Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies
by Ede Frecska, Luis Eduardo Luna, Rick Strassman MD, Slawek Wojtowicz
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ede Frecska, Luis Eduardo Luna, Rick Strassman MD, Slawek WojtowiczEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); 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: Terence Mckenna's wet Dreamin with Salvador Dali
Summary: 5 Stars
An elf whispered to me the other night that "trying to pin down my weird experiences with words was like trying to eat fire with an axe". "Profound experiences", the elf assured me, "can never be embodied in mere words". "Worlds come after the experience, so the experience is real, the word isn't"; the elf said. He taught the original doctrine of awakening. When done correctly, this doctrine will break open your hopelessly dreary reality and set you on your way to the elf palace.
Unfortunately, only the special adepts achieve this goal; access to the elf nest was not meant for the peasants. Fortunately, we now have the new-kids on the block; the psychedelic experience and the DMT flash. These drugs can open the gates to worldwide Enlightenment, that is, they are for the masses. The DMT flash is an especially fast track to the elf infested galaxy. It is even more unfortunate then that the DMT experience really is impossible to describe with a voice box and a pen.
It is this impossibility of 'solid' evidence that leads those who refuse to step off the merry-go-round of consumerism to conclude that it is all an illusion or mere hallucination. How then do we describe the DMT flash with mere mouth noises or fancy pen play? Unless we can write like Plato, and if we can use a Shakespeare's God like talents, we may probably get close; otherwise the experiences we want to describe will easily turn into gobbledygook. (And they almost always do!)
In this fun and sexy age of online gurus and self help movements, we must sharpen our position, otherwise then we run the risk of our ideas being bracketed inside the New-Age section alongside UFOs, Crystal Gazing and celebrity death worship for dummies (insert the latest nihilistic celebrity spiritual fad)! And so the psychedelic experience becomes cannon fodder for the satirists and the sceptics.
Rick Strassman and his merry men put up a good fight. The book is packed with great essays and stories to get your teeth stuck into. Five stars there then as this is as good as these kinds of books really get (though there is allot of UFO stuff included, but I suppose you have to sell books). I'll just like this review to be about the artwork.
McKenna was convinced that the DMT flash was more than the heavenly beauty of Christianity, more than the blissful paradise described in the Qur'an, the two great terminals at the Omega way. Oh no; according to the Terence, 'it's the real'. All you need is a bong and courage (McKenna).
......(7 minutes later).....
And then it finishes and you forget as soon as you open your eyes.
How can artists even begin painting this sort of experience? This is a typical experience you can have on DMT and this is why these scientists and artists are 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).
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?
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? Like I mention above, nor the voice-box nor the pen will do, but something new.
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. 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. The artwork, such as the ayahuasca visions, included in this book look absolutely fantastic, but they didn't mirror alien worlds to me; just our mundane and boring world of rainforests, comic monsters and glossy humanoids.
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? It's got the artwork and it's got the psychedelic luminaries. Please let it be it!!
Alas, no, it's not it. It's the job of the artist is to convince us you see, not the other way round. It's not our job to rationalize the artwork just because we want the DMT flash to have a 'real' status. Let's not simply define ourselves as believers or followers. (Have you yourself visited these places?)
Ok I suppose McKenna convicted a generation and he was indeed a genius but who else is coming forward with an equal poetic vision? To my mind Terence McKenna blazed the bath of genius (he really did have something to say) but the rest of the community don't inspire confidence in any ontological aesthetic. There are egos and narcissists and gurus and fopdoodle's and that's about it!
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 extraordinariness, overthrow the dominance of scientific materialism. It would then make front page headlines all around the world with letters ten food high (Mckenna).
Although some of the artwatk is brilliant and otherworldly, mose of it 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? We'll have to wait a few years until the technology catches up I think.
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.
Terence McKenna's puppet questions.
Stomach girl hair extensions.
Allen Ginsberg howless erection.
Stomach girl's mimetic spaghetti flies.
Terence McKenna's becoming obsessed by floaters that hover before his eyes.
Free floating love could rid her of a desire to die.
Whilst Charles Darwin's suffering from monkey pies.
And Sister Mary's machinery of silent suffering terrifies the children's eyes.
More Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies reviews:
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Summary of Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies
An investigation into experiences of other realms of existence and contact with otherworldly beings? Examines how contact with alien life-forms can be obtained through the ?inner space? dimensions of our minds
? Presents evidence that other worlds experienced through consciousness-altering technologies are often as real as those perceived with our five senses
? Correlates science fiction?s imaginal realms with psychedelic research
For thousands of years, voyagers of inner space--spiritual seekers, shamans, and psychoactive drug users--have returned from their inner imaginal travels reporting encounters with alien intelligences. Inner Paths to Outer Space presents an innovative examination of how we can reach these other dimensions of existence and contact otherworldly beings. Based on their more than 60 combined years of research into the function of the brain, the authors reveal how psychoactive substances such as DMT allow the brain to bypass our five basic senses to unlock a multidimensional realm of existence where otherworldly communication occurs. They contend that our centuries-old search for alien life-forms has been misdirected and that the alien worlds reflected in visionary science fiction actually mirror the inner space world of our minds. The authors show that these ?alien? worlds encountered through altered states of human awareness, either through the use of psychedelics or other methods, possess a sense of reality as great as, or greater than, those of the ordinary awareness perceived by our five senses.
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