The Joyous Cosmology

Doctors, lawyers, and religious figures have faced the problem of so-called “mystical preparations”—substances, according to available information, that don’t cause obvious harm to the body but lead to changes in consciousness comparable to the most exalted aesthetic and religious experiences. In this book, one of the leading researchers in the field of psychology of religion provides an objective assessment of these preparations and also recounts his own personal experiments with them. The author’s vivid, poetic descriptions of his experiences contain valuable information about the changes occurring in human consciousness. These changes span a wide spectrum of experiences—from glimpses of an aesthetic vision of nature to a philosophical vision of existence in the world as a comedy that is at once infernal and divine. At the same time, the researcher comes to “not only a cosmology of unity, but also a cosmology of joy.” The book’s foreword is written by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, former staff members of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.