By Alan W. Watts
The Joyous Cosmology is Alan Watts’s exploration of the perception that the consciousness-changing medications LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin can facilitate when observed with sustained philosophical mirrored image by way of someone who's in seek, no longer of kicks, yet of understanding.” greater than an artifact, it truly is either a riveting memoir of Watts’s own experiments and a profound meditation on our perennial questions on the character of life and the lifestyles of the sacred.
Includes Watts’s article Psychedelics and non secular Experience”
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Extra resources for The joyous cosmology : adventures in the chemistry of consciousness
Example text
He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body he “has” a body. Instead of living and loving he “has” instincts for survival and copulation. Disowned, they drive him as if they were blind furies or demons that possessed him. The feeling that there is something wrong in all this revolves around a contradiction characteristic of all civilizations. This is the simultaneous compulsion to preserve oneself and to forget oneself. Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival—going on living—thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
The Joyous Cosmology is solid testimony for the same happy expectations. Timothy Leary, PhD, and Richard Alpert, PhD Harvard University, January 1962 PREFACE IN THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION Aldous Huxley has given us a superbly written account of the effects of mescaline upon a highly sensitive person. It was a record of his first experience of this remarkable transformation of consciousness, and by now, through subsequent experiments, he knows that it can lead to far deeper insights than his book described.
External material success is followed by disillusion and the basic “why” questions, and then by the discovery of the world within—a world infinitely more complex and rich than the artifactual structures of the outer world, which after all are, in origin, projections of human imagination. Eventually, the logical conceptual mind turns on itself, recognizes the foolish inadequacy of the flimsy systems it imposes on the world, suspends its own rigid control, and overthrows the domination of cognitive experience.