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 Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies
Book Review: Terence Mckenna bites!!
Summary: 2 Stars
Arthur Schopenhauer 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 psychedelics . Unless we can write like Plato; coupled with Shakespeare's power of imagery, then the experiences we 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 we run the risk of our ideas being bracketed into the New-Age section alongside UFOs, Crystal Gazing and Scientology! And so the psychedelic experience becomes cannon fodder for the satirists and the sceptics.
Rick Strassman and his merry men cannot avoid this pitfall!
They are scientists and artists claiming that the DMT experience is not another weird cult. Its real!
Take a strong enough dose and scientific materialism will just melt away! Just like that. Another reality will then emerge. The molecule is the door-frame and we step beyond it and see wonderful things. Things that have an ontological validity independent of our thoughts and feelings about it. "More like shifting fantasy land than good old positivist rock n roll"(Mckenna).
There are reports of alien machines, impossible objects and space-stations orbiting alien worlds. You will be greeted by telepathic elf machines of syntactical information that are extraordinary complex, impossible to fathom but very ordered. It somehow all makes sense (Mckenna. Other worlds are thus a membrane away!!! These are fantastic claims indeed.
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 metaphors for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon the 'truth'. Or even the truths 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 person 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. These realities could then be printed onto paper and shown to the rest of the world. It will be art as has never been seen before. 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. Just our one.
There is a mad cultish movement all over the Internet concerning the DMT experience. People like Joe Rogan (on YouTube) and the mighty Mckenna are converting many. And so they should, because what they have to say sounds bloody convincing to me. But its reasonable of intelligent people like you and I to demand a little more than just auditory preaching. Words are never enough. Plus this book is packed full of quantum physics masquerading as scientific proof and so do you think that the authors added the pictures just to look nice? Or are they passing them off as snap-shots to other worlds? I submit to you the later.
I really wanted to be blown away by this book. Terence Mckenna used to say that in the future (he was speaking in the 90's), the psychedelic community will be able to model the hyper-dimensional objects they claim to encounter on DMT. Just as quantum mechanics led to the silicon chip and the home computer, the DMT flash will take form and be made visible via powerful computer software.
The truth of the DMT place could then be shown to rest of the world, with a "look at this" ring to it (Mckenna). And so the long heralded alternative to scientific reductionism will be upon us!
Is this book it? Its got the artwork and its got the psychedelic luninaries. Please let it be it!!
Alas, no, its not it. Its the job of the artist is to convince us. Not the other way round. Its not our job to rationalize the artwork just because we want the DMT flash to have a 'real' status. Lets not simply define ourselves as believers or followers. (Have you yourself visited these places?)
It is claimed that the psychedelic experience is a catalyst for the imagination. If so then psychedelic art created by experienced psychonauts should posses boundary dissolving properties that 'normal' artists cannot possibly match.The kind of artwork I'm thinking about should be able to blow away the competition and by shear extraordinary-ness, overthrow the dominance of scientific materialism. It would then make front page headlines all around the world with letters ten food high (Mckenna).
So it is sad that the artwork in this book boils down to reptilian humanoids, grey faced aliens, plants and trees and illuminous men on fire! The artwork is indeed brilliant, but art created by experienced psychonauts should posses impossible properties that 'normal' artists cannot possibly match. After all, do they not make fantastic claims?
I doubt whether these comic sci-fi scenarios will be enough to convince the sceptics.
This is why, to my mind, psychedelic artwork doesn't come close to say, Hieronymus Bosch or Salvador Dali in imagination and weirdness. Bosch and Dali had something boundary dissolving about their imaginings. They resembled travellers with access to places only they could see. Indeed, Timothy Leary once described Salvador Dali as "the only person who can paint LSD without having taken LSD."
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. Oh and the rest of the book is a very good mixture of sci fi and science. But the market is saturated with this sort of thing.
Book Review: Natural sequel to DMT: Spirit Molecule
Summary: 5 Stars
In collaboration with Dr. Slawek Wojtowicz, Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, and Dr. Ede Frecska; Dr.Rick Strassman's new book Inner Paths to Outer Space is the natural sequel to his first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, in which Strassman documented his extraordinary medical research administering the potent endogenous psychedelic neurochemical, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), to human volunteers. After receiving intravenous injections of DMT, Strassman's participants reported a range of exceptional phenomena from entity encounters and alien abduction-like experiences to near-death like experiences. Inner Paths considers the DMT-induced entity encounters and alien abduction-like experiences from Strassman's research in further depth, particularly in the contexts of quantum physics, science fiction and shamanism, proposing that access to alien worlds in outer space occurs in the inner space of the psyche.
The book covers some interesting terrain, ranging from advice on the best circumstances in which to experience these other worlds to speculations about the neurochemical underpinnings of alien-abduction experiences. It didn't quite probe the ontology of the alien encounter fully, nor satisfactorily dissect the insectoid beings enough for me, but it does explore these bizarre experiences in a creative and non-reductionistic way, yet I still feel it could have made a deeper analysis. Nevertheless this book is fascinating, timely and important in that it asks the questions that aren't being asked about psychedelically-induced entity contact, and comes up with some interesting speculations in doing so. Well worth a read.