Revisiting 'The Psychedelic Experience'
How does the 'Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead' hold up today?
It’s strange to think that it’s been 60 years since Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert—latterly known as Ram Dass—published a thin volume called, quite grandly for such a short book, The Psychedelic Experience.
Conceived in 1962 and published in 1964, the book pre-dates the Castalia Foundation, the summer of love, the psychedelics panic that came later that decade. It is the result of, really, only a few years of intense experimentation with mushrooms, LSD and mescaline on the part of the three authors, with Timothy Leary being the most infamous and visible. But it does belie the therapeutic underpinnings of this research, and the fact that the psychologists who fell into the world of psychedelics saw these substances as possible triggers for a greater mental ascendence; something that could help us, as humans, to better deal with and understand our existential crises.
The more personal context for this book is perhaps under-discussed. Timothy Leary lost his wife to suicide in 1955, meaning that his explorations into the psychedelic space were necessarily conjoined with grieving, and a consideration of mortality; he learned about psilocybin’s existence just two years after her death, and started experimenting with it three years after that. By the time the book was published in 1964, Leary had been expelled from his role as Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at Harvard for his promotion of psilocybin mushrooms to students and his increasingly erratic behaviour. In other words: between death, grief, the discovery of psychedelics, the undermining of everything he thought he knew and the destruction of his career, Leary had his entire understanding of the world demolished and rebuilt within the space of a decade. Is it any wonder he was searching for how to make meaning, and how to contextualise life, death and knowledge itself?
Perhaps its no surprise, then, that the authors focused so heavily on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (also known as the Bardo Thodol, or ‘Liberation through hearing during the intermediate state''). This text, probably the best known Tibetan text in the western world, was composed in the 8th century by Padmasambhava, written down and buried in the Tibetan hills by his student, and revealed to Karma Lingpa in the 14th century. It is intended as a guide to understand what happens to consciousness after death on the mortal plane, when it resides in the inter-space between this life and rebirth, the space known as the bardo. It was in part intended for practitioners to midwife people through the first death experience. And the authors themselves write in the general introduction, the book “was not intended for general reading. It was designed to be understood only by one who was to be initiated personally by a guru into the Buddhist mystical doctrines, into the premortem-death-rebirth experience.”
So why did they choose to take this book and catapult it into the burgeoning psychedelics scene? They explain it themselves:
In publishing this practical interpretation for use in the psychedelic drug session, we are in a sense breaking with the tradition of secrecy and thus contravening the teachings of the lama-gurus.
However, this step is justified on the grounds that the manual will not be understood by anyone who has not had a consciousness-expanding experience and that there are signs that the lamas themselves, after their recent diaspora, wish to make their teachings available to a wider public.
Reading this in 2024, it’s difficult not to feel heavily critical of this approach, which is to wilfully disregard the wishes of another culture for the sake of the betterment of yourself and those around you. Contemporary discussions around the wholesale taking of another culture’s rituals and processes might consider this book to be a prime example of cultural appropriation—and I don’t think they would be wrong.
The urge to give people a guide, to help them spiritually through a process that has the potential to change their approach to life, death and the very concept of themselves—that’s a noble impulse. But what we realise today is that power resides in some places more than others, and cultural sensitivity is paramount, and some things are simply not for the taking. The choice to disregard centuries of Tibetan spiritual belief, unfortunately, casts a shadow of any contemporary reassessment of this book.
As for the text itself. The authors use the Tibetan model to divide the psychedelic experience into three phases: the first period (of complete transcendence and pure awareness); the second period (of self, or ‘external game reality’ in ‘exquisite clarity or in the form of hallucinations’); and the final period (the return to reality). This framework can easily be mapped onto the psychedelic experience as many of us have undergone it, and it takes only a half step to understand it further as (ego) death, post-mortem knowledge, rebirth—with the post-mortem knowledge being that the world is entirely interconnected; that consciousness exists beyond the mortal realm, that we have to learn and grow from our experiences, that we can change. Or as the authors put it, with ‘Bardo’ referring to the intermediate state between lives:
when undergoing ego-loss… there follows of progressive descent into lower and lower states of the Bardo existence, and then rebirth.
In the most sympathetic reading of this book, it is obvious that the authors simply wish to give their new psychedelic disciples—who, lets remember, were predominantly students—a guide by which to understand and premeditate the enormously impactful experiences brought out by psychedelics. In some passages you can hear them trying to hold their students’ hands through it:
In order to maintain the ego-loss state… the prepared person will relax and allow the forces to flow through him. There are two dangers to avoid: the attempt to control or to rationalize this energy flow. Either of these reactions is indicative of ego-activity and the First Bardo transcendence is lost.
An unsympathetic reading would say that these authors had become lost in their own delusions of grandeur, convinced that they had bestowed upon the western world some knowledge hitherto unknown by man—except it was known, to the Tibetans, to the Mexicans, to other cultures who have known about these substances and used them for much longer than we have. Critics might say this book was their attempt to cement themselves as spiritual guides for an entire generation. The language in the book is indeed grand, explaining very physical things (such as pulsating sensations, visual disturbances, hallucinations etc) in metaphysical ways.
But these were also psychologists, very used to working within the traumas and challenges of the minds of their peers. The urge to support, to explain these overwhelming experiences in a way that would facilitate positive mental change, is surely laudable. Yet the rooting in psychology has its limits, none more obvious than when the book veers into the territory of what it calls ‘Sexual visions’.
In the third Bardo, the third period of psychedelic experience, the authors tell us sexual visions are extremely frequent; we may imagine ‘males and females copulating’. So far, so fine; some psychedelic experiences are intensely sexual, as this is just another expression of sensate overwhelm. We have all, I’m sure, been there.
However, the authors go on to tell us that if we attempt to enter the orgies in our minds, we will do so on an animal or neurotic level:
If you become conscious of “maleness”, hatred of the father together with jealousy and attraction towards the mother will be experienced; if you become conscious of “femaleness”, hatred of the mother together with attraction and fondness for the father is experienced.”
Dr Freud, is that you? Are we really telling young people about to enter a highly suggestible state that if they experience feelings of arousal, it’s because they want to fuck their mother? Had I been told this before my first trip, I’m sure it would have resulted in some visits to a therapist. As all humans, the authors have found it difficult from putting their own—in this case, professional—bias into the text, and given their huge influence at the time it was written, this seems problematic at best.
Since the publication of this book, and the huge social and political changes that have occurred since that time, there are certainly a good few people who consider Timothy Leary especially to have overstepped his mark in his promotion of psychedelics, ultimately triggering a governmental counter-response that stymied the research of and access to psychedelics for decades. There are others who have critiqued his lack of care towards his patients and disciples and, indeed, his ego. Did these three men, and one in particular, exert an outsized influence on the psychedelics generation? Their own book sums up the issues of this neatly:
The danger is that the voyager becomes frightened by or unduly attached to these powerful figures.
So what are we to take away from this book, from the vantage point of 2024? It is impossible to ignore the fact that its publication was an enormous act of sacrilege, to an extent that seems counter to the very spirit of psychedelic discovery. Where is the reflection or self knowledge from these authors around the choices they have made? Where is the appreciation of interconnectedness in taking something from another culture wholesale and riding roughshod over their spiritual beliefs and history? It is difficult to engage positively with a text that is not drawn from positivity.
However, what the authors were at least attempting to do here was to provide for the emerging generation of psychonauts what
refers to as ‘containers’ for these experiences. In his book How to Change Your Mind, Pollan emphasises his view that adhering to the social ‘containers’ we have created around psychedelic substances—such as the Native American Church’s use of peyote—allows us to get the most out of psychedelic experiences and mitigate the (already low) potential harms from taking them. This book, perhaps, should be seen in the same vein, though without any of the cultural nuance and consideration as Pollan’s take.Must these ‘containers’ be as prescriptive or formalised as all this, though? Of course, we are supporters of psychedelic therapy; those who are suffering from treatment-resistant depression, OCD, post-traumatic stress disorder and all manner of serious mental health conditions should of course have access to formalised care which encompasses all that psychedelics can bring to them. But does the existence of this medicalised care for those with serious conditions mean that all other use of psychedelics is invalidated, if it is not crammed into frameworks like those put forward by the authors of The Psychedelic Experience? Must we go hunting for centuries old formulations of the ego-death experience to create something like a framework for ourselves and our experience with psychedelic substances, or any other drugs for that matter? After all, is the ritual of taking something at a rave, then going back to someone’s apartment for ‘afters’, listening to Moon Safari and rubbing each other til the comedown kicks is not a social ‘container’ that is based around care? Is tripping in your friend’s back garden staring up at the stars and talking about life any more or less impactful and healing than doing the same thing in a sterile medical office, or using another culture’s spiritual framework for understanding what you’ve gone through?
60 years is a long time, in science especially, and we have come a long way in understanding these substances in the decades since this book was written. We have begun to undo the decades of damage done by the psychedelic panic and we have started the work of embracing psychedelics not only as recreational substances but as catalysts for self-betterment, as tools with which to approach death, as things that can help us heal. Perhaps we don’t need the Tibetan Book of the Dead to do all that.
Interesting, not one mention of Frank Barron…