Name: The Psychedelic Experience
ISBN: 9780141900384

The Psychedelic Experience

This manual uses material from The Tibetan Book of the Deadfor this preparation. The authors also make an important contribution to the interpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.They show that it is concerned not with the dead, but with the living. The last section of the manual provides instructions for an actual psychedelic session, under adequate safeguards. The authors were engaged in a program of experiments with LSD and other psychedelic drugs at Harvard University until sensational national publicity unfairly concentrating on student interest in the drugs, led to the suspension of the experiments. Since then, the authors have continued their work without academic auspices.

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petecooperDec 2019

It's 'best of' season on the books and music front, so I wish to ask about how you found your reading lists this year. What stood out?

I didn't read as much as I'd have liked due to life complications, but I particularly enjoyed:

* Manufacturing Consent (Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky) * The Psychedelic Experience (Timothy Leary) * Young Men and Fire (Normam Maclean)

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progmetaldevFeb 2025

Thank you, I have spent quite some time reading the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, as well as the (English translation) of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Before I found those sources, I had found the rewritten version found in the Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in my youth when I was interested in LSD. There are quite a few parallels between what I've heard from those close to me that were dying, psychedelic experiences of my own and friends, as well as a near death experience I had myself. I have found the amount of memory that can be recalled from the unconscious to be amazing. The "life flashing before my eyes" was something I fully experienced, and I somehow recalled even minor events over 16 years of my life (I was 16 when I had my near death experience).

Whether or not someone believes this to be real or a hallucination, it is still a human experience, and should at least be treated with respect. I think it's perfectly fine to not believe that it is something higher than brain function, but in Buddhism there is the concept of non-duality.

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LiquixMar 2018

Two counterpoints:

A) Lennon discovered and got very deep into LSD in 1966, mere months before Lucy in the Sky was written. He had a powerful ego death experience [1].

B) Admitting to the public that one of their hit songs was about a controversial drug was an obvious PR no-no.

I guess there's no way to know for certain either way, though.

[1] "When McCartney and Lennon visited the newly opened Indica bookshop, Lennon had been looking for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche but found a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, adapted from the translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Walter Evans-Wentz, which was introduced to Leary by Aldous Huxley. Lennon bought the book, went home and followed the instructions exactly as stated in the book. It discussed an “ego death” experienced under the influence of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, supposedly essentially similar to the dying process, and requiring similar guidance."

https://books.google.com/books?id=FQSLCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA240

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smanuelAug 2014

Timothy Leary wrote "The Psychedelic Experience" in 1962. Aldous Huxley wrote "The Doors of Perception" in 1954. And I guess there are many other books on psychedelics which I haven't read.

But still it's a chemist, who earned the title by writing a book about psychedelic chemical compounds and their effects, but which is not as... psychologically deep as other books (some of which have been written almost half a century ago) on psychedelics.

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