So I'm dusting this blog off once again and hoping to give it new life as a way for me to present book reviews. I'm not seeking to gain any popularity or anything, but with our disillusionment with Deviant Art and Facebook, where I've spent way too much time these last two years, we were left with, what do we do now? We started our blogs and phlogs back in 2005 and most of them have lain fallow. Today we all of us hope that this marks a new era in the Community's presence on line. The two books which I'll be reviewing today are:

Trytptamine Palace by James Oroc, pub Park Street Press, 2009 Rochester Vermont


and

Inner Paths to Outer Space by Rick Strassman, M.D., Slawek Wojtowicz, M.D., Luis Eduardo Luna, Ph.D and Ede Frescka, M.D., pub Park Street Press, 2008 Rochester Vermont

Oroc's "Tryptamine Palace" bears the subtitle "5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad." This creature has been the subject of an awful lot of dis-information, most notably people in the American southwest and in Mexico grabbing just any old toad and licking it with the expectation of getting high. Inveterate watchers of the Simpson's TV show would remember an episode where Homer did just that and had a profound visionary experience. This book actually has very little to do with the toad in question. It is more the story of James Oroc's quest for the divine through the use of various psychedelic materials, most notably his work with the powerful 5-Me-O-DMT in the subtitle.

It can be difficult to review a book like this (or the other one, for that matter) because of the amount of prejudice, hysteria, media disinformation and U.S. government policies and laws concerning the use in any manner whatsoever of "psychedelic drugs." I wish to address this before continuing on to the considerable merits of the books, if only to clarify where your reviewer stands in all of this. To facilitate that, a little history is in order.

Those chemicals which are today usually called "psychedelic" were synthesized during the course of the 19th and 20th centuries by reputable chemists working for reputable pharmeceutical firms. Among these chemicals are mescaline, LSD, DMT and psilocybin. Some small amounts of research was begun in the 1950s with these four, usually work done by those in the medical and psychiatric fields. In 1953 or thereabout the British author Aldous Huxley ingested some mescaline after hearing about it, and was guided through an extraordinary afternoon by his doctor companion. Huxley, who for much of his life had been studying the religious mystical traditions of both West and East, wrote a book which he named after a statement of William Blake" "The Doors of Pereception," and in it all but declared that he had had the beatific vision par excellence. It was plain that Huxley felt that religious revelation was available in chemical form. Of course, despite his reputation his work was attacked from a number of quarters, most notably by an Oxford scholar named R. C. Zaehner, whose expertise lay in Islamic and Buddhist religious texts. Zaehner's claim, echoed through the years thereafter by others (most notably by Violet MacDermott), was that whatever it was that Huxley had undergone, it was not a genuine spiritual experience. Huxley took Zaehner's claims to heart to the extent that he (sort of) replied with a second work, "Heaven and Hell," the title also being a glance toward William Blake. Thanks to the egotistical shenanigans of Dr. Timothy Leary, the U.S. government outlawed all psychedelics in the late 1960s and 1970s, and legitimate research for therapeutic ends was halted at that time as well. However, in the public eye at large these substances were viewed as "dope" of some sort, something that irresponsible hedonistic hippies used to "get high." And that is where things have stayed since roughly 1969.

The first cracks in this massive wall appeared in the 1990s when Dr. Rick Strassman (one of the co-authors of the second book under scrutiny here) was permitted to administer DMT to human volunteers. Strassman is a psychiatrist of no mean standing, and he had to go through many hurdles to be allowed to conduct his research (which is documented in an earlier books by him, "DMT: The Spirit Molecule."), but research he did; and so today there are beginning to appear papers on the possible use of MDMA and psilocybin in psychological therapy. However, it will be a......while......before this work registers with approval with most Americans; overseas seems to be a different matter, but I digest ~

When it was legally available for sale and usage in America, James Oroc experimented with smoking 5-Me-O-DMT and was introduced into a world of pure light. Like many young people he had been profoundly disenchanted with traditional Western notions about God and religion, but having had experiences which literally tore his assumptions asunder (in a gracious if powerful way), he was left, as many of us who have experienced what Tuli Kupferberg has called the "scented vat," are left, with having to call his experiences "divine" and THAT which he experienced as God. I must add that 5-Me-O-DMT is apparently the strongest psychedelic we've come up with - and that the Sonoran Desert Toad, a huge creature which inhabits remote parts of Mexico, exudes the stuff from glands on its back. I shall allow the reader to connect the dots here.

Now, as this is a book review, it behooves me to say a few things about Oroc's writing. Unlike many tomes penned by young acolytes of experimental spiritualities, his is extremely well-written and flows easily from page to page, episode to episode. He has a sense of humor as well, and how often we might wish for a smile or laugh when reading about eternal verities? Simply put? If yer into this kind of thing, buy the book, you won't be sorry.

The subtitle to Strassman et al's work is "Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies." It's easy to overlookthe subtitle if you're not paying attention: but you just might be asking, "WTF do they mean by 'Spiritual Technologies?'" Of course, it is implied that psychedelic substances are somehow a means of "spiritual technology" as well, and it is perhaps here that my little historical synopsis at the outset of this article will come to the fore: the "argument" twixt Huxley and Zaehner and all those in their trains has never been resolved, although given the current (American) climate about psychedelic spirituality, it's easy enough to suss that such a notion would be repugnant to a large number of (again, American) people. However, although this book may be narrowly viewed as preaching to the chemical choir, it does stand on its own as a collection of quite diverse works by very professional people. Strassman, as indicated above, pioneered research with DMT in the U.S. in the early 1990s and his contributions give a succinct summary of his work, including the oft-time startling reports his subjects brought back with them. Like many people who've undergone an intense psychedelic experience, these folks came back with tales of entities who communicated with them, examined them and showed them marvelous things. Strassman's initial reactions were understandable and may be nutshelled as, well, of COURSE they're going to tell stories like that, I gave them DMT. But the consistency of some of his subjects' reports gave him pause and he began to wonder: did they really meet someone? Luna, who has worked extensively with the Amazonian herbal preparation ayahuasca, reports his life-experiences as he worked with various shaman and religious guides in the use of this powerful psychedelic. Wojtowicz weighs in with material about the use of "magic mushrooms," which have also been long used by non-Western spiritual traditions in seeking the divine; and Frecska's contributions, while based upon much solid research with both the substances involved and with the people who've used them presents a breathtaking prospectus of just what might await us as we voyage - with or without psychedelics - into the future. Yes, it's well written, buy it.