Revisiting “The Psychedelic Experience” (the book)
A recent discussion convinced me that I needed to read The Psychedelic Experience, the 1964 book by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), and Ralph Metzner. I should say that I’m fairly well read in psychedelia, although by no means an expert, and I wanted to fill in the lacuna left by having not read the book.
As Daniel Pinchbeck says in his insightful introduction, the book today functions mostly as an historical document. Indeed, the works of people such as Stanislav Grof, Terrance McKenna, Rick Strassman, and the crew of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies — among many others — can be seen as superseding The Psychedelic Experience by a long way. Even the authors (I’m familiar with their writing to varying degrees) seem to have let it rest not long after its publication. Certainly, for none of the three did it stand as the great text to which all subsequent writing would be a footnote (as sometimes happens).
At times, the text does seem quite old. As Pinchbeck points out, the repetitive use of the word “game” to describe social interactions and learned routines gets tiresome pretty quickly. Yet the mid-century notion that we are all playing social games, and that we might do well to question the rules and objectives of them, strikes me as something we could profitably revisit — if we can but come up with a few new terms to make reading easier.
Although the book is old and has been improved upon by subsequent writings, having been written in the early 1960s endows it with a freshness. Psychedelics were new, at least to mainstream Western society, and there’s an excitement and even innocence in the book that is very enjoyable. It was a time before psychedelics were banned, criminalized, and marginalized, when the authors felt that LSD and mushrooms could be of enormous benefit. And as of then they had had only some pushback from the establishment (getting fired from Harvard is a big deal, but not on par with spending a few decades in prison).
There are also a few insights in the book that don’t seem to have been acknowledged much in other places. For example, the different reactions to psychedelics by introverts and extroverts represents an interesting consideration. These various little gems are scattered throughout the book, and represent the legacy of a time when the narrative on psychedelics was less sophisticated but also very open.
As for the main thrust of the book, using The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) as a guide for a psychedelic session, the first thing that struck me was the language. Now, in his translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, W.Y. Evans-Wentz appropriately used archaic English to convey the feeling of the Bardo Thodol, which of course is written in archaic Tibetan. Beyond the historical aspect, the use of archaic terms has a certain impact — that’s why they turn up so frequently in both religious and legal contexts. Still, I don’t know how a 20th century psychonaut would respond to hearing things like, “O nobly born one…” while tripping on acid. At least thou and thee have been cleaned up to you.
In terms of the imagery, the authors sensibly transition the specific images into contemporary terms, for example noting that instead of various wrathful deities a Westerner is more likely to encounter various machines, robots, and so on.
Is it valid (and/or wise) to map the psychedelic experience onto the between states as described in the Bardo Thodol?
It makes some intuitive sense to relate psychedelics to the bardo states. After all, the Bardo Thodol offers some of the most vivid and detailed accounts of nonordinary states of consciousness, including both blissful and terrifying visions that would be very familiar to the psychedelic explorer. The insight that the visions are the product of one’s own consciousness and based on karma (conditioning) is also supportive. And ego-death has remarkable similarities in any context.
Even so, the Bardo Thodol is a book that purports to offer liberation — Buddhahood — in the afterdeath state. And The Psychedelic Experience claims to offer liberation, too. Yet we know that that was not the experience of its authors — they learned a lot through the experience, but they weren’t enlightened by it, in the sense of stable Buddhahood. We know that. And the authors knew it, too.
By repeatedly emphasizing the potential for complete sustained realization, the book sets the reader up for failure. While re-entering ‘game reality’ at an optimal level is acknowledged as the best outcome for nearly everyone, the actual language is confusing. One learns that the goal is to maximize “the degree of enlightenment in the subsequent personality,” but this is only stated in the very last pages of the book.
As Pinchbeck points out, The Psychedelic Experience helped to set up the dichotomy in psychedelia between those folks who use Eastern mysticism to orient the experience and those who rely more on shamanism. To an extent, that can be attributed to the specific substances and the cultural context in which they are utilized: users of ayahuasca and plant medicines might lean more towards shamanism while those who use LSD and synthetic substances could tend more towards Eastern (or for that matter, Western) mysticism. Clearly, though, if any such tendencies exist they are general trends with many exceptions. Leary’s introductions to psychedelics came through mushrooms, after all.
One interesting observation made in the book is that the psychedelic voyager can experience scenes of birth which might be a recollection of their own biological birth. Within the context of the Bardo Thodol, sexual and birth scenes are a primary consideration (although the Bardo Thodol is a guide for choosing future births rather than reliving past ones).
Those familiar with the psychedelic literature will recognize that the potential to re-live biological birth is key to Stanislav Grof’s work. Approached with a wide-angle lens, Grof’s Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs) could be associated with the various bardo states described in The Psychedelic Experience. However, Grof, basing his work on far more voluminous experience, does not assume a linear trajectory to the experiences of the BPMs and the entry into the transpersonal realms.
If you’re a reader in the realm of psychedelia, The Psychedelic Experience is interesting on many levels. It was published just as the idea that LSD and other substances were psychotomimetics — drugs that induced temporary psychosis-like states — was beginning to wane as the dominant model of psychedelics (or hallucinogens as they were called at the time). The enthusiasm expressed by the authors represents a turn of thought very similar to the current Psychedelic Renaissance, which has pulled the substances away from their reputation as useless at best, and dangerous at worst.
As one of the very first attempts to bring psychedelics to a wider swath of the population, the book suffers from over-enthusiasm, not just for the psychedelics themselves, but also for the model the authors were using to overlay the experience. They were really sure they had it right, as can be seen in their advice for using the book:
“It should be proclaimed to all living persons; it should be read over the pillows of ill persons; it should be read to dying persons; it should be broadcast.”