The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead

Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them.

The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light

as a guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain,

All deities and demons, all heavens and hells are internal.

Judged against the criterion of the use of available fact, the greatest psychologists of our century are William James and Carl Jung.5 Both of these men avoided the narrow paths of behaviorism and experimentalism. Both fought to preserve experience and consciousness as an area of scientific research. Both kept open to the advance of scientific theory and both refused to shut off eastern scholarship from consideration.

The underlying solution - repeated again and again - is to recognize that your brain is producing the visions. They do not exist. Nothing exists except as your consciousness gives it life.

Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream

Modern psychedelic chemicals provide a key to this forgotten realm of awareness. But just as this manual without the psychedelic awareness is nothing but an exercise in academic Tibetology, so, too, the potent chemical key is of little value without the guidance and the teachings.

There are two things which have caused misunderstanding. One is that the teachings seem to be addressed to the dead or the dying; the other that the title contains the expression “Liberation through Hearing” (in Tibetan, Thos-grol).

They forget that active memory is only a small part of our normal consciousness, and that our subconscious memory registers and preserves every past impression and experience which our waking mind fails to recall.

To provide “special training” for the “special experience” provided by psychedelic materials is the purpose of this version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The background of this unusual book is not the niggardly European “either-or,” but a magnificently affirmative “both-and.

The psychologies of the east have always found practical application in the running of the state, in the running of daily life and family. A wealth of guides and handbooks exists: the Book of Tao, the Analects of Confucius, the Gita, the I Ching, the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

The methods of investigating consciousness change, such as meditation, yoga, monastic retreat, and sensory deprivation, and are seen as alien to scientific investigation. And most damning of all in the eyes of the European scholar, is the alleged disregard of eastern psychologies for the practical, behavioral and social aspects of life.

Eastern psychology, by contrast, offers us a long history of detailed observation and systematization of the range of human consciousness along with an enormous literature of practical methods for controlling and changing consciousness.

A psychology is based on the available data and the psychologists’ ability and willingness to utilize them. The behaviorism and experimentalism of twentieth-century western psychology is so narrow as to be mostly trivial. Consciousness is eliminated from the field of inquiry. Social application and social meaning are largely neglected. A curious ritualism is enacted by a priesthood rapidly growing in power and numbers

The Basic Trusts and Beliefs. You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awarenesses for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond the range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.

The first period (Chikhai Bardo) is that of complete transcendence—beyond words, beyond space-time, beyond self. There are no visions, no sense of self, no thoughts. There are only pure awareness and ecstatic freedom from all game (and biological) involvements.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead was called in its own language the Bardo Thödol, which means “Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane.” The book stresses over and over that the free consciousness has only to hear and remember the teachings in order to be liberated.

The modern fixation on abstract, quantifiable, and rational modes of thought has profoundly alienated us from the directly sensorial and mimetic forms of knowing and relating maintained by indigenous cultures, allowing us to treat the natural world as something separate from ourselves. The entheogenic experience can temporarily reconnect the modern individual with lost participatory modes of awareness that may induce a greater sensitivity to his or her physical surroundings, beside raising a psychic periscope into the marginalized realms of mythological archetype and imaginative vision.

quantifiable, and rational modes of thought has profoundly alienated us from the directly sensorial and mimetic forms of knowing and relating maintained by indigenous cultures, allowing us to treat the natural world as something separate from ourselves. The entheogenic experience can temporarily reconnect the modern individual with lost participatory modes of awareness that may induce a greater sensitivity to his or her physical surroundings, beside raising a psychic periscope into the marginalized realms of mythological archetype and imaginative vision.

Leary’s first psychedelic trip, on psilocybin, occurred in Mexico in 1960, as he approached his fortieth birthday. Returning to Harvard, he changed the subject of his research from interpersonal communication and what he termed “existential transactions” to an exploration of the possible uses of psychedelics for transforming personality and behavior.

the free consciousness has only to hear and remember the teachings in order to be liberated. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is ostensibly a book describing the experiences to be expected at the moment of death, during an intermediate phase lasting forty-nine (seven times seven) days, and during rebirth into another bodily frame.