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most often was Venerable Margaret, a Buddhist priest I met in 1974 dur- ing my first stay at the monastery.* STEPPING ON HOLY TOES + 301 "certifiability" of a volunteer's understanding with anything other than psychiatric models of interpretation. Another problem was how to relate what I knew about Buddhist ap- proaches to nonmaterial beings with what our volunteers were reporting. For example, Tibetan and Japanese versions of Buddhism possess a full roster of demons, gods, and angels. I understood these encounters to sym- bolically represent certain qualities of ourselves, not autonomous noncorporeal life forms. When volunteers began reporting contact, my first reaction was, "Oh, this is something they talk about in Buddhism. They are just aspects of our own minds." These encounters got stranger, however, and the beings started test- ing, probing, inserting things into, eating, and raping our volunteers. A Buddhist framework seemed less capable of explaining these types of experiences. Generically I could apply the inherent skepticism of Bud- dhism in taking anything as "real" or "special" about these stories. That is, it was "just meeting beings." These apparent life forms were not nec- essarily any wiser or more trustworthy than anything else we might meet in our lives or minds. Nevertheless, I needed some guidance, both for the spiritual experi- ence and the "contact" aspects of our work. I began sharing our findings, and my questions, with trusted monk friends. The one to whom I turned A clinical psychologist by training, Margaret became a Buddhist monk after realizing, "I didn't want to be let loose on the world the way I was." She wanted to experience her own mental and spiritual health before try- ing to help others. She loved monastic life, however, and stayed on. Margaret and I spoke the same language, shared the same concerns, and viewed the human condition through similarly trained clinical eyes. Before beginning the actual DMT studies, I happened to spend a few days at the monastery. My two-year journey through the regulatory labyrinth, seeking permission and funding to begin giving DMT, was drawing to a close. Margaret had risen to chief assistant to the abbot, and her time was heavily