Richard Wu

Richard Wu rated a book liked it Laws of Media: The New Science by Marshall McLuhan	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The syncretism levels are off the charts, and it's great fun so long as you get that McLuhan was no Einstein, in that the great physicist pretended, in knowing he was nearing the end of his life, neither to himself nor anyone else that he, though con ...more
Jun 13, 2019 03:43PM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it The Aeneid by Virgil	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Dryden must be read, of course, but I figure better postponed in favor of initial narrative familiarity. To this end I chose, after comparing several verses of Fagles, Mandelbaum, and Fitzgerald, Frederick Ahl's translation for its precise diction an ...more
Jun 06, 2019 01:02PM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds. (256) Once one disambiguates between consciousness as the predicate of experience and consciousness as an infectious, adaptive, historically recent conceptual paradigm of individuality, ...more
May 11, 2019 11:12PM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research by Stanislav Grof	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Eagerly, eagerly do I await the day when what is to be contemporary science will vindicate the psychoanalytic theories of yore from their ignominious casting down by the replication-crazed, self-survey-obsessed "cognitive psychology" of current conte ...more
Apr 30, 2019 05:52PM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book liked it Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics & Other Spiritual Technologies by Rick Strassman	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
James Fadiman of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide said this was "mandatory." I won't echo him, but I admit its mix of information and speculation was fun to read. Negatives - The first few Strassman sections rehash his previous book, except (for bre ...more
Apr 24, 2019 04:47PM · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book it was amazing VALIS (VALIS Trilogy, #1) by Philip K. Dick	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There is no way we can adapt to their viewpoint, their moral, political, sociological environment. To them we’re professional agitators, more alien than the Nazis, probably even more of a menace than the Communist Party. We’re the most dangerous agi ...more
Apr 18, 2019 12:22AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — VALIS by Philip K. Dick <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it Ubik by Philip K. Dick	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Neither Sufi nor Spinozist would disagree with God's ubiquity; he is to be found in cathedrals as well as in packaged cereals and cleaning products, in infomercials, in the cathode ray tubes through which these ads are beamed and in the logos brainst ...more
Apr 15, 2019 08:58PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Ubik by Philip K. Dick. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Ubik by Philip K. Dick <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book it was ok DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Headache-inducing chapter 6, "Labyrinth," meticulously chronicles the process of securing permits and contracts with the FDA, the DEA, the NIMH, the NIDA and other regulatory agencies, scientific advisory committees, ethics advisory committees, grant ...more
Apr 14, 2019 03:11PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of DMT by Rick Strassman. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — DMT by Rick Strassman <iframe id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Richard Wu rated a book really liked it The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Let’s say I toss a ball, and that I couldn’t have tossed it if I didn’t will it. Assuming divine foreknowledge, we can say God knew, before I tossed it, that I was going to. Now it’s true, foreknown events can’t not happen—they occur by necessity—and ...more
Apr 09, 2019 04:26PM · 1 like · like · see review
Richard Wu rated a book it was amazing Little, Big by John Crowley Read 2 times	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Little, Big was written over a decade before I came onto the scene, revealing, to me finally, that there are constants—never absolute, though some change at a glasslike pace—in the trajectory of life, constants which, for a certain type of person goi ...more
Apr 06, 2019 12:55AM · 1 like · like · see review

Richard Wu rated a book liked it

Laws of Media: The New Science
by Marshall McLuhan

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The syncretism levels are off the charts, and it's great fun so long as you get that McLuhan was no Einstein, in that the great physicist pretended, in knowing he was nearing the end of his life, neither to himself nor anyone else that he, though con The syncretism levels are off the charts, and it's great fun so long as you get that McLuhan was no Einstein, in that the great physicist pretended, in knowing he was nearing the end of his life, neither to himself nor anyone else that he, though convinced of his own talents as he was, had finally discovered the Theory of Everything which would have served quite fittingly as capstone and farewell. Like Nietzsche, McLuhan had little compunction about inserting himself among the titans, obsolescing, at least in his own mind, reams of scholarship from all those inferior thinkers who failed to perceive the ground upon which they thought. But should we also grant him the title of Dynamite? Let's first assess the effects of his work.

If we go by academic popularity, Laws of Media was a non-starter (one might say it fizzled out) even among McLuhan's literary milieu. Did it fare any better with the public at large? Judging from the low number of ratings it has on this website, no, especially relative to the texts of Kuhn and Popper—both contemporaries, both worse publicists—who also had to push their memetic signals through in an ecology of declining literacy increasingly mediated by electronic noise. So we can safely say it had more bombast than blast.

What about the ideas themselves—do they hold water? I was glad to see, in the second sentence of the Introduction no less, the claim that "This essay offers in testable and falsifiable form (the criteria of scientific laws) observations about the structure and nature of things man makes and does," and later on, that "While empirical, [the tetrads of our science] provide a basis for prediction, for example, that retrievals or reversals of a certain form will occur." I was dismayed to see, in the remaining sections, no experiments proposed as to how a tetrad may be tested, no indication of what the criteria for a successful falsification might be, and no general or specific methods for properly determining predictive power. I do not think Popper and McLuhan would've agreed as to how the former's terms were to be construed. I think the latter took a fast-and-broad reading and asserted it multiple times with a confident tone—no substitute for qualification, so his thesis bears only the patina of science; holds no water on the terms it attributes to itself.

What about on other terms? Can the tetrad at least be incisive as a mode of conceptual analysis? Yes, I think, if we take for example "Hermeneutics" (page 140), which does enhance clarity, does retrieve depth, does reverse into obscurity when done to excess, and does bury naivete; each sense in which hermeneutics performs these actions is easily seen, that is, pattern-matched to prior experience (though this is insufficient to render its tetrad scientific; only descriptively resonant). If we take, however, "Booze" (144), which apparently enhances "private outlook, energy and zest, aggressiveness," we can add to our "Yes" a "but not necessarily." Nobody needs reminding that alcohol is more commonly categorized as a "depressant," or that only a select proportion of drinkers becomes more aggressive; and if by "private outlook" is meant "interiority of introspection," I suspect this mostly applies to a special tiny class of littérateur which does not drink to forget or to socialize.

Why the credit card should obsolesce "money" (as opposed to "paper cash") is a mystery to me, as is why Aristotelian Causality intensifies into Formal Cause in particular. How the car obsoletes the horse-and-buggy is apparent, but how "Crowd" obsoletes "the individual, private identity" is not. Specifically, though it may be true that one "loses oneself" while part of a crowd or mob, that crowds exist does not obsolesce private identity in anywhere close to the way that that cars exist obsolesces horses. And here obsolesce takes on two similar-but-orthogonal entendres, which is about as kosher as saying the written word and the telescope both "extend the eye" (117). Whether this is multimodal 4-D analysis or sloppy sense conflation I'll leave you to judge, but I at least felt like saying "That's a stretch" to many of the attributions made herein; anyone can take a concept, find the loosest interpretation still applicable as metaphor for another concept, and claim connection. So hermeneutics also intensifies into apophenia, you see.

A couple last notes. Firstly, the final sentence "Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides" posits control as a sort of telos for the New Science and as a self-evident desideratum. Why should it be? I have my own answers, but a chance to compare and contrast would've been nice. Secondly, if we do decide to take his claim to place at face, McLuhan is still very, very obviously the third in a sequence of Bacon, Vico, McLuhan… Who is be the fourth grammarian? Whose tetrad shall complete the tetrad of tetrads? ...more

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The Aeneid
by Virgil

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Dryden must be read, of course, but I figure better postponed in favor of initial narrative familiarity. To this end I chose, after comparing several verses of Fagles, Mandelbaum, and Fitzgerald, Frederick Ahl's translation for its precise diction an Dryden must be read, of course, but I figure better postponed in favor of initial narrative familiarity. To this end I chose, after comparing several verses of Fagles, Mandelbaum, and Fitzgerald, Frederick Ahl's translation for its precise diction and prose imagery, the emphases on which are afforded are by a freedom from metrical demands. Its frequent and detailed endnotes also impress with their wealth of intertextual references, elucidating, among various other relevancies, the authorial decisions Virgil made to comply with his political context and—in a stunning attempt at cross-cultural, cross-millennium empathy—likely perceptions of certain puns and allusions from the mind of a reader in Octavian's Rome. So Ahl's Aeneid comes recommended for anyone who values these factors. Here's a few sample lines:

…the old man takes aim at the billowing breezes, displaying Technical art arched tense for a canticle hummed by a bowstring. [5.520]

These men are fighting with double-edged steel, to the death; the black harvest Bristling the broad fields is unsheathed swords. Now the sun-dazzled bronzework Flashes and tosses the sunlight’s bolts back up to the sky’s clouds. [7.525]

(it took some 23,000 sea-snails to produce enough dye for a Roman senator’s robe, according to Pliny the Elder) [note to 1.639]

Virtue is much more appealing when found in a beautiful body. [5.344]

I would leave, however, this review infelicitous were I not to remark on at least the theme I found most fascinating, namely the idea of (un)fulfillment as it relates to the desires of figures past and present: Dido, Ulysses, Theseus, Deiphobus, Lausus, etc. To die without achieving fulfillment seems for Virgil to rank among the worst of outcomes for a given life, and fulfillment, for what appears to be an admixture of poetic expediency and actual belief, seems always to depend on the execution of a single act—a glory in battle, a capture of love, a heeding of prophecy—whose provenance may be social role or individual destiny.

For my part, I do not take so severe a position as does our poet Virgil, do not think it prudent, right, or noble to hinge the worth of one's own life on a singular performance, though the impulse he has recognized continues, Erato: "I don’t want to die a virgin." But neither is this to deny the existence of lives whose justification rests on a crucial, let us say, wooden t; even yours may be one of them. Would you celebrate it then? Why not, either way? View living as a bonus of sorts: of Tartarian shades, Virgil claims they'd give about anything for another day in the sun, just another day in the life, however grueling, humiliating be it—forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit—however trivial, however sad… ...more

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The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral... by Julian Jaynes

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Jaynes

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Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds. (256)

Once one disambiguates between consciousness as the predicate of experience and consciousness as an infectious, adaptive, historically recent conceptual paradigm of individuality,

Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds. (256)

Once one disambiguates between consciousness as the predicate of experience and consciousness as an infectious, adaptive, historically recent conceptual paradigm of individuality, Jaynes’ thesis, which regards the latter only, becomes palatable and perhaps even revelatory. I do not, by this, mean miraculous—for a solution to the so-called “hard problem” (which Chalmers wouldn’t coin for another couple decades) would be precisely that—but simply eye-opening in the paraphrandic sense of the corporeal metaphier here applied. I’d recommend this to anyone who has (A) had the intuition that other people, especially those of far cultural distance, experience the world differently from oneself, and (B) finds said intuition sufficiently fascinating to want to suss out in what ways they do, and how, and why.

Because Jaynes’ real accomplishment (in my view) is just such an elucidation for ancestral subjectivity—the difficulty of which cannot be overemphasized. To know the minds of friends or lovers or parents is one thing; of foreigners, another; of island tribesmen, another still; but of the Babylonians, cloistered in their ziggurats or hanging from their gardens? Yet this is what Jaynes presumes to explain (in depth at that), threading archaeological data, literary trends, historical turning points, and numerous neuroscientific experiments through the tortuous labyrinth of analog ‘I’; insightful gems at every corner.

Long story shorter, the gods of yore commanded man directly as hallucinated chorus; it was normal to be schizophrenic, egoless, and zombielike, since such a state afforded ample equanimity for those inhabiting societies not yet so burdened by demands to come, from in or out; but population growth and Mother Nature’s whimsy sparked confusion—war, disease, and famine—no delusion had recourse to cope with; Mnemosyne, affronted by her deposition from the aural air into the written earth, multiplied her voices: less commensurate from subject to another, and less certain; Babel fell; critical complexity thresholds breached evolved a space for ego and deceit; the gods retreat while supplicants strove ever harder to beseech, to less and less avail; “Enlightenment” chained Titans to right hemispheric Tartarus—to prophesy a heresy, now quite beyond the pale…

PRESENT ERA. The bicameral vacuum, expanding at the speed of the universe, yearns for fulfillment. Nostalgia for the absolute pervades, and manifests as prayer, hypnosis, narcotics, astrology: the vestiges of asubjective aeons; ersatz divination. The gluttonous Self, fed to bursting, feels too tight for its transcendental breeches; wants deflation or escape—neither which it can, sans help, achieve. Beset by coming catastrophes—synecdochized by rising tides—of magnitudes unseen since ancient times… what can it do, at such remove from its solution space? Consecrate itself for God’s return, they say, bootstrap its evolution or retrace. ...more

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Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof

Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research
by Stanislav Grof

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Eagerly, eagerly do I await the day when what is to be contemporary science will vindicate the psychoanalytic theories of yore from their ignominious casting down by the replication-crazed, self-survey-obsessed "cognitive psychology" of current conte Eagerly, eagerly do I await the day when what is to be contemporary science will vindicate the psychoanalytic theories of yore from their ignominious casting down by the replication-crazed, self-survey-obsessed "cognitive psychology" of current contemporary science, currently, thankfully, crumbling as we speak under the rot of its own pillars: its preening reductionism, its notions of significance… Bare emperors de facto—and soon de jure.

What this heralds is a "Tat Tvam Asi" increasingly "As above, so below," in which hermeneutic levels previously at war will reconcile their differences in terms perfectly legible within the parlance of each. Yes, that neuroscience and psychology will undergo a unio mystica is what I'm insinuating; and even if we mortals are not to grasp the full mechanics of their hierogamy (as our descriptive language today fails even to abstract the logic of an AlphaGo), we will be satisfied to leave it at that (or else become something altogether unrecognizable).

Intimations of this prophecy may be found by linking Grof's theoretical frameworks with relatively recent studies. For instance, the transmutation of unbearable, blinding pain into ecstatic outbursts of bliss common to what he calls "BPM III" reactions has a biological basis in the proximity and similarity of the neural clusters responsible for both, and I've become more amenable to the idea of lifelong behavioral patterns (both beneficial and detrimental) emerging and solidifying in childhood, or even infancy, after learning that the LSD-induced brain state bears an uncanny resemblance to that which babies manifest throughout infancy: radically interconnected and malleable relative to that of the adult waking state. So is it any surprise that a single LSD-guided session can amount to years of sober therapy?

But I didn't expect the extent and number of sessions some patients would sit through (sometimes in the dozens, and of up to 1500μg in a dose) before considered cured; Grof's case studies are worth reviewing if for no other reason than to humanize their subjects, and the at-times unfathomable burdens of which they are dying—in some cases almost literally—to be relieved. That is, to be relived, as from a narratological perspective, closure is precisely revolution; to experience an event of significant symmetricality to the one which got the cycle spinning; the second point on the spiral speared through by the axis of time. Now if only there were an accelerant…

…LSD can be used as a kind of “inner radar” that scans the unconscious, identifies the areas of high affective tension, and brings them to the open. (216)

You may assess this claim, of course, by poring over the case evidence Grof presents in his book and matching them against your criteria for validity; if the patient reports are taken at face then his conclusion seems to me well justified (albeit selection bias is the cheap catch-all counter). Alternatively you could take the stuff yourself, be a gonzo scientist direct and experiential—the flaw being a high likelihood of becoming, in at least what can feel a literal sense, what you behold (and there are better things to become). A last suggestion would be to match it against your past trips and see how well it holds (when I try this, I find myself unable to distinguish between what is properly cause and what effect).

Regardless, I applaud Grof for really putting himself out there, you know, for recognizing when the territory calls for new cartography and then trying to make the maps while blazing trails himself, experimentally speaking, not in the "name of Science" per se but in effect as much… I have the perfect song: Frontier Psychiatrist. ...more

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Inner Paths to Outer Space by Rick Strassman

Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics & Other Spiritual Technologies
by Rick Strassman

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James Fadiman of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide said this was "mandatory." I won't echo him, but I admit its mix of information and speculation was fun to read.

Negatives
- The first few Strassman sections rehash his previous book, except (for bre ...more

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VALIS (VALIS Trilogy, #1)
by Philip K. Dick

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There is no way we can adapt to their viewpoint, their moral, political, sociological environment. To them we’re professional agitators, more alien than the Nazis, probably even more of a menace than the Communist Party. We’re the most dangerous agi

There is no way we can adapt to their viewpoint, their moral, political, sociological environment. To them we’re professional agitators, more alien than the Nazis, probably even more of a menace than the Communist Party. We’re the most dangerous agitators that this time segment has yet had to deal with.

Already in UBIK, it dawns on Chip that the more he opens his mouth in cold-pac 1939, the more its denizens will think him a loony. How are you supposed to speak if everything you want understood is sealed behind your future's dialect? What is insanity anyhow? Do I know? Yes I do! It's a measure of communicative commensurability; and by caching your message for the metaphorical Elect, who—cross your fingers—have the right decoders installed. Maybe use a pseudonym and say that it's your schizo-ditto. Have his twin be a fictional you-but-not. Jam the signal with a few real life events, to blur the line for those who can't read between them. Not that I presume to, hell, but you, reading this, now might (please do), might want to take another crack see? Picture you, among the chosen…

Or completely cuckoo, not in the socially constructed politically fraught American Psychiatric Association diagnostic and statistical manual of banal normativity sense but in the objective sense, which I decide (and you are). It's very simple, look, Dr. Stone beknights Fat with auctoritas (that's Latin for authority) successfully because he understands that Psyche, too, is a muse and wants to have her song heard. Listened to, by someone who can listen; and Stone can sing just well enough to prove that he can listen. Well enough to vindicate a now-erstwhile insanity. David can't (dogma forbids), Maurice can't (duh), Kevin tries, but becomes like the monster he wants to fight? Sez Entry #42, that is BGE 146, that is a thought echoing across the Eternal Now and nothing truly new.

Lamptons' VALIS provides a second vindication; but where the other was scholarly, this one's experiential—and thus superlative:

But on a far more fundamental level Fat felt fear at the turn of events. Perhaps he had always felt reassured to think that his March 1974 encounter with God emanated from mere insanity; viewing it that way he did not necessarily have to take it as real. Now he did.

McLuhan said excision comes at cost, Kierkegaard expressed the general pattern best, I don't need to point out how getting what you want (or even what you need) creates, sometimes, a vacuum where desire used to be (the irony!), but I did want to so I did. If you wanna talk psychedelics, well, VALIS is not trippy (no matter what they say), but like MDMA consuming it may amount to "years of psychotherapy in a single session," and unlike other of his works the prose quality will get you high; I recommend speedrunning the Pink Floyd discography in parallel.

Before I leave this review… those who believe, as an article of faith, that everything is interconnected: how about a demonstration?

There is some connection between VALIS and the early Christians, but I can't make out what. Anyhow, the film alludes to it elliptically. Everything is in pieces, all the information.

The word "film" is four letters, which when divided in half reveals "fi" and "lm." Being the upper half, "fi," aka Form I of Parmenides, is the true half—and "lm," Yin, is the false degenerate half, to be killed off and replaced. With what? "sh," of course: the fish alludes to it elliptically. Now recall the ichthys. What shape does it take again? That's right, a goddamn ellipse—with an upper curve and a lower curve. Now read the next sentence: Everything is in pieces, all the information. In pieces… In... what? One more time. Everything is in pisces, all the information.

Ah. ...more

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Ubik
by Philip K. Dick

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Neither Sufi nor Spinozist would disagree with God's ubiquity; he is to be found in cathedrals as well as in packaged cereals and cleaning products, in infomercials, in the cathode ray tubes through which these ads are beamed and in the logos brainst ...more

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DMT: The Spirit Molecule
by Rick Strassman

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Headache-inducing chapter 6, "Labyrinth," meticulously chronicles the process of securing permits and contracts with the FDA, the DEA, the NIMH, the NIDA and other regulatory agencies, scientific advisory committees, ethics advisory committees, grant Headache-inducing chapter 6, "Labyrinth," meticulously chronicles the process of securing permits and contracts with the FDA, the DEA, the NIMH, the NIDA and other regulatory agencies, scientific advisory committees, ethics advisory committees, grant committees, university boards, chemical suppliers, attorneys at law… It is fantastic. Migraine-inducing chapters-not-6… are not.

…let's ask, "Why do we make DMT in our bodies?"
My answer is: "Because it is the spirit molecule." (53)

Here Strassman propounds a simple (let's just assume) fact without qualifying it through a larger instrumental scheme; begs the necessity of said "spirit molecule" for an end he will never make explicit in the 300-some pages to follow, as if when asked why birds chirp, he responds, "Because chirping sounds good." So we're left without the "Because their goal is to mate and they have spare energy for mating calls, which must sound good to work." Without, that is, an explanation that satisfies any reasonable reading of the question.

The closest he comes to one is conjecturing that DMT ushers this "consciousness" thing (self-evidently vital enough to demand no further explananda) into our corporeal vessels. His case runs as follows. First, he defends (I will concede rather elegantly) that the pineal gland, apart from its function as melatonin factory, is responsible for producing hallucinogenic quantities of DMT inside our bodies at times of great stress such as birth, death, and near-death. Then, noting that it takes seven weeks for the pineal gland to become visible in fetal development, the same forty-nine days—would you believe it—that the Tibetan Book of the Dead says is the time the soul takes to reincarnate after death, he contends that "a pineal DMT release at forty-nine days after conception marks the entrance of the spirit into the fetus. (xvii)"

Two main problems mar this thesis—the first experimental, the second epistemological. Strassman's deduction of pineal function is founded on biological mechanisms he knows quite well, and it is elegant because he contextualizes each of them for us before paring down and honing in Sherlock Holmes style. Unfortunately, these mechanisms held disqualifying nuances to be explicated in future years, namely that the quantities of DMT endogenously synthesizable by our pineal glands cannot, due to biochemical bounds, ever be sufficient for psychedelic effects to manifest subjectively. Graver is the argument from synchronicity, which reeks of wishful, anthropocentric thinking. It is not so much that appeals to ancient, esoteric wisdom are wrong by virtue of the wisdom's falsity, but that they presume, almost categorically, a baseless certitude in translation or analogy by which they're then enlisted to our modern theories' ends.

Other flaws in Strassman's book include dogmatic banalities, spurious etymology, and overmuch suspension of disbelief. Take for example: "However, DMT, as a true spirit molecule, gave our volunteers the trip they needed, rather than the one they wanted. (156)" Who is Strassman to decide what a trip someone needs consists of? By what criteria does, can he assess such a thing? The claim is arrogant as it is uncritical, and whatever truth lies behind it (which psychedelic users oft attest to without foisting on others) deserves elucidation far more than blanket reassertion. Secondly: "The name for serotonin came from the Latin sew, 'blood,' and tonin, 'tightening.' (24)" Last I checked, sanguis is Latin for blood and sero- derives from serum. No idea where Strassman copped "sew" from. Lastly, that relatively subject-invariant experiences of machine elves or alien abductions or jesters and jokers occur on DMT bespeaks less the purported "reality" of the other "realms" or "frequencies" or "channels" on which they come into being than the self-similarity of our neuroanatomy, or what Kant might call our transcendental cogito.

Here are more disagreeable quotes:

I would recruit only experienced psychedelic users for the study. Experienced volunteers would be better able to report drug effects than those with no idea what to expect. (95)

No, it is not prior experience which mediates ability to articulate experience. It is proficiency with language. A cursory glance at Watts or Huxley, Thompson, Junger or Michaux will prove as much.

It's easy, with hindsight, to relate Ken's negative entity-contact experience on a high dose of DMT to his habit offending off any dark, shadowy aspects of himself. His psychological defenses were just too weak to function under the spirit molecule's powerful influence. (253)

A classic case of confounding convenience with correctness. Why bother digging when you can glibly explain away?

In my mind, MDMA is a mild drug. People who prefer it to the typical psychedelics tend not to do well when stressed, either by life or by taking more potent mind-bending drugs. MDMA is what I like to call a "love and light" drug, one that accentuates the positive and minimizes the negative. If only life were so simple. (252)

"DMT: Not for sissies." Cool, cool. ...more

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The Consolation of Philosophy
by Boethius

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Let’s say I toss a ball, and that I couldn’t have tossed it if I didn’t will it. Assuming divine foreknowledge, we can say God knew, before I tossed it, that I was going to. Now it’s true, foreknown events can’t not happen—they occur by necessity—and ...more

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Little, Big
by John Crowley

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Little, Big was written over a decade before I came onto the scene, revealing, to me finally, that there are constants—never absolute, though some change at a glasslike pace—in the trajectory of life, constants which, for a certain type of person goi ...more