Timothy Leary (1920–1996)

Timothy Leary's primer on how (and why) to hold a successful LSD session towards the goal of mind expansion and self-exploration. I was personally more interested in the theory than the application, but it is educational to see the level of preparation and seriousness with which these "trips" were meant to be conducted. People tend to forget that the LSD mind-expansion movement may have been attributed to the hippie movement, but it originated and expanded due to involvement by actual scientists and psychologists.

With the recent polarized controversies over "pronouns" (currently 2023), it is also interesting to see the literary attempts at non-binary association in books from half a century ago, as Leary repeatedly uses terms such as 'hir' and 's/he' to denote individuals in a non-gender imprinted fashion. It seems like if you pay attention to history, we're still fighting the same fights over and over again.

stop the cycle. Grow with the Flow.… (mere)

This book is an invaluable resource of information about the psychedelic experience for anyone who wants to try to understand a little bit more about it without trying illegal or legal drugs. The author does a great job of explaining that the psychedelic experience is more of a religious experience than plain drug experience.
It's an irrefutable fact that every one of the world's major religions and wisdom traditions had a psychedelic drug ritual attached to them, even Christianity has halos based on mushroom caps and art containing mushrooms everywhere. Timothy Leary went so deep with studying various ancient wisdom traditions to understand or explain or better navigate the psychedelic experience and this book does that 'beautifully.' The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Buddhism as a whole go brilliantly hand in hand with psychedelics, as if they were made for each other, but the inexperienced would need a little guidance to link some of the concepts with one to the concepts of the other, and that's what this book seeks to do. It is a bit deep for younger readers, but it gets the ideas across.… (mere)