For a new generation seeking the trip of a lifetime it is the essential guidebook to getting there.

The Psychedelic Experience, created by professors Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), is a foundational text that serves as a model and a guide for all subsequent mind-expanding inquiries. Based on a unique interpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Psychedelic Experience remains a vital testament to broadening spiritual consciousness through a combination of Tibetan meditation techniques and psychotropic substances.

A commemorative edition of the classic 1966 book that introduced America to the world of LSD

In the midst of a raging national controversy around the indiscriminate use of LSD, two authorities – Richard Alpert, PhD (a.k.a. Ram Dass) and psychoanalyst Sidney Cohen, MD – spoke out on the dangers, merits, legal regulations and control of
the revolutionary psychedelic drug. Their book was illustrated with a groundbreaking photo essay by journalist Lawrence Schiller, whose cover story for Life magazine introduced America to the sweeping new LSD epidemic and was a precursor to the federal criminalization of the drug.

No understanding of the history of the sixties could ever be complete without a grasp of the work of Leary, Alpert, and Metzner, the cultural resistance to their experiments, and the way in which psychoactive drug use became a part of contemporary society. Birth of a Psychedelic Culture shines a bright light on these experiments and their cultural milieu through never before seen photographs and the personal accounts of authors Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass, who vividly recall descriptions of particular “trips” as well as conversations with luminaries such as Aldous Huxley, Charles Mingus, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others that appeared on the scene.