Ralph Metzner (1936–2019)

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.… (altro)

This was a very tiresome and boring read.

Starting with the Confessions of an opium eater by De Quincey, first published in 1821, a small group of writers has kept coming back to exploring and writing about drugs, with names often mentioned randing from Baudelaire, Aldous Huxley in The doors of perception and Heaven and Hell, and William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg in The Yage Letters. The debate about drugs seems to have run a course from innocense in De Quincy to curiosity and exploration in Huxley and guilt in the writers of the 1960s. As drug use, particularly opium, came to be seen as a bad thing, the spreading illicit use of hard drugs such as cocaine and heroine soon became stigmatized and criminalized. The use of these drugs by William Burroughs and described e.g. in Junky led in the process of criminalization and shame about its use.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the three authors of The psychedelic experience, like Burroughs all style themselves as PhDs. It seems the Penguin Modern Classics series often does not seem to select potential classics, but is more focused on selecting works that defined the period, and in that sense inclusion of this work seems fully justified.

The psychedelic experience consists of five parts, an introduction by Daniel Pinchbeck to the book, and a "general introduction" which is part of the book. This is followed by "Tibetan Book of the Dead" and a manual with instructions for a psychedelic session. This is all very technical stuff and it is hard to imagine who would read it with the purpose of being instructed. Otherwise it is just totally boring stuff.

For the purpose of my general interest, I was delighted with Daniel Pinchbeck's 2007 introduction, while the reading of The psychedelic experience is no more than hitting another tick box.… (altro)

Opening to Inner Light draws on the writings of Eastern and Western mysticism, comparative mythology, literature and poetry, and those of philosophers and teachers in the esotrtic, shamanic, yogic and hermetic traditions. It incorporates the formulations of modern depth psychotherapy, anthropology and transpersonal psychology.Rich in scholarship, symbolic imagery and the personal experience of the author's colleagues, clients and students, as well as related published accounts, Opening to Inner Light is a book for all those who have undergone any deep personal change, from a born again religious cenversion to the extended expanded consciousness of spiritual illumination.… (altro)