HUXLEY
Aldous Huxley died on November 22nd 1963.
The same day as John F. Kennedy.
His death was eclipsed so completely by the assassination that almost nobody noticed.
One of the great minds of the twentieth century dissolved into whatever comes next on the most traumatic day in modern American history and the world was looking somewhere else.
He knew he was dying.
Laryngeal cancer.
He could barely speak.
In the final hours he wrote a note to his wife Laura — he could not say it — asking her to inject him with one hundred micrograms of LSD.
She did.
He died approximately eleven hours later.
Those present described him as peaceful.
Moving toward something rather than away from it.
Laura wrote about his face in the final hours.
She described an expression she could only call liberation.
He used the opened valve one final time.
At the moment the valve opens permanently.
Consciously.
With full intention.
Now place this beside another death we have spoken about in this series.
The 16th Karmapa. Rangjung Rigpe Dorje. Dying in that hospital in Zion, Illinois in 1981.
Western doctors who had never seen anything like it.
The warmth remaining in his chest for three days.
His face expressing something that had no category in Western medicine.
“Don’t worry about death, nothing happens!”
Two men.
Two completely different paths.
Two completely different vehicles.
One opened the valve with chemistry — consciously, intentionally, at the threshold.
One had spent an entire lifetime learning to open the valve through practice — had mastered the dissolution sequence, had trained the recognition of Clear Light, moved through death the way a practitioner moves through sleep.
Same territory.
Same threshold.
Same quality of conscious presence at the moment of dissolution.
Different vehicles.
Huxley saw the territory. He glimpsed it clearly, repeatedly, with full intellectual rigour and genuine courage.
He made an extraordinary map of where the valve can open and what is on the other side.
But between each glimpse he came back.
To ordinary consciousness.
With no reliable way to return on his own will.
The map was beautiful. But a map is not the territory.
And there is a profound difference between having visited a place and knowing how to live there.
The Karmapa didn’t visit. He lived there.
Every day.
Through decades of practice — through prostrations, through mantras, through guru yoga, through sitting and looking and the unglamorous daily work of keeping the valve open by clearing what keeps it closed.
By the time he arrived at the threshold of death he was not a tourist to the territory he was entering.
He was coming home.
Now — what was the technology he used?
The Six Yogas of Naropa.
The Six Yogas are not six separate practices that happen to be grouped together.
They are a single integrated technology for opening the reducing valve — deliberately, reliably, completely — at every state of consciousness available to a human being.
Tummo — the inner fire.
Burns through the kleśāvaraṇa. (kleh-SHAH-vah-rah-nah) The emotional veil.
The heat generated in the central channel processes the accumulated residue of habitual emotional patterns.
The valve begins to open from the body upward.
Gyulü — the illusory body. Works directly on the jñeyāvaraṇa. (nyeh-YAH-vah-rah-nah)
The conceptual veil.
You recognise that the solid, permanent, boundaried form you take yourself to have is a construction.
An appearance arising from causes and conditions. The valve loosens its grip on the story of form.
Ösel — Clear Light. This is the valve fully open.
The recognition of the luminosity that underlies all experience.
The clear light that is the nature of mind itself.
The Dharmakaya that the sleeping mind touches every night without knowing it. The practice of Ösel is the cultivation of the capacity to recognise and remain in the open valve.
Not glimpse it.
Remain.
Milam — Dream Yoga. Opens the valve inside the dream state. What we covered in EP13. The awareness behind the dream is the same awareness behind the waking state. The valve that closes during sleep is kept open through practice.
Bardo — the in-between. Opens the valve at the threshold of death and during the dissolution sequence. The states the ordinary mind passes through unconsciously become navigable territory for a prepared practitioner.
Phowa — the transference of consciousness. When the valve opens at death, Phowa is the technology for directing consciousness through it consciously. Not hoping for recognition at the last moment.
Actively,
deliberately,
with training,
directing awareness toward the Dharmakaya at the moment of dissolution.
Huxley opened the valve with four-tenths of a gram dissolved in water.
The Six Yogas of Naropa are a complete technology for opening the same valve — in the waking state, in the dream state, in the dying state, and in the space between lives.
Not in an afternoon. Not through a molecule.
Through the sustained, precise cultivation of the quality of attention that makes the valve open and stay open.
That is the technology Milarepa’s calluses were built from.
That is what the 16th Karmapa’s warmth three days after death was the fruit of. That is where the path leads.
I am sure some of the Karmapa’s Students gave him some LSD, I doubt he took it, he didn’t need to. He only received it so his students would have less to misuse?
A valve that had never been closed has nowhere left to open.
A molecule cannot enlighten you.
It cannot help you traverse the stages or bardos of life.
Only years of practising love and compassion can. Only the sustained cultivation of awareness — of the Paramitas, of the Four Basic Thoughts, of the refuge, of the sitting and the looking and the choosing again and again the wider response over the reactive one — only this builds the house.
There is no shortcut to lasting joy and highest bliss.
The molecule can show you the window — if you didn’t know it was there.
BUT Practice, meditation, builds the house.
You walk through on your own will.
LATE CTA — THE FRUITS
If something shifted in this episode — don’t file it under unremarkable. That’s what the valve does. It files everything under unremarkable and moves on. Subscribe wherever you listen. Share it with one person whose valve is ready to open. And if you want to go deeper — the Six Yogas of Naropa are on the Quantum Awareness site. I’ll link them directly in the show notes. Each one its own door. Each one pointing at the same valve.
Let it produce fruit.
CLOSE
So here is where we land.
Aldous Huxley sat in a Los Angeles living room in 1953 and saw three flowers as they actually were.
Twenty-five centuries earlier a man held up a lotus and only one person in the assembly really saw it.
Both moments are pointing at the same thing.
The tathatā suchness of a flower.
The suchness that the reducing valve — the jñeyāvaraṇa, (nyeh-YAH-vah-rah-nah) the default mode network, the brain’s compulsive top-down model of reality — has been filtering out your entire life.
The mescaline got Huxley there in an afternoon.
A lifetime of practice got Mahākāśyapa (mah-HAH-KAH-shya-pah) there permanently.
The Six Yogas got the 16th Karmapa there so completely that three days after clinical death his chest was still warm.
The territory is real.
The science confirms it.
The tradition has been mapping it for centuries.
And the convergence — Bergson’s philosophy, Huxley’s afternoon, Carhart-Harris’s neuroimaging, Yogācāra epistemology, the Flower Sermon, the Six Yogas of Naropa — that convergence is not a coincidence.
It is the same territory described from every possible direction.
Look at something near you right now.
A flower if you have one.
A hand.
A cup of tea.
Really look.
Not at your idea of it.
At it. 20.52
The tathatā was always there. 20:58
The lotus is always being held up.
The valve is always ready to be opened.
[NEXT EPISODE BRIDGE]
Next time — we go further into the cartography. A Czech psychiatrist named Stanislav Grof spent fifty years mapping what happens when the valve opens — not just for an afternoon but for hours, repeatedly, systematically.
He built the most detailed map of non-ordinary consciousness that Western science has ever produced. Th Gateway to the Nominous.
And along the way he found Moses on the mountain, the Eleusinian initiates, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead waiting for him at the end of the map.
All pointing at the same territory.
Until then — look at the flowers. Really look.
This is QP. Sound is emptiness. Emptiness is sound.
See you next time.
LATE CTA — THE FRUITS
If something shifted in this episode — don’t file it under unremarkable. That’s what the valve does. It files everything under unremarkable and moves on. Subscribe wherever you listen. Share it with one person whose valve is ready to open. And if you want to go deeper — the Six Yogas of Naropa are on the Quantum Awareness site. I’ll link them directly in the show notes. Each one its own door. Each one pointing at the same valve.
Let it produce fruit.
[GONG]
[OM CHANTING OUT]
Episode Runtime: Approximately 20 minutes of content
Further Reading:
Onsite:
EP14 Part 1 — You Have Never Seen Reality As It Is (Reducing Valve)
OffSite:
Wikipedia — Six Yogas of Naropa
Wikipedia — Neem Karoli Baba ( Maharaj-ji LSD ) Ram Dass’ Lama