Review: 'The Private Sea' by William Braden

Originally published in 1967 ‘The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God’ by William Braden is, broadly speaking, an attempt to contextualise spiritual and religious readings of the psychedelic experience in regard to other apparently contingent social movements of the time. William Braden was a journalist who, in writing the book, applied several journalistic techniques including interviews with prominent individuals and even experimenting with mescaline on himself.

Braden argues that there exists a relationship between radical theology, specifically the New Theology of Bishop John A.T. Robinson and the Death of God proclamation of Thomas J.J. Altizer, and what he refers to as LSD cultism (spiritual groups with psychedelic sacraments like Timothy Leary’s League for Spiritual Discovery, which from hereafter will be referred to as the psychedelic movement.) This relationship, his argument goes, is partly based on the introduction of Eastern philosophical and religious concepts into the Western mode of thinking and that together they present a challenge to orthodox Western theism. Secondly, he argues, these cultural shifts have created a renewed interest in metaphysics and that the possibility of developing a new humanistic ethic, based on the LSD experience for example, also represents a challenge to established science and reason.