"Body, Mind & Spirit - Entheogens & Visionary Substances; Body, Mind & Spirit - Shamanism; Social Science - Popular Culture"--
Since the mid-1950s, the psychoactive compound DMT has attracted the attention of experimentalists and prohibitionists, scientists and artists, alchemists and hyperspace emissaries. Until now, the complete story of DMT has remained untold.Mystery School in Hyperspace is the first book to delve into the history of this substance, the discovery of its properties, and the impact it has had on poets, artists, and musicians.
DMT has appeared at crucial junctures in countercultural history. It was present at the meeting between Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and Tim Leary's associates. It guided the inception of the Grateful Dead in 1965. It showed up in Berkeley in the same year, falling into the hands of Terence McKenna, who would eventually become its champion in the post-rave neo-psychedelic movement of the 1990s. Its indole vapor drifted through Portugal's Boom Festival and has been evident at Nevada's Burning Man, where DMT has been adopted as spiritual technology supplying shape, color, and depth to a visionary art movement. The growing prevalence of use is evident in a vast networked independent research culture, and in aesthetic impact. As this book traces the effect of DMT's release into the cultural bloodstream, the results should be of great interest to contemporary readers.
The book permits a broad reading audience to join ongoing debates in studies in consciousness and theology where the brain is held to be either a generator or a receiver of consciousness. The implications of the "spirit molecule" or "the brain's own psychedelic" among other theories illustrate that DMT may lift the lid on the Pandora's Box of consciousness.
Features a foreword by Dennis McKenna and twenty-five color illustrations by various artists, including Martina Hoffmann, Robert Venosa, Alex Grey, Android Jones, Luke Brown, Carey Thompson, Adam Scott Miller, and Cyb). Cover art by Beau Deeley.
This is clearly not a "how-to book" or user manual. Rather, this cultural history exposes many myths and also reveals how DMT has had a beneficial influence on the lives of many, including many belonging to a vast underground network whose reports and initiatives expose drug war propaganda and shine a light in the shadows. This conversation is highly relevant at a time when significant advances are being made to lift the moratorium on human research with psychedelics.
