Joyous Cosmology

In describing the effects of mescaline, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception opened a proverbial door for a generation of seekers. Watts walked through it with this classic account of the levels of insight that consciousness-changing drugs can facilitate &quote;when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding.&quote; Watts and peers including foreword authors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (then Harvard professors) anticipated physicists' recognizing the individual's &quote;inseparability from the rest of the world,&quote; the work of New Age thinkers who combine scientific findings and spiritual experiences, and federally funded clinical trials utilizing psilocybin to treat a variety of conditions. More than an artifact, The Joyous Cosmology is both a riveting memoir of Watts's personal experiments and a profound meditation on our perennial questions about the nature of existence and the existence of the sacred.