MODLITWY PSYCHODELICZNE

(PSYCHEDELIC PRAYERS)

Please Note: TEXT IS IN POLISH

By TIMOTHY LEARY

Published by Illuminatio, Bialystok, Poland:  2012

This book is a HARDCOVER in Fine Condition with 150 pages,

black and white illustrations, and with Spectacular Psychedelic Cover Art.

Please Note: ALL TEXT IS IN POLISH

First Polish Edition, and apparently the first of Leary’s books to be translated to Polish.

The text follows the revised and expanded edition published by Ronin in 1997, with contributions by Ralph Metzner, Rosemary Leary, and Michael Horowitz. 

“Timothy Leary’s only book of poetry is a series of adaptations of Lao Tse’s Tao Te Ching or Way of Life,” which Leary attempted to ‘rewrite in the lingua franca of psychedelia’.”  (Leary Bibliography A5). 

MORE ABOUT WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT in English

This book of poetry and meditations written while Timothy Leary was visiting India in 1965 and finished the following year, "Psychedelic Prayers" is an adaptation of Book 1 of the "Tao Te Ching".

EXCERPTS IN ENGLISH FROM THE FOREWORD

The psychedelic or visionary experience releases a wide range of awareness-of-energy and tunes us in to patterns of neurological signals which are usually censored from mental life.

During the last five years, 1960-1965, we have witnessed a psychedelic revolution.

Consider the statistics.

Over one hundred and fifty million Americans share the same imprinted symbol system tribal language and rituals. Of these, a good ten million have taken the first psychedelic step and experienced the neural level of consciousness have transcended symbols and contacted raw energy hitting their nerve endings. Here we include the marijuana smokers, the adepts in hatha yoga, and mediators.

Another group, at least 500,000 Americans, have contacted cellular consciousness have had experiences which transcend both symbolic game and the sensory apparatus. We include here the peyote eaters, the mushroom eaters, the LSD cult.

Next we have those whose consciousness has gone beyond game, gone and direct sensory awareness, gone beyond cellular flow and contacted the molecular and elemental energies that crackle and vibrate within the cellular structure. Those who have taken large doses of LSD, mescaline, DMT, and experienced what the eastern psychologists call the "white light," the "void," the "inner light."

Each of these psychedelic levels neural, cellular, molecular are beyond symbols, incoherent to the symbolic mind. And each of these levels of consciousness is different from the others. This wide spectrum of whirling energies all uncharted and unlabelled confronts the psychedelic explorer.

So what is the net effect of these millions of visionary voyages?

A linguistic babel. A chaos of potentiality. A confusion of promise. Most of these psychedelic voyagers are now aware of the limitless re­alities stored in the nervous systems, but there is no conception of the meaning and use of these potentials.

From the beginning of the Harvard-IFIF-Castalia exploration into con­sciousness two facts were 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, premature theories must be resisted.

No current philosophic or scientific theory was broad enough to handle the potential of the 13 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.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a psychedelic manual incredibly spe­cific about the sequence and nature of experiences encountered in the ex-static state. A revision of this text published under the title The Psyche­delic Experience, was our first attempt at session programming.

For the last two years we have been working with another old, time-tested psychedelic manual the Chinese text, Tao Te Ching, sometimes translated as The Way of Life.

Written some 2600 years ago by one or several philosophers known to us now as "the old fellow" (Lao Tse), this text is still timelessly modern and will remain so for thousands of years to come—as long as man has the same sort of nervous system and deals with the range of energies he now encounters.

The Tao Te Ching deals with energy. Tao is best translated as "en­ergy," as energy process. The message of the Tao Te Ching is that all is energy, all energy flows, all things are continually transforming.

The Tao Te Ching is a series of 81 verses which celebrate the flow of energy, its manifestation and, on the practical side, the implications of this philosophy for man's endeavors.

The Tao Te Ching is divided into two books the first comprising thirty-seven chapters, the second forty-four.

In this volume of Psychedelic Prayers from the Tao Te Ching you will find fifty-six poems which are based on the thirty-seven chapters of Book I of the original.

These translations from English to psychedelese were made while sitting under a bamboo tree on a grassy slope of the Kumaon Hills overlook­ing the snow peaks of the Himalayas.

The aim was to relate this essence theme to psychedelic sessions. Slowly a psychedelic version of the chapter would emerge. This first draft version would then be put under the psychedelic

micro-scope. For several years I have pursued the yoga of one LSD session every seven days. The neurological amplification of cannabis was also available. The essence resin of the marijuana plant sometimes called hashish.

During these sessions I would read the most recent draft of the Tao poems. A humbling experience for the poet to have his words exposed to the pitiless magnification of the psychedelic perspective.

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. During these examinations a ruthless process of polishing, cutting away takes place. Slowly the most blatant redundancies and mentalisms were pruned.

Each poem in this volume has been exposed to several dozen appraisals by lycergized nervous systems. Each psychedelic "try-out" is different. People's reactions vary. What is essence-simplicity to one, is truism to another. The "right" metaphor for one is contrived to another.

Most readers have found five or so poems in this collection which vi­brate in tune to their deepest resonances. The rest do not pass the in­spection of their psychedelic enlargers.

The fifty-six hymns have been divided into six groups:

Part I. Preparatory Prayers to be read before the ses­sion. These hymns apply the creative quietude of Lao Tse to the technique of running a psyche­delic session.

Part II. Prayers Invoking Pure Energy Flow, molecular or atomic energy beyond symbol, sense-organ or cellular energy. These prayers are to be read, slowly and ethereally during the "high" points which usually come during the first three hours of an LSD session.

Part III. Prayers Invoking; Cellular Consciousness, seed energy. Odes glorifying the DNA code to be read from the third to sixth hour of the LSD session.

Part VI. Prayers Invoking Sensory Experiences Regis­tered by the External Sense Organs. Hymns glorifying the direct awareness of vision, hear­ing, touch, smell, taste to be read from the sixth to ninth hours of the LSD session or dur­ing sessions involving neural ecstagenic agents such as marijuana, low doses of LSD, hatha yoga, meditation.

Part V. Prayers Invoking Sensory Experiences Regis­tered by Internal Sense Organs , visceral aware­ness from the nerve plexes mediating elimina­tion, sex, heart, lungs, and the frontal cortex. These hymns can be read during the sixth to ninth hours of an LSD session when the subject has cut himself off from external stimulation.

Part VI. Re-imprinting Prayers designed to guide the subject during the period of re-entry (nine to 24 hours). While the subject is returning to the symbolic world and the post-session imprint is being formed.

These divisions are based on the theory of levels of consciousness de­veloped during six years of psychedelic research and published in Static and Ecstatic Consciousness.

This mapping of consciousness is based on the neurological and bio-chemical anatomy of the human body. The theory is simple. Consciousness is energy received by structure.

ETC. ETC AND SO MUCH MORE ======