Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies
by Rick Strassman MD, Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ede Frecska
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ede Frecska, Luis Eduardo Luna, Rick Strassman MD, Slawek WojtowiczEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-27
ISBN: 159477224X
Number of pages: 376
Publisher: Park Street Press
Book Reviews of Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies
Book Review: They have dreamed their dream, and awakening have found nothing in their hands.
Summary: 2 Stars
Ludwig Wittgenstein used to say that thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words ...This is even more true when we try to describe the experiences brought on by psychedelic drugs . Unless you possess the writing ability of Plato; coupled with a Shakespearean power of imagery, then the experiences you want to describe can turn into gobbledygook!!
So psychedelic experiences are easily ridiculed when downloaded into normal language. And downloaded into tasteless language they should be ridiculed.
In this age of online gurus and seers you run the risk of your ideas being bracketed into the New-Age section alongside UFOs, Crystal Gazing and Scientology! And so you become cannon fodder for the satirists and the sceptics!
The authors cannot avoid this pitfall!
They are claiming that the psychedelic experience is not another weird cult. Its real!
Take a strong enough dose and visionary scenarios will come bounding out of the speakers! Not mere colours and pretty patterns, but the Big Other of scripture! You will be greeted by three dimensional elf machines of syntactical information that are extraordinary complex, architectonicly connected and ordered. Other worlds are a membrane away!!!
Therefore, Ayahuasca, LSD and Magic Mushrooms are a doorway to another modality that exists independent of our thoughts and feelings about it. More like shifting fantasy land than good old positivist rock n roll.
Sounds great, but these ideas are so alien to our world of television, and football; but why not? Why should 500 years of scientific materialism have all the fun?
Sadly there's a paradox between the language and the reality of the psychedelic experience. The paradox is that you cannot see what another person is trying to described!
No matter how cleverly an expert may convince you; his or her words will always remain mere symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon the 'truth'. (Or even the truth that is swimming around in that persons head!) Isn't this fact obvious?
So if a person is raving on about chemically induced realities from the fractal void etc, we only have her word for it. Even if she is the most articulate human being or best writer in the world; her words will never be the thing-in-itself, but will always remain a description. It amazes me how naive we are about the limits of language. This applies especially to describing drug induced trips.
So how do we get to the meat of this mystery? How do we demonstrate the validity of these phenomena to those who will never step outside the culturally sanctioned playpen?
How about computer technology? With powerful computers it should be possible to create artwork of psychedelic intensity to convince the sceptics.
The bench test will be to design virtual reality software that can model the worlds described in this book. A multifaceted simulation of a psychedelic flash. Computer generated vistas of psychedelic space-time if you will. The pictures in this book (and all over the Internet) give a glimpse of what can be done with a mouse and little imagination.
Alas, I wasn't converted. Psychedelic artwork such as the ayahuasca visions included in this book are absolutely fantastic, but they didn't mirror alien worlds to me.
It is claimed that the psychedelic experience is a catalyst for the imagination. So psychedelic art should have an original flavour that will be literally out of this world! The kind of artwork I'm thinking about should be able to blow away the competition and truly silence the doubters. It should scream out at the observer, "WHAT THE HELL IS IT"?
This is not what is you find! So it is sad that the psychedelic artwork boils down to weird reptilian humanoids, spaceships orbiting planets and eyeballs popping out of foreheads etc. The artwork is indeed brilliant, but art created by experienced psychonauts should posses boundary dissolving properties that 'normal' artists cannot possibly match.
Comic sci-fi scenarios will never convince.
(This type of art gives a glimpse of a future technological paradigm. They are the swine before the pearls!)
This is why, to my mind, psychedelic art doesn't come close to say, a Hieronymus Bosch or a Salvador Dali in imagination and weirdness. Bosch and Dali had something boundary dissolving about their creations. They resembled travellers with access to places only they could see.
I doubt whether Bosch or Dali had access to magic mushrooms, LSD or ayahuasca. So what is going on? This is just my personal bias though. What do others think?
P.S. Try downloading audio stuff by Terence Mckenna or just 'YouTube' the man. Mckenna was famous for his storytelling skills so he's a good place to start if you want clues to the experiences described in this book.
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