The Psychedelic Book of the Dead

Timothy Leary's 1964 manual 'The Psychedelic Experience' adapted the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the bardo—the intermediate realm after death—to guide and regulate psychedelic trips. Although Leary's appropriation was problematic, this essay argues that his use of these Tibetan materials creatively reframed the intense, phantasmagoric experiences common to strong psychedelics. Drawing on comparative religion and secular psychology, Leary constructed a model of psychological transformation that rejected religious or transcendental meaning while expanding the bardo concept already present in Tibetan Buddhism.

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Abstract

In 1964, Timothy Leary and a few colleagues published The Psychedelic Experience, a manual for “tripping” explicitly based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. At the core of the Tibetan materials lies the concept of the bardo, the “in between” realm of the afterlife. While acknowledging the problematic nature of Leary’s radical appropriation, this essay argues that his application of these materials to the orchestration and regulation of psychedelic experience reflected a productive reframing of the phantasmagoria common to strong psychedelic experience. Using tools of comparative religion and secular psychology, Leary constructed a model of psychological transformation that rejected religious or transcendental meaning while creatively expanding the bardo concept already evident in Tibetan Buddhism.