Can Psychedelics Help Us Prepare for the Afterlife?

Are they thanatomimetics? It might make sense, depending on your view of what awaits us after we die…

Among the many arguments in favor of the responsible use of psychedelics, I count this one as quite powerful: we are all going to die.

Hopefully, not soon. But inevitably. And we may very well benefit from having some practice for the postmortem state, which psychedelics could provide.

Let’s back up a minute and consider exactly what we think existence after the death of the body is like. I’ve been covering this in my series on the survival of consciousness after death, linked below, but for our purposes we can identify three broad scenarios: nothing at all happens; we are taken up to another plane of existence where we are guided through the experience by guides and other helpful beings; and, lastly, we are thrown into a terrifying world created by our own mind when left devoid of sensory input.

This last scenario comes from the Bardo Thodal, the Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s not much comfort in the Tibetan view of the afterlife. There are beneficent beings there, offering liberation, but we’ll likely be terrified of them and run towards less attractive alternatives. The afterlife states are described in pretty raw and frightening terms in the Bardo Thodal, which is often considered to be the most detailed account of the time between births.

It should be noted that the Tibetan view on postmortem existence may be among the most detailed, but it is also rather unique to both Eastern and Western traditions. There’s nothing else like it in Buddhism, for example, and it contrasts sharply with the accounts of near-death experiences we have in the West (to be fair, near-death isn’t death, but it’s what we have to go on).

It is on the basis of the possibility that the Bardo Thodal has it right that I would suggest that psychedelics can have value for navigating the afterlife. If after we die our consciousness is left adrift from its moorings and no helpful guides appear, we would benefit from having some experience in managing such states — and psychedelics could provide that practice.

In 1964, Leary, Alpert, and Metzger took the reverse approach in the their book, The Psychedelic Experience (my review is linked below). They thought that the techniques advocated in the Bardo Thodal would be useful, with some adaptations, for working through the challenges and opportunities of psychedelic trips. Indeed, for those seeking models for navigating the multiverse of psychedelia, The Tibetan Book of the Dead holds some appeal, at least in terms of the potentially bizarre and powerful visions that often do not have any correlates in mundane experience. Not that the authors thought the experiences were the same, but that they were usefully comparable.

Leary, Alpert, and Metzger are certainly not the only psychedelic explorers who have some interest in correlates with thanatology. Researcher Stanislav Grof has a book on death, Death — The Ultimate Journey. Besides, psychedelics naturally lead us to consider the ‘big questions’ of existence, and death ranks right up there among those.

There are too many variations of the psychedelic experience to make any direct connections to the Bardo Thodal, of course. The overall trajectory of a trip may or may not make a useful analogy to the various bardo states. The visual imagery and emotional content is not the same, although there may be some parallels. The basic premise that both the bardo states and a psychedelic trip are “mind left to itself” is the major point of connection.

In the wave of psychedelic enthusiasm that began in Western culture in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s — not the first wave, by the way — the substances went through a number of name changes. Initially, they were called psychotomimetics, indicating that they created states that mimicked a temporary psychosis. The limitations and inaccuracies of that viewpoint led to labelling them as hallucinogens, focusing on their abilities to generate hallucinations. Yet hallucinations can come from various sources that are associated with delirium, another negative association. Besides, not every experience involves true visual or auditory hallucinations. Later, folks took up Humphrey Osmond’s suggestion they ge labelled as psychedelics, meaning “mind manifesting” — my favorite label. More recent psychonauts have suggested entheogen, meaning “manifesting the god within,” but I consider that a bridge too far, given the potential characteristics of some trips. Entheogen seems to be more a prayer than a description.

The question is, might we also consider these substances as potentially being thanatomimetics, mimicking postmortem consciousness? In this, I fall in with Leary, Alpert, and Metzger in the sense that I think it is possible that there are helpful similarities without being a complete equivalence. What I believe is that if the afterlife experience is anything like the psychedelic experience, we would benefit from having some “practice” within a controlled and temporary state before taking the big leap into the beyond.

I’m not suggesting anything like intentionally generating death experiences or even thoughts of death during a psychedelic trip. I don’t and wouldn’t do that. I’m only saying that if our experiences after death are in any significant way parallel to a psychedelic trip, we would do well to acclimate ourselves beforehand. Mostly, when I approach a trip with some trepidation, I remind myself that I’ll be back in a few hours, and that perhaps it will be useful practice for the eventual non-voluntary trip.

Personally, I’m hoping for the ‘benevolent guides and angels’ scenario, but I’m not presuming anything.

Thanks for reading! New followers (and there are a lot of you) might like to check out some of my prior writing — nothing is very topical, so you can read it now without any loss of value.

Here’s a link to my series on Death and the Survival of Consciousness, to get you started.

Here’s a link to my review of The Psychedelic Experience.