The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Wilson Watts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Seldom before have I read 30 pages of printed .pdf so tightly packed with meaning. A lot of it was profound, written in a time when psychedelic substances were a new unexplored area of the human experience. Research was being done on their medical and other properties (with Watts being sceptical about whether the proper environment for relative experimentation really was research laboratories and clinics). It was an innocent time, before the powers that be had really found out about what a gaping hole into their walls of modern vices their initial allowance of the use of LSD and mushrooms had blown.
“The active and the passive are two phases of the same act. A seed, floating in its white sunburst of down, drifts across the sky, sighing with the sound of a jet plane invisible above. I catch it by one hair between thumb and index finger, and am astonished to watch this little creature actually wriggling and pulling as if it were struggling to get away. Common sense tells me that it is the “intelligence” of the seed to have just such delicate antennae of silk that, in an environment of wind, it can move. Having such extensions, it moves itself with the wind. When it comes to it, is there any basic difference between putting up a sail and pulling an oar? If anything, the former is a more intelligent use of effort than the latter. True, the seed does not intend to move itself with the wind, but neither did I intendo to have arms and legs.”
Descriptions of powerful and deep insights only possible during a psychedelic trip are what the meat and potatoes of The Joyous Cosmology is. It’s a journey with the aid of these substances to planes of thought and existence impossible before to reach, far away from the egoistic mind and squarely in the consciousness behind the thinking mind. It’s a story of a temporarily selfless being experiencing the world.
It’s very hard to describe actually. I’m not at all sure if anything from this book stuck with me for good, but I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to, in the same way that powerful psychedelic trips are fleeting and strong cosmological realisations during them feel like dreams after the trip is over. Tim Leary warns in the foreword that this is a difficult book. Perhaps a couple of powerful entheogenic experiences are indeed the correct required “reading” for tackling it. The fact that the substances needed for having these experiences are almost ubiquitously illegal says much more about the laws, the lawmakers behind them and their intentions, than it does about the substances themselves.