The psychedelic experience releases an enormous amount of awareness-of-energy and helps us tune-in to patterns of neurological signals which are usually censored from mental life.
Understanding, describing, and intelligently using these released energies have puzzled scholars for thousands of years. Today, LSD sessions puzzle, enrapture, awe, and confuse. Mainly, they confuse. During the last five years (1960-65) we have witnessed a psychedelic revolution. It is estimated that well over a hundred thousand Americans have taken the timeless voyage through their nervous systems using LSD. They have had the veil of symbolic illusion lifted for a few hours. And what is the net effect? A chaos of potentiality. A confusion of promise. Most of these psychedelic voyagers are now aware of the limit-less realities stored in the nervous systems, but there is no conception of the meaning and use of these potentials.There are of course no simple solutions, no easy answers provided by LSD. On the contrary, every paradox, every ambiguity, every problem of static-symbolic life is intensified, raised to exponential powers. Where there once was a blind-robot symbolic uncertainty, there is now an uncertainty compounded and multiplied by knowledge of the illusory nature of routine reality and the existence of countless realities.
A note for the modern reader: While The Castalia Foundation broadly agrees with Tim Leary's perspective here, there are many methods which the modern self-explorer can use to extract clearer meanings from a psychedelic session. The most effective of these is to make audio recordings; write; or draw during a session. In the days following a session, these recorded-materials can be used to make sense of the experience. Indeed, Leary himself once summarized this approach in his public talks with the following advice to the LSD voyager: "Take notes!".
From their earliest explorations into consciousness, both The Castalia Foundation and the IFIF (International Federation for Internal Freedom) have held two facts to be apparent. First, that there were no extant maps, models, myths, theories, languages to describe the psychedelic experience. Second, that the temptation to impose old models and premature theories must be resisted.
No current philosophic or scientific theory was broad enough to handle the potential of the thirteen-billion-cell computer. Our decision, then, was to maintain an open posture, to collect data on psychedelic sessions from a wide variety of subjects, in a wide variety of settings, and to continue to look for better models and theories to explain the psychedelic experience. It became apparent that, in order to run exploratory sessions, manuals and programs were necessary to guide subjects through transcendental experiences with a minimum of fear and confusion. Rather than start de novo using our own minds and limited experiences to map out the voyage, we turned to the only available psychological texts which dealt with consciousness and its alterations: the ancient books of the East.Each of the five prayers which follow has been selected from one of these five sections: Preparation; Pure energy flow; Seed energy; Cakra energy; and Re-imprinting.
The Tao manual, like all other psychedelic texts, must be studied intensively. The detailed theory of energy transformations must be thoroughly learned. The commentary notes for those sutras selected for the session must re-read several times. Psychedelic poetry, like all psychedelic art, is crucially concerned with flow. Each psychedelic poem is carefully tailored for a certain time in the sequence of the session. Simplicity and diamond purity are important. Intellectual flourishes and verbal pyrotechnics are painfully obvious to the turned on nervous system. Psychedelic poetry should be read aloud (or pre-recorded for playback during a session) at a slow tempo, in a low natural voice. The prayers are best read or audio-recorded by one who is high at the time. Any tension, artificiality, or game-playing on the part of the reader tends to stand out in embarrassing relief during the psychedelic session itself. Read by the static-intellect (one imprinted to symbols and inundated by the verbosity of our culture), these sutras are simply another sequence of lifeless words. But to the consciousness released from imprinted-statics these prayers can become precise bursts of trembling energy and breathless meaning. You will wonder, perhaps, at the use of the term 'prayer' to label these sutras. Prayer is ecstatic poetry. Prayer is psychedelic communication. Ordinary, static communication in terms of prose symbols, is game; mind addressing mind. You cannot describe the ecstatic moment in static terms. You cannot — without regret — communicate during the ecstatic moment in static prose. You cannot produce ecstasy with static symbol sequences. When you are in a psychedelic state (out beyond symbols), game communication seems pointless; irrelevant; inappropriate; inadequate. There is no need to communicate in a psychedelic state, because everything is already in communication. You are plugged into the multiplex network of energy exchanges. But there are those transition moments of terror; of isolation; of reverence; of gratitude. There are moments when there comes that need to communicate. There can arise a need to communicate with the non-game energy source that you sense in yourself and around you. And there is the need, at exactly that moment, for a language which is not mental, cliché. A straight, pure, 'right' non-game language. This is prayer. Mantra. Ejaculation. There are moments in every psychedelic session when there comes that need to communicate at the highest and best level you are capable of. This need has been known and sensed for thousands of years. All prayers are originally psychedelic communications with higher, freer energies. They are a process of tuning yourself into the billion-year-old energy dance. Conventional prayers, for the most part, have degenerated into game rituals; slogans; meaningless verbalization; appeals for game help. However, when that crucial non-game terror-reverence awe-full moment comes, it is at these moments when the ecstatic-cry is called for. At that time, you must be ready to pray. You must be ready to go beyond yourself; to contact energy beyond your game. At that time you must be ready to pray. When you have lost the need to pray, you are dead.The following psychedelic sutra was adapted from Tao Sutra number seventeen. This sutra can be read aloud before a psychedelic session so that both the guide (if there is a guide) and the voyagers are explicitly aware of the guiding contract. Modern readers are urged to note that this sutra specifically states that a guide who requires payment for their services is the 'worst' type of guide. This, obviously, makes the concept of a psychedelic 'therapist' a ridiculous notion.
If you are paying to be guided, your have found yourself a quack for a guide. Accepting this, given our cultural preoccupation with 'therapy', and reverence for 'therapists' may be hard for some readers to accept.
The Castalia Foundation cautions against the use of guides per-se in a modern psychedelic session. Our culture is currently so bereft of suitable psychedelic guides, that it is often better to avoid guides entirely. The modern 'scene' is currently so polluted with corporate-thieves, dollar-chasing 'scientists' and bad-shaman, that it is better, first, to use lower doses of LSD, and explore your nervous-system alone.
The Castalia Foudation suggests that you pre-record any sutras you would like to listen to during your session. Additionally, we offer you three different books on the topic of solo self-healing, which you can read for free here.
The Session Guide Sutra
In the greatest sessions
One does not know that
there is a guide
In the next best sessions
One praises the guide
In the good session
One admires the guide
It is worse when
One fears the guide
The worst is that
One pays him
If the guide lacks trust
in the people
Then
The trust of the people
will be lacking
The wise guide guards his words
The wise guide sits serenely
When the greatest session is over
The people will say:
"It all happened naturally"
— OR —
"It was so simple, we did it all ourselves"
The next psychedelic sutra was adapted from Tao Sutra number one. This sutra can be read at a very slow, measured, hushed tempo, in the first hour of the psychedelic session.
The First Hour Sutra
That Which Is Called the Tao Is Not the Tao
The flow of energy..........
Here..........
It..........
Is..........
Nameless..........
Timeless..........
Speed of light..........
Float beyond fear..........
Float beyond desire..........
Into this Mystery of Mysteries
Through this Gate of All Wonder
The next psychedelic sutra was adapted from Tao Sutra 21. This sutra can be read between the first and the fifth hours of the LSD session.
First to Fifth Hour Sutra
Lao Tse’s Mind Becomes Preoccupied
With a Very Difficult Subject:
To describe the Production of
Material Forms by the Tao
Is it a dream?
Shadowy?
Elusive?
Invisible?
All things
All images
Move slowly
Within
Shimmering nets
Here
Essence endures
From here
All forms emerge
All forms
Emerge
From this second
Back to the ancient beginning
The next psychedelic sutra was adapted from Tao Sutra number ten. This sutra seeks to break-through to the sexual cakra and is to be used in programmed sessions which attempt to systematically explore the sequece of cakras or somatic nerve plexes.
The Water Cakra Sutra
Can you float through the universe of your body
and not lose your way?
Can you lie quietly
engulfed
in the slippery union
of male and female?
Warm wet dance of generation?
Endless ecstasies of couples?
Can you offer your stamen trembling in the meadow for the electric penetration of pollen
While birds sing?
Twist sinuously on the river bank
While birds sing?
Wait soft-feathered, quivering, in the thicket
While birds sing?
Can you coil serpent writhing
While birds sing?
Become two cells merging
Slide together in molecule embrace?
Can you, murmuring
Lose
All
Fusing
This last psychedelic sutra is based on Tao Sutra fifteen. This sutra can be read during the last-third of the psychedelic session to those who have selected the Tao model of flow for their re-imprint.
The Tao Imprint Sutra
How to Recognize
He who returns in the flow of tao
Brings back a mysterious penetration
So subtle
That it is misunderstood
Here is his appearance
Hesitant like one who wades in
a stream at winter
Wary as a man in ambush
Considerate as a welcome guest
Fluid like a mountain stream
Natural as uncarved wood
Floating high like a gull
Unfathomable like muddy water
How can we fathom his muddiness?
Water becomes clear through stillness
How can we become still?
By moving with the stream
This article originally appeared in Psychedelic Review, Issue Number 7, 1966. It was lovingly transcribed by volunteers at The Castalia Foundation in Millbrook, USA.
