The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

Alan W. Watts – 1962

“When you get the message, hang up the phone.”  So wrote Alan Watts famously in this book to stress the importance of utilizing a tool and then setting it aside to reflect on what was gleaned rather than turning it into permanently affixed blinders.  Watts was keen on advocating the use of psychedelics to augment a sober and committed project of introspection based on his many years of study of Eastern mysticism that he attempted to adapt for the Western mind.  He was sometimes criticized as a popularizer, but I consider Watts in the same category as people like Carl Sagan or Margaret Mead; educators who recognized their gift for communication and reached out to a larger audience that might otherwise be put off by more arcane texts.  In the polemical prologue, Watts eloquently lays out the reasons why the mainstream demonization of psychedelics has been based on irrational and inaccurate assumptions.  The main body of the book describes his first-hand reactions to uses of mescaline, acid and psilocybin; always clearly stressing that psychedelic vision is “supernormal,” not hallucinatory.  To augment this, the book is complimented with many extreme-close-up photographs of natural things like leaves, rocks and microscopic cells.  I noticed that Watts' ultimate conclusion is quite similar to Norman O. Brown's; namely, that the missing element from modern, rational man's life, the thing that would make him whole, is a heightened sense of what can only be called 'play,' except in a form that rises above the frivolous to take on spiritual dimensions.  What I found striking about Watt’s writing is his zeal to connect Zen with LSD as a new kind of mysticism accessible to modern man.  As much as he wishes that such inter-psyche explorations would lead to greater understanding of a “cosmic consciousness,” inner peace, and artistic, scientific or philosophical achievement, he also laments that psychedelics may just as easily end up used exactly as alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and marijuana are; the loafer’s cheap sedative or stimulant and a lazy justification to ignore rather than solve worldly challenges.  Unfortunately, his fears rather than hopes seem to have come to pass; for where is the latter-day intellectual as respected and articulate as Watts to advocate psychedelics in our time?

Excerpt:  “...We are beginning to evolve a new image of man, not as a spirit imprisoned in incompatible flesh, but as an organism inseparable from his social and natural environment.  This is certainly the view of man disclosed by these remarkable medicines which temporarily dissolve our defenses and permit us to see what separative consciousness normally ignores – the world as an interrelated whole.  This vision is assuredly far beyond any drug-induced hallucination or superstitious fantasy.  It wears a striking resemblance to the unfamiliar universe that physicists and biologists are trying to describe here and now.  For the clear direction of their thought is toward the revelation of a unified cosmology, no longer sundered by the ancient irreconcilables of mind and matter, substance and attribute, thing and event, agent and act, stuff and energy.  And if this should come to be a universe in which man is neither thought nor felt to be a lonely subject confronted by alien and threatening objects, we shall have a cosmology not only unified but also joyous.”