The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness [Paperback]

A classic account of the psychedelic experience

The Joyous Cosmologyis Alan Watts’s exploration of the insight that the consciousness-changing drugs LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin can facilitate “when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding.” More than an artifact, it is both a riveting memoir of Watts’s personal experiments and a profound meditation on our perennial questions about the nature of existence and the existence of the sacred.

Includes Watts’s article “Psychedelics and Religious Experience”

Spiritual philosopherAlan Watts, student of Buddhism, Anglican minister, chaplain at Northwestern University, and author of more than twenty books, died in 1973.

“Alan Watts describes with startling clarity and poetic beauty his drug-induced experiences.”
—Contemporary Psychology

“The Joyous Cosmologyis a carrier wave of information and insight, which has lost none of its subtlety, suppleness, or zest.”
— from the new introduction byDaniel Pinchbeck, author ofBreaking Open the Head

“A stirring introduction to one of mankind’s newest self-examinations.”
—Newsweek