Sublime

Then there was Fadiman’s colleague at the institute Myron Stolaroff, a prominent Silicon Valley electrical engineer who worked as a senior executive at Ampex, the magnetic recording equipment maker, until an LSD trip inspired him to give up engineering (much like Bob Jesse) for a career as a psychedelic researcher and therapist.

we cannot even be certain whether science, the epistemic tool upon which we have come to depend most heavily, is up to this task.

Rick Strassman had sought and received approval to study the physiological effects of DMT, a powerful psychedelic compound found in many plants.

“For me the data [from those first sessions] were … I don’t want to use the word mind-blowing, but it was unprecedented the kinds of things we were seeing there, in terms of the deep meaning and lasting spiritual significance of these effects.

According to the legend, young men wishing to be initiated into the sect were given large doses of hashish and then introduced into an “artificial paradise”—a hidden valley of exotic floral gardens, splashing fountains, and nubile young women.

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western civilization.

There is no solution to the “drug problem,” or to the problem of environmental destruction or the problem of nuclear weapons stockpiles, until and unless our self-image as a species is reconnected to the earth. This begins with an analysis of the unique confluence of conditions that must have been necessary for animal organization to make the leap

It is significant that the major production areas of hard narcotics are “tribal zones.” Modern imperialists would have us believe that, try as they might, they have never been able to overrun and control these areas, in Pakistan and Burma for example, where major production of opium occurs. Consequently, faceless tribal leaders, ever changing and w