[castaneda]

Originally Posted by MelT

I hate to be the voice of reason. Leary knows much about psychedelics and bugger all about the Tibetan tradition or its experiences. He only touches on a little of it in the initial post here, but a lot of what he says is wrong if its supposedly based on a general buddhist (or even much of Hindu) practice or thought. That isn't to say that whatever experiences he's talking about aren't real and something else, but as someone who follows one of the Tibetan traditions, what he's talking about aren't real experiences of transcendence in the esoteric sense. We can certainly hold up some Tibetan writings and say that there are comparisons, as he used our ideas as source material here and there - but as an outsider he's missed the point of much of it and has misinterpreted much more.

I don't want to nitpick and take the posting apart, it would have to be a very long and involved posting to describe fully what he's saying that's wrong. Long story short: Some LSD experiences have, without doubt, apects of transcendence, but only some. There may well be an 'inner' and 'outer' experience with LSD and others, but if it is either outer or innner, then that experience is not transcendence and it's not anything to do with Tibetan Buddhism.

I know it must seem an arrogant thing to claim more knowledge than Leary on anything, but this is my pet subject and I've given over much of my life to the study and practice of it. I've got nothing to gain from shooting him down, I only hope to warm people not to assume he knows everything on the subject. Tibetan anything it ain't...


MelT

My feelings on the Leary crowd, from what little I know about them - is that they were generally very wacked out, far out people that amazingly affected positive social change.

Killing the Buddha