The Canon / Pillars / Psychedelics & Shamanism
Pillars · 1964
The Psychedelic Experience
Psychedelics & Cyber-ShamanismThe Psychedelic Experience, adapted by Timothy Leary and his collaborators from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is offered as a guidebook for the psychedelic session, holding that the content of the experience is governed by "set and setting"—the user's mindset and surrounding environment.
The book maps the trip onto the stages of the bardo, providing readings and a structure intended to steer the journey toward ego transcendence rather than fear. Around it stands Leary's larger thesis of the programmable mind: that beliefs operate as reality tunnels, selective constructions that can be rewritten, so that consciousness is something one engineers rather than merely inherits.
This metaphor of mind as reprogrammable software became the work's most enduring legacy, feeding Robert Anton Wilson's popularizations, the later fusion of psychedelics and computing, and the contemporary claim that altering one's internal program alters experienced reality.
In its words
Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting.
Practices it teaches
Set and Setting — Deliberately Designing Mindset and Environment for an Inner Experience
"Set and setting" is the principle — coined and popularised by Timothy Leary and colleagues — that the outcome of a powerful inner experience is governed less by the trigger itself than by two things the person…
Lineage
The author
Timothy LearySet, setting & reality tunnels
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