Reviews
A Review from Erowid by Chris Mays, 5/19/2011
The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred
Journeys
http://www.erowid.org/library/review/review.php?p=334
by James Fadiman, Ph.D.
Park Street Press 2011
ISBN:1594774021
With the publication of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, James Fadiman has
inaugurated a new era of spiritual and practical exploration of inner space. Mind
you, he didn’ t invent or even rediscover the spiritual use of entheogens, nor the
psychotherapeutic exploration of psychoactive plants and chemicals, but this guidebook
represents a bold re-emergence of an ancient healing practice.
Fadiman, a co-founder of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and author most
recently of an undergraduate psychology textbook and The Other Side of Haight: A
Novel, is a champion of psychedelic guiding. He’ s been around since the giddy big bang
of psychedelic culture, and now, gladly, and with hope, turns the keys to guided journeys
over to the grandchildren of that distant revolution. There’ s plenty by and about him on
the web, if you’re curious.
Fadiman gets right to the guided session instruction without disclaimers and apologies—
a courteous gesture considering we’ve waited for more than a generation already. The
guidebook is replete with suggestions for both guide and voyager regarding everything
from music, food and lighting to finer aesthetic points. The six aspects of the well-
conceived voyage are set and setting (which you knew), but also: substance, sitter,
session, and situation. The six stages of a voyaging session are all simple and easily
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made with canvas, brushes and paint: within Fadiman’s simple protocol exists a universe
of possibilities.
Not all these possibilities are happy ones, naturally, so there is plenty of material on what
can go wrong, and how to recover. Some chapters, contributed in part by other writers,
speak to the experiences of pioneering elders and suggest how voyaging can address
healing, creativity, problem solving and everyday life. Other chapters bring history,
science and future directions for research and experimentation into context.
No single volume could hope to address all the issues, and especially the practical
concerns, of the myriad combinatorial nodes of the Six S’s, so The Psychedelic
Explorer’ s Guide wisely points out to the Web for other resources, and to a dedicated
wiki, to which you, too, may contribute.
As noted, this topic has been around for a while; the World Health Organization
published Ataractic and Hallucinogenic Drugs in Psychiatry in 1958! The 60s saw
several widely read personal narratives of voyaging, a handful of guidebooks, quite a
bit of science, and a larger number of rants, both pro and con, religious and secular,
erudite and fulminating. The intervening decades brought hundreds of books about
hallucinogens, cannabis and other drugs in religious, cultural, medical and literary
contexts, but relatively few had practical advice or spiritual use in mind, although you
could read between the lines, and many did.
The “How I Tripped Good” genre is alive and well—scarce copies of such books by folks
who tripped to death fetch handsome prices—as is the perennially larger “ How I Fucked
Up Getting Fucked Up” school, which are quickly remaindered. But, The Psychedelic
Explorer’s Guide belongs to an altogether higher order of endeavor, puns happily winked
at. Truly destined to be a classic. Don’ t leave everyday reality without it.
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