By Alan W. Watts

A vintage account of the psychedelic experience

The Joyous Cosmology is Alan Watts’s exploration of the perception that the consciousness-changing medicines LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin can facilitate “when followed with sustained philosophical mirrored image through anyone 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 life of the sacred.

Includes Watts’s article “Psychedelics and non secular Experience”

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Example text

I AM LISTENING TO THE MUSIC OF AN ORGAN. As leaves seemed to gesture, the organ seems quite literally to speak. There is no use of the vox humana stop, but every sound seems to issue from a vast human throat, moist with saliva. As, with the base pedals, the player moves slowly down the scale, the sounds seem to blow forth in immense, gooey spludges. As I listen more carefully, the spludges acquire texture—expanding circles of vibration finely and evenly toothed like combs, no longer moist and liquidinous like the living throat, but mechanically discontinuous.

Be prepared. There are scores of great lines in this book. Dozens of great ideas. Too many. Too compressed. They glide by too quickly. Watch for them. If you catch even a few of these ideas, you will find yourself asking the questions which we ask ourselves as we look over our research data: Where do we go from here? What is the application of these new wonder medicines? Can they do more than provide memorable moments and memorable books? The answer will come from two directions. We must provide more and more people with these experiences and have them tell us, as Alan Watts does here, what they experienced.

There is time to see them, time for the whole intricacy of veins and capillaries to develop in consciousness, time to see down and down into the shape of greenness, which is not green at all, but a whole spectrum generalizing itself as green—purple, gold, the sunlit turquoise of the ocean, the intense luminescence of the emerald. I cannot decide where shape ends and color begins. ” And somehow that is quite satisfactory, even startlingly clear. The meaning is transparent in the same way that the color and texture are transparent, with light which does not seem to fall upon surfaces from above but to be right inside the structure and color.

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