When Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD, Experiencing “the Most Serene, the Most Beautiful Death” (1963) [Video]

The “spir­i­tu­al adepts” of Tibet’s mod­ern peri­od, writes Hus­ton Smith in his com­pre­hen­sive intro­duc­tion to the Bar­do Thodol, or “The Tibetan Book of the Dead”, “were inner-world adven­tur­ers of the high­est dar­ing, the Tibetan equiv­a­lent of our astronauts—I think it is worth coin­ing the term ‘psy­cho­naut’ to describe them. They per­son­al­ly voy­aged to the fur­thest fron­tiers of that uni­verse which their soci­ety deemed vital to explore: the inner fron­tiers of con­scious­ness itself, in all its trans­for­ma­tions in life and beyond death.”

West­ern modernity—its ener­gies focused entire­ly on shap­ing, sub­du­ing, and expro­pri­at­ing the mate­r­i­al world—did not begin to take such com­plex inner jour­neys seri­ous­ly until the 20th cen­tu­ry. When it did, it did so large­ly through the pop­u­lar influ­ence of pio­neers like Aldous Hux­ley and Tim­o­thy Leary, who intro­duced the inner jour­ney through a syn­cretism of East­ern spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, Indige­nous reli­gious prac­tices, and psy­chotrop­ic drug use—something of an accel­er­at­ed course to the fron­tiers of con­scious­ness for those who had failed …