The Joyous Cosmology

I borrowed The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts from my friend David yesterday. It sets off describing the problem of the perceived separation of mind from body, and you from the world, or, as he writes in his The Book (see here): “a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin”.

I don’t like the expression “politically correct”, but this book certainly isn’t politically correct today, since it explores the use of LSD, mescaline and psilocybin (a derivative of a mushroom) as short-cuts to breaking through the illusion of separateness and realizing the interdependence of all things, which is the “goal” of the practicing of Buddhism and Zen, among others. He writes:

Is it possible, then, that Western science could provide a medicine which would at least give the human organism a start in releasing itself from its chronic self-contradiction? The medicine might indeed have to be supported by other procedures – psychotherapy, “spiritual” disciplines, and basic changes in one’s pattern of life – but every diseased person seems to need some kind of initial lift to set him on the way to health. [...] Is there, in short, a medicine which can give us temporarily the sensation of being integrated, of being fully one with ourselves and nature as the biologist knows us, theoretically, to be? If so, the experience might offer clues to whatever else must be done to bring about full and continuous integration. It might be at least the tip of an Ariadne’s thread to lead us out of the maze in which all of us are lost from our infancy.

I didn’t know of this book but it will be very interesting to read. I wonder if he abandoned these thoughts later in his life (the book is written in 1962, eleven years before he died).