"Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Alan)

There are many who believe that we stand at an important turning point
in man's power to control and expand his awareness. Our research
provides tentative grounds for such optimism. The Joyous Cosmology is
solid testimony for the same happy expectations.

Timothy Leary, Ph.D.---Richard Alpert, Ph.D.

Harvard University, January, 1962
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Preface

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In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley has given us a superbly
written account of the effects of mescaline upon a highly sensitive
person. It was a record of his first experience of this remarkable
transformation of consciousness, and by now, through subsequent
experiments, he knows that it can lead to far deeper insights than his
book described. While I cannot hope to surpass Aldous Huxley as a
master of English prose, I feel that the time is ripe for an account of
some of the deeper, or higher, levels of insight that can be reached
through these consciousness-changing "drugs" when accompanied with
sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of
kicks, but of understanding. I should perhaps add that, for me,
philosophical reflection is barren when divorced from poetic
imagination, for we proceed to understanding of the world upon two
legs, not one.

It is now a commonplace that there is a serious lack of communication
between scientists and laymen on the theoretical level, for the layman
does not understand the mathematical language in which the scientist
thinks. For example, the concept of curved space cannot be represented
in any image that is intelligible to the senses. But I am still more
concerned with the gap between theoretical description and direct
experience among scientists themselves. Western science is now
delineating a new concept of man, not as a solitary ego within a wall
of flesh, but as an organism which is what it is by virtue of its
inseparability from the rest of the world. But with the rarest
exceptions even scientists do not feel themselves to exist in this way.
They, and almost all of us, retain a sense of personality which is
independent, isolated, insular, and estranged from the cosmos that
surrounds it. Somehow this gap must be closed, and among the varied
means whereby the closure may be initiated or achieved are medicines
which science itself has discovered, and which may prove to be the