While studies of indigenous use of the psychotropic drink ayahuasca (or yajé) in the Spanish-speaking countries of the Amazon region have resulted in an impressive bibliography over the past few decades, relatively little has been published to date about equivalent practices in Brazil. This gap has now been filled by an anthology in Portuguese of 26 essays by … [ read more ]
In Eating the Flowers of Paradise, Kevin Rushby tells the story of an epic trip—not just a tale of a literal intoxication, but of an emotional and intellectual obsession. A decade following a job teaching English in the Yemeni city of San’a, where Rushby first enjoyed qat, he decides to return to Yemen by way of Ethiopia, where the drug … [ read more ]
I can still remember the party almost ten years ago at which I was first introduced to the visionary art work of Alex Grey. At the time, I was just getting my feet wet with psychedelics, as were a number of my friends, and we crowded around a copy of Sacred Mirrors, Grey’s first collection, and oooohed and ahhhhed … [ read more ]
Having read the reviews on Tatarsky’s Harm Reduction Psychotherapy, I was drawn to Denning’s book because it looked more like a “how to” text than a collection of case studies. This proved to be right, and the book is a good reference for those who need more of a “cookbook” approach. Denning’s approach, even when writing, is “clientcentered". This book … [ read more ]
The cover of a recent Time magazine special issue features a crafty-looking yoga-babe sitting in padmasana alongside the headline: How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body. It’s just another sign of a sea change in the mainstream representations of mind, as new psychoactives, imaging technologies, and pop spirituality recontextualize the neural dance of consciousness and flesh. The boundaries between … [ read more ]
The subtitle of Dan Russell’s epic dissertation, Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy, says it all. Make no mistake, this is not a book about the so-called “war on drugs” we hear about in the newspapers, the one being fought on our streets between cops and druggies or border guards and drug smugglers. Nor is this the tale of … [ read more ]
Zig Zag Zen explores the intricate relationship between Buddhism and psychedelics in the West. There are several ways to approach reviewing a book like Zig Zag Zen, because books affect people for different reasons at different points in their lives. There was a time when I would have read this book as a metaprogrammer, experimenting with psychedelics and … [ read more ]
In his recent book, The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place, Buddhist seeker and explorer Ian Baker delivers 500+ pages of well-researched background and detailed travelogues recounting his quest for Shangri-La. We follow Baker and his companions on three separate journeys into Pemako, a perilous and isolated region of Tibet. Baker’s major geographical discovery … [ read more ]
There are two dominant attitudes toward modernity inside contemporary drug culture, and both of them, in almost diametrically opposed ways, attempt to slip outside of our history, that engulfing tsunami of politics and commodities, technology and cultural memes that make up the West. On the one hand you have the romantic turn … [ read more ]
I remember being surprised when I first encountered resistance after bringing up the Grateful Dead in conversation among younger members of the psychedelic community. Even in light of some annoying public perceptions shaped by the embarrassing behavior of part of their audience and their own personal disintegration towards the end, I always assumed that their crucial contributions to the tapestry … [ read more ]