Psychedelic Prayers

Psychedelic Prayers
Author: Timothy Leary
Publisher: Ronin Publishing
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2010-09-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781579511166

Leary's only book of meditative poetry. Manual to higher consciousness inspired by Lao Tse's Tao Te Ching (Way of Life) Includes six rediscovered poems, photos, and drawings from the cover of the German edition by H. R. Giger and photos of Leary in India, along with essays by Michael Horowitz, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, and Ralph Metzner, who was with Leary in India when he wrote the book. A companion volume to High Priest. "My objective," Leary wrote,"was to find the seed idea in each Sutra and rewrite it in the lingua franca of psychedelia." The result was this handy take-along prayer book. It is intended to be read slowly during a session as a guide to transcendental experiences.

Psychedelic Mysticism

Psychedelic Mysticism
Author: Morgan Shipley
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2015-11-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 149850910X

Concerned with scholarly, popular, and religious backdrops that understand the connection between psychedelics and mystical experiences to be devoid of moral concerns and ethical dimensions—a position supported empirically by the rise of acid fascism and psychedelic cults by the late 1960s—Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America traces the development of sixties psychedelic mysticism from the deconditioned mind and perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley, to the sacramental ethics of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, to the altruistic religiosity practiced by Stephen Gaskin and The Farm. Building directly off the pioneering psychedelic writing of Huxley, these psychedelic mystics understood the height of psychedelic consciousness as an existential awareness of unitive oneness, a position that offered worldly alternatives to the maladies associated with the postwar moment (e.g., vapid consumerism and materialism, lifeless conformity, unremitting racism, heightened militarism). In opening a doorway to a common world, Morgan Shipley locates how psychedelics challenged the coherency of Western modernity by fundamentally reorienting postwar society away from neoliberal ideologies and toward a sacred understanding of reality defined by mutual coexistence and responsible interdependence. In 1960s America, psychedelics catalyzed a religious awakening defined by compassion, expressed through altruism, and actualized in projects that sought to ameliorate the conditions of the least advantaged among us. In the exact moments that historians and cultural critics often locate as signaling the death knell of the counterculture, Gaskin and The Farm emerged, not as a response to the perceived failures of the hippies, nor as an alternative to sixties politicos, but in an effort to fulfill the religious obligation to help teach the world how to live more harmoniously. Today, as we continue to confront issues of socioeconomic inequality, entrenched differences, widespread violence, and the limits of religious pluralism, Psychedelic Mysticism serves as a timely reminder of how religion in America can operate as a tool for destabilization and as a means to actively reimagine the very basis of how people relate—such a legacy can aid in our own efforts to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and compassionate world.

Psychedelic Christianity

Psychedelic Christianity
Author: Jack Call
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 77
Release: 2018-07-27
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1785357484

Psychedelic Christianity discusses what we should hope and believe about the ultimate goal of living and uses psychedelic experience and Christianity as its guiding stars. The book reconciles three seemingly inconsistent claims: that we have already attained the ultimate goal; that there is more than one ultimate goal; that there is and always will be another ultimate goal coming. Psychedelic Christianity also argues that Jesus taught that worldly politics will never lead to the kingdom of heaven.

Psychedelic Refugee

Psychedelic Refugee
Author: Rosemary Woodruff Leary
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1644111810

A memoir by one of the original female psychedelic pioneers of the 1960s • Shares Rosemary’s early experimentation with psychedelics in the 1950s, her development through the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, and her involvement, at first exciting but then heartbreaking, with Dr. Timothy Leary • Describes her LSD trips with Leary, their time at the famous Millbrook estate, their experiences as fugitives abroad, including their captivity by the Black Panthers in Algeria, and Rosemary’s years on the run after she and Timothy separated One of the original female psychedelic pioneers, Rosemary Woodruff Leary (1935-2002) began her psychedelic journey long before her relationship with Dr. Timothy Leary. In the 1950s, she moved to New York City where she became part of the city’s most advanced music, art, and literary circles and expanded her consciousness with psilocybin mushrooms and peyote. In 1964 she met two former Harvard professors who were experimenting with LSD, Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner, who invited her to join them at the Millbrook estate in upstate New York. Once at Millbrook, Rosemary went on to become the wife--and accomplice--of the man Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America.” In this intimate memoir, Rosemary describes her LSD experiences and insights, her decades as a fugitive hiding both abroad and underground in America, and her encounters with many leaders of the cultural and psychedelic milieu of the 1960s. Compiled from Rosemary’s own letters and autobiographical writings archived among her papers at the New York Public Library, the memoir details Rosemary’s imprisonment for contempt of court, the Millbrook raid by G. Gordon Liddy, the tours with Timothy before his own arrest and imprisonment, and their time in exile following his sensational escape from a California prison. She describes their surreal and frightening captivity by the Black Panther Party in Algeria and their experiences as fugitives in Switzerland. She recounts her adventures and fears as a fugitive on five continents after her separation from Timothy in 1971. While most accounts of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been told by men, with this memoir we can now experience these events from the perspective of a woman who was at the center of the seismic cultural changes of that time.

Alan Watts–Here and Now

Alan Watts–Here and Now
Author: Peter J. Columbus
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2012-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1438441991

Considers the contributions and contemporary significance of Alan Watts.

Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Substances

Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Substances
Author: J. Harold Ellens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 883
Release: 2014-10-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1440830886

Can drugs be used intelligently and responsibly to expand human consciousness and heighten spirituality? This two-volume work presents objective scientific information and personal stories aiming to answer the question. The first of its kind, this intriguing two-volume set objectively reports on and assesses this modern psycho-social movement in world culture: the constructive medical use of entheogens and related mind-altering substances. Covering the use of substances such as ayahuasca, cannabis, LSD, peyote, and psilocybin, the work seeks to illuminate the topic in a scholarly and scientific fashion so as to lift the typical division between those who are supporters of research and exploration of entheogens and those who are strongly opposed to any such experimentation altogether. The volumes address the history and use of mind-altering drugs in medical research and religious practice in the endeavor to expand and heighten spirituality and the sense of the divine, providing unbiased coverage of the relevant arguments and controversies regarding the subject matter. Chapters include examinations of how psychoactive agents are used to achieve altered states in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism as well as in the rituals of shamanism and other less widely known faiths. This highly readable work will appeal to everyone from high school students to seasoned professors, in both the secular world and in devoted church groups and religious colleges.

Heresy and Borders in the Twentieth Century

Heresy and Borders in the Twentieth Century
Author: Karina Jakubowicz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2021-03-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1000359166

This book explores the shifting and negotiated boundaries of religion, spirituality, and secular thinking in Britain and North America during the twentieth century. It contributes to a growing scholarship that problematises secularization theory, arguing that religion and spirituality increasingly took diverse new forms and identities, rather than simply being replaced by a monolithic secularity. The volume examines the way that thinkers, writers, and artists manipulated and reimagined orthodox belief systems in their work, using the notion of heresy to delineate the borders of what was considered socially and ethically acceptable. It includes topics such as psychospiritual approaches in medicine, countercultures and religious experience, and the function of blasphemy within supposedly secular politics. The book argues that heresy and heretical identities established fluid borderlands. These borderlands not only blur simple demarcations of the religious and secular in the twentieth century, but also infer new forms of heterodoxy through an exchange of ideas. This collection of essays offers a nuanced take on a topic that pervades the study of religion. It will be of great use to scholars of Heresy Studies, Religious Studies and Comparative Religion, Social Anthropology, History, Literature, Philosophy, and Cultural Studies.

Your Brain Is God

Your Brain Is God
Author: Timothy Leary
Publisher: Ronin Publishing
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2001-09-11
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1579510523

This collection of essays, written by the poster boy of 1960s counterculture, describes the psychological journey Timothy Leary made in the years following his dismissal from Harvard, as his psychedelic research moved from the scientific to the religious arena. He discusses the nature of religious experience and eight crafts of God, including God as hedonic artist. Leary also examines the Tibetan, Buddhist, and Taoist experiences. In the final chapters, he explores man as god and LSD as sacrament.

Evolutionary Agents

Evolutionary Agents
Author: Timothy Leary
Publisher: Ronin Publishing
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2009-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781579510435

An encore to Musings on Human Metamorphoses in which Leary delves deeper into his vision of "human future history." He likens human society to that of insect hives and shows how certain evolved evolutionary agents (mutants) are upsetting hive and causing it to evolve. Eventually we will become the aliens. The book describes the struggle between the forces moving into the future and those attempting to stop change. While most people associate Leary solely with LSD and debauchery, this fascinating discourse has little mention of drugs.