The present moment in human history (as Lama Govinda points out) is critical. Now, for the first time, we possess the means of providing the enlightenment to any prepared volunteer. (The enlightenment always comes, we remember, in the form of a new energy process, a physical, neurological event.) For these reasons we have prepared this psychedelic version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The secret is released once again, in a new dialect, and we sit back quietly to observe whether man is ready to move ahead and to make use of the new tools provided by modern science.43
Leary and Alpert believed, at least in the early years of their work with LSD, that the experiences of the mystics and the yogins of the world’s religions were essentially the same, that they were insights into the fundamental and eternal truths of the universe, truths that are now being or will soon be confirmed by modern science, but were already known to the sages of the past. “Indeed, eastern philosophic theories dating back four thousand years adapt readily to the most recent discoveries of nuclear physics, biochemistry, genetics, and astronomy” (p. 20). Furthermore, those same experiences could be induced through the use of psychedelic drugs. In order to put the Tibetan text (or, more precisely, Evans-Wentz’s book) to such use, it was necessary for the authors to decontextualize it from its traditional use as a mortuary text. To effect this change, they, like Evans-Wentz before them when he found Theosophical doctrines there, resort to the trope of the esoteric meaning: “The concept of actual physical death was an exoteric facade adopted to fit the prejudices of the Bonist tradition in Tibet. Far from being an embalmers’ guide, the manual is a detailed account of how to lose the ego; how to break out of personality into new realms of consciousness; and how to avoid the involuntary limiting processes of the ego; how to make the consciousness-expansion experience endure in subsequent daily life” (p. 22).
The book is dedicated to Aldous Huxley and begins with tributes to Evans-Wentz, Jung, and Lama Govinda. It then moves through the three bardos set forth in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, providing its own gloss. Thus here the first bardo, the bardo of the time of death (’chi kha’i bar do), during which the mind of clear light dawns, is called the Period of Ego Loss or Non-Game Ecstasy. At this first stage of the psychedelic experience the voyager has the opportunity to see reality directly and thereby achieve liberation, with liberation defined as “the nervous system devoid of mental-conceptual activity,” and thus able to see the “silent unity of the Unformed” (p. 36). The authors then translate the Tibetan imagery into their own:
The Tibetan Buddhists suggest that the uncluttered intellect can experience what astrophysics confirms. The Buddha Vairochana, the Dhyani Buddha of the Center, Manifester of Phenomena, is the highest path to enlightenment. As the source of all organic life, in him all things visible and invisible have their consummation and absorption. He is associated with the Central Realm of the Densely-Packed, i.e., the seed of all universal forces and things are densely packed together. This remarkable convergence of modern astrophysics and ancient lamaism demands no complicated explanation. The cosmological awareness—and awareness of every other natural process—is there in the cortex. You can confirm this preconceptual mystical knowledge by empirical observation and measurement, but it’s all there inside your skull. Your neurons “know” because they are linked directly to the process, are part of it. (P. 36)
The second bardo, in which visions of peaceful and wrathful deities occur (chos nyid bar do), is called the Period of Hallucinations. The authors again translate the Tibetan deities that appear during this stage into their own vocabulary, renaming the visions of the sixth day, for example, the Retinal Circus. During this stage the voyager is told not to become attracted or repulsed by the visions that occur, that he or she should sit quietly, “controlling his expanded awareness like a phantasmagoric multi-dimensional television set” (p. 47). Indeed, television (and to a lesser extent robots) provides the dominant metaphor for the author’s gloss of the experience of the bardo.
The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light.
The terror comes with the discovery of transience. Nothing is fixed, no form solid. Everything you can experience is “nothing but” electrical waves. You feel ultimately tricked. A victim of the great television producer. Distrust. The people around you are lifeless television robots. The world around you is a facade, a stage set. You are a helpless marionette, a plastic doll in a plastic world. (P. 66)
Consistent with their reading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead as an esoteric guide to the use of psychedelic drugs, Leary, Metzner, and Alpert see the third and final of the three bardos not as an explanation of the process by which the spirit of a dead person is reborn in one of the six realms of samsara (as a god, demigod, human, animal, ghost, or denizen of hell), but rather as an instruction on how to “come down” when the effects of the drug begin to fade. The third bardo is thus called the Period of Re-Entry. “In the original Bardo Thodol the aim of the teachings is ‘liberation,’ i.e., release from the cycle of birth and death. Interpreted esoterically, this means that the aim is to remain at the stage of perfect illumination and not to return to social game reality” (p. 77). All but the most advanced, however, must return to one of six “game worlds.” Thus, like Evans-Wentz, the authors of The Psychedelic Experience offer their own version of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth:
The Tibetan manual conceives of the voyager as returning eventually to one of six worlds of game existence (sangsara). That is, the re-entry to the ego can take place on one of six levels, or as one of six personality types. Two of these are higher than the normal human, three are lower. The highest, most illuminated, level is that of the devas, who are what Westerners would call saints, sages or divine teachers. They are the most enlightened people walking the earth. Gautama Buddha, Lao Tse, Christ. The second level is that of the asuras, who may be called titans or heroes, people with a more than human degree of power and vision. The third level is that of most normal human beings, struggling through game-networks, occasionally breaking free. The fourth level is that of primitive and animalistic incarnations. In this category we have the dog and the cock, symbolic of hyper-sexuality concomitant with jealousy; the pig, symbolizing lustful stupidity and uncleanliness; the industrious, hoarding ant; the insect or worm signifying an earthy or grovelling disposition; the snake, flashing in anger; the ape, full of rampaging primitive power; the snarling “wolf of the steppes;” the bird, soaring freely. Many more could be enumerated. In all cultures of the world people have adopted identities in the image of animals. In childhood and in dreams it is a process familiar to all. The fifth level is that of neurotics, frustrated lifeless spirits forever pursuing unsatisfied desires; the sixth and lowest level is hell or psychosis. Less than one percent of ego-transcendent experiences end in sainthood or psychosis. Most persons return to the normal human level. (P. 83)
This reading is at wild variance with the way in which the doctrine of rebirth is understood in Tibet, or any other Buddhist culture. The Buddha appeared in the form of a human, not as a god, and was superior to a god because, unlike them, he was free from future rebirth. Like Evans-Wentz, Leary, Metzner, and Alpert are also committed to the view that the human level is the most common abode, whereas in Tibet there is a well-known saying that the number of beings born in the unfortunate realms of animals, ghosts, and the hells is like the number of stars visible on a clear night, while the number of beings born as gods, demigods, and humans is like the number of stars seen on a clear day. This insistence on rejecting a literal interpretation of rebirth in favor of psychologizing the six realms would persist in future incarnations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The next section
of the book, “Some Technical Comments about Psychedelic Sessions,” includes detailed instructions on the amount of time to be cleared on one’s calendar; the setting, including the choice of lighting, music, furnishings, art work, and food (preferably “ancient foods like bread, cheese, wine, and fresh fruit”); the number of people who should make the voyage together, including their personality traits; the qualifications for the guide, the person (or ideally two people, one high, the other straight) who will serve as air traffic controller; and, of course, the dosage. “The dosage to be taken depends, of course, on the goal of the session. Two figures are therefore given. The first quantity indicates a dosage which should be sufficient for an inexperienced person to enter the transcendental worlds described in this manual. The second quantity gives a smaller dosage figure, which may be used by more experienced persons or by participants in a group session” (p. 101). Voyagers are instructed to study the book closely before embarking, even tape-recording portions to be played back at appropriate points during the voyage.
Yet the authors close with an instruction regarding “religious expectations”: “Again, the subject in early sessions is best advised to float with the stream, stay ‘up’ as long as possible, and postpone theological interpretations until the end of the session, or to later sessions” (p. 104). What the authors fail to acknowledge, however, is that their apparently clinical reading of the psychedelic experience is itself a richly theological interpretation, a theology founded, like that of Evans-Wentz, on the conviction that there is an ancient brotherhood of mystics who, throughout history and across cultures, have shared in an experience of gnosis. What Leary, Metzner, and Alpert add to Evans-Wentz is the conviction that the harmony between science and religion that Evans-Wentz could only prophesy had now become true, and was accessible to all through the use of LSD. They assume that there is a deep structure in human consciousness that has remained the same across time and space. This remains a topic of debate among anthropologists, who would ask us to consider to what extent even the idea of “consciousness” is translatable cross-culturally. Leary, Metzner, and Alpert assume further that the states of consciousness described in Buddhist texts are records of meditative experience. Here scholars of Buddhism would ask to what extent one might regard the baroque pure lands described in the Mahayana sutras as the records of a vision experienced in meditation. Should they be taken instead as literary descriptions, not unlike the paradise described by Dante?
But the fundamental assumption that supports the view that there is a structural similarity between the results of Buddhist meditation and those of drug use is that Buddhism is compatible with science, that the Buddha knew long ago what scientists are only now beginning to discover, that Buddhist meditators gained access to the deepest levels of consciousness long before scientists invented chemical agents that demonstrated the existence of such states. What is it about Buddhism that would make us draw such conclusions? When we read the claims of Hindu fundamentalists that locomotives and rocket travel are described in the Vedas or that the beam of light emitted from Śiva’s brow is really a laser, we smile indulgently. But when we read Buddhist descriptions (products of the same time and the same culture that produced the Vedas and Śiva), descriptions, for example, of a universe that moves through periods of cosmic evolution and devolution, we assume that this is simply something that physicists have not yet discovered. This assumption would reappear in future incarnations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The second English translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead was published in 1975 by Shambhala Publications as part of its Clear Light Series, dedicated to Evans-Wentz. The translators were Francesca Fremantle and Chögyam Trungpa, a prominent incarnate lama of the Kagyu sect who gained a large following in the United States beginning in the early 1970s.44 Unlike previous and subsequent translations, the translators’ and editors’ commentaries did not equal or surpass in length the actual translation of the Tibetan text. Trungpa provides a relatively brief, twenty-nine-page commentary devoted largely to how to recognize while living the visions (which he calls “projections”) described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, with much emphasis on overcoming duality. It is a highly psychologized reading, with much talk of neurosis, paranoia, and unconscious tendencies. Fremantle explains, in terms reminiscent of Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, that “It is noticeable that several of the words which best express the teachings of Buddhism are part of the language of contemporary psychology, for the attitudes of certain schools of Western psychology often come closer to Buddhism than do those of Western philosophy or religion. . . . Concepts such as conditioning, neurotic patterns of thought, and unconscious influences, seem more appropriate in this book than conventional religious terms.”45
Their decision to psychologize the text is evident throughout. For example, in Tibetan texts on the dying process, one of the early stages described is that in which the physical elements of earth, water, fire, and wind dissolve in succession, one into the other. An eighteenth-century Tibetan text states, “when the power of the wind that serves as the basis of the physical earth constituent declines, and it dissolves into the water constituent, the external sign is that the strength of the body is lost, that is, one says, ‘I am being pulled down,’ thinking that one is sinking into the earth. Similarly, when the water constituent dissolves into the fire constituent, the external sign is that the moisture of the mouth and nose dry up and the lips become puckered. When the fire constituent dissolves into the wind constituent, the external sign is that warmth of the body gathers from the extremities at the heart and one’s luster deteriorates. The external sign of the wind constituent dissolving into consciousness is a gasping for breath and one makes a wheezing sound from [the breath] collecting unevenly within.”46 Leary, Metzner, and Alpert took the instructions on the bardo out of their traditional context of death and made them into a description of hallucinations. In discussing these stages of the dissolution of the elements, Trungpa also moves the discussion away from the experience of death, explaining that these dissolutions happen every day:
Such experiences happen constantly. . . . First the tangible quality of physical, living logic becomes vague; in other words, you lose physical contact. Then you automatically take refuge in a more functional situation, which is the water element; you reassure yourself that your mind is still functioning. In the next stage, the mind is not quite sure whether it is functioning properly or not, something begins to cease operating in its circulation. The only way to relate is through emotions, you try to think of someone you love or hate, something very vivid, because the watery quality of the circulation does not work any more, so the fiery temperature of love and hate becomes more important. Even that gradually dissolves into air, and there is a faint experience of openness, so that there is a tendency to lose your grip on concentrating on love or trying to remember the person you love. The whole thing seems to be hollow inside.47
It is not surprising, then, to see that Trungpa reads the six realms of rebirth as “different types of instinct,” and that each of the traditional descriptions of the abodes of rebirth are “a psychological portrait of oneself.” The cold hells are thus “the aggression which refuses to communicate at all.”48 We learn that (contrary to the experience of many pet owners) “the animal realm is characterised by the absence of sense of humour.”49
In 1992 a second best-selling book of the dead was published, this time by Sogyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama living in England. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is described on the dust jacket as “a spiritual masterpiece” that “brings together the ancient wisdom of Tibet with modern research on death and dying and the nature of the universe.” Sogyal intends the book as “the quintessence of the heart advice of all my masters, to be a new Tibetan Book of the Dead and a Tibetan Book of Life.”50 To date, the book has sold over three hundred thousand copies. Part of its appeal is certainly its approachable style, so different from translations of Tibetan texts or transcriptions of tea
chings by contemporary lamas.51 The work is filled with Sogyal Rinpoche’s reminiscences about great masters he knew in Tibet and how they died, but there are many such stories available in the current popular literature on Tibetan Buddhism. The book contains classic Buddhist teachings illustrated by classic stories, also available elsewhere. But there is much here from genres of literature not included in the standard lineage of teaching. There are approving citations from the works of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on “death and dying,” Ian Stevenson on “cases suggestive of reincarnation,” and Raymond Moody on the “near-death” experience. The Brazilian Minister on the Environment is quoted on the threat to the environment posed by modern industrial society. Accounts of the deaths of ordinary people are interwoven with scenes of the passing of great masters, illustrated by quotations from Milarepa, Padmasambhava, and the current Dalai Lama. But Sogyal’s points are also supported by citations from other masters. There are quotations from Montaigne, Blake, Rilke, Henry Ford, Voltaire, Origen, Shelley, Mozart, Balzac, Einstein, Rumi, Wordsworth, and the Venerable Bede, which together create a cosmopolitan eclecticism around Sogyal’s message, as if what the book conveys is not a Tibetan Buddhist tradition but a universal message, a perennial philosophy, that has always been known to those who know, a secret brotherhood not unlike Madame Blavatsky’s Mahatmas. Indeed, the vast popularity of Evans-Wentz’s and Sogyal’s versions may derive from the way they homogenize the Tibetan text into an ahistorical and universal wisdom. (The Tibetan text is so thoroughly appropriated in Sogyal’s work that its translation need not be included.)
Sogyal Rinpoche has said that Tibet is lost, that all that remains is its wisdom.52 He places that wisdom in a global and ahistorical spiritual lineage of thinkers that no other Tibetan author has ever cited. Referring to a revered contemporary Tibetan lama, Sogyal writes, “Whenever I think of him, I always say to myself, ‘This is what St. Francis of Assisi must have been like’” (p. 109).53 This is the kind of statement that makes the reader suspect the presence of a ghost writer, and Sogyal acknowledges the assistance of Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey, who perhaps collaborated with him as Evans-Wentz did with Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup. In this case, however, the author named on the spine of the book is the Tibetan, not the Westerner. Harvey is a best-selling author on the spiritual, a term that by the beginning of this decade meant something different than it had in Madame Blavatsky’s day. “Spiritual” no longer refers to contact and communication with the spirits of the dead. Instead it evokes an ethos beyond the confines of the merely religious, pointing back to that which was the original life blood of religious traditions but was ultimately free from them, confined as they were by institution and by history. The spiritual was instead at once both universal and personal, accessible not only through the experiences of the mystics of the great “world religions” but also, perhaps in a more pristine form, through Asian traditions or through shamanism, nature worship, or the cult of the goddess, what was once regarded as primitive.
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