Semiotic Analysis of The Psychedelic Experience: a Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead from the Standpoint of Tibetan Buddhism

Intrigued by mind-changing substances and psychedelics, and willing to dig deeper, I came in touch with The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead a couple of years back. Time later, through a brief insight into Zen Buddhism I laid my eyes on the Eastern conception of voidness, and how it declined in the Japanese aesthetic of ma. I realized that, in its very core, the source of The Psychedelic Experience must have been, too, inspired by the inestimable doctrine of Mahāyāna, the great vehicle. Nontheistic traditions shook my beliefs completely, making me doubt my life-long atheism and inspiring me to take the next step, a linguistic one. Consulting The Psychedelic Experience for the umpteenth time, I started wondering about what English renderings such as ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’ stood for — throughout the work, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert seemed to be using one rather than the other depending on the context the word was employed. For example, death is always accompanied by the adjective ‘conscious’ rather than ‘aware’. Furthermore, whereas it is stated that the Tibetan model upon which the manual is based is ‘designed to direct and control awareness’ in order to realize ‘illumination’, ‘illumination’ is said to be ‘an ecstatic condition of consciousness’. In Sanskrit, and yet even more in Tibetan, each term — especially the specific vocabulary for the different states of cognition — is extremely precise and designates a clear segment of reality. Are English translations such as ‘consciousness’ and ‘awareness’ pointing to the same state of reality? The semantic scope of any English translation referring to different levels of mind is vague and should be contextualized. Therefore, to understand The Psychedelic Experience from a semiotic point of view it is indispensable to be familiar with Buddhist thought regarding death, the mind, and absolute reality.