Psychedelic Mysticism by Shipley Morgan;

Author:Shipley, Morgan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 4

“Trust your Divinity, Trust your Brain, Trust your Companions”

Psychedelic Manuals, Entheogens, and the Flowering of a Perennial Religion

All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again.

—Sir Thomas Browne, “The Garden of Cyrus”

In the introductory foreword to the first-ever (1927) English translation of the Bardo Thödol (what editor W.Y. Evans-Wentz translates to mean The Tibetan Book of the Dead), Lāma Anagarika Govinda—a Western convert to Buddhism who helped expose the West to Tibetan Buddhism and meditative practices—stresses the symbolic and metaphoric inner meaning of the text, how the text “is far more . . . [than] religious speculation about death and a hypothetical after-death state . . . it is a key to the innermost recesses of the human mind, and a guide for initiates, and for those who are seeking the spiritual path of liberation.”1 Even the popularized name, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, reflects the ineffable states described within the text itself—its misnomer, being a “book of the dead,” obscures how the Bardo Thödol operates for the living, for the intermediate planes between life, death, and rebirth.2 In this way, by interrogating the bardos—between states of consciousness—the Bardo Thödol guides access to “the unrestricted treasury of subconscious memory, wherein are stored the records not only of our past lives but the records of the past of our race, the past of humanity, and of all pre-human forms of life,” as Govinda stresses.3 Based on his belief in a recurring cycle that connects the “past,” the “pre-human,” and universal “consciousness” within the immediate present, Govinda identifies a foundational perennialism at the heart of Buddhism’s understanding of life and death.

The literal translation of the Bardo Thödol bears this out. More than a name which parallels another ancient funerary text, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol—from the Tibetan bardo (the “between-state”) and thödol (liberation)—commonly translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State or, more simply, Liberation Through Hearing.4 Yet even this etymology fails to account for the full nuances of the Tibetan title Bardo thos grol chen mo. According to Robert Thurman, “in the actual Tibetan title, Bardo thos grol, bardo simply means the ‘between-state’ . . . the words thos grol mean that this book’s teaching ‘liberates’ just by being ‘learned’ or ‘understood,’ giving the person facing the between an understanding so naturally clear and deep that it does not require prolonged reflection or contemplation.”5 Because of this, Thurman prefers “the most common Tibetan title of the work . . . The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between.”6 Liberation, hearing, understanding, “between-state”—when read this way, the text operates from within states of consciousness unburdened, that is, “limitless” experiences characterized primarily, much like the psychedelic experience according to Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, by “the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego and identity.”7

Yet as the very structure of the Bardo Thödol suggests, such liberation neither comes spontaneously nor immediately, but emerges by following the instructions outlined in the text.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.