Unfortunately, I can't say that Michael Pollan's attempt to capture the new psychedelic zeitgeist changed mine. Perhaps this is simply because it is aimed at readers who, like Pollan, start off pyschedelically and philosophically naive. I didn't need anyone to convince me that it might be interesting to alter my consciousness, nor that it can be done fairly safely with drugs, nor even that such experiences could have a profound and lasting effect on my worldview. For the already intrepid psychonaut, the book exhibits mainly the endearing, amusing, but also kinda boring, breathlessness with which one (faintly) recalls early experiments. So yeah dude, this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it's not just, it might not be just such a simple... uh, you know?
I agree completely. I sympathize with the mind-blowingness of It. All. I understand how hard it is to convey the ineffability of the experience without ending up in vague platitudes about how all is one (too late). I'm also frustrated by the fact that Pollan spent 400 pages chronically and neurotically doubting the reality of his own experience. While I am, again, no stranger to this type of doubting, there's also a pretty obvious spiritual and philosophical retort for it. All experience is real. You may experience unreal objects, but the experience itself cannot be unreal. Perhaps this is more tautology than theory. Nevertheless, keeping it in mind is inoculation against the dismissive scientific rationalism that aims to separate us from our experience.
For me, the most interesting part of the book was his history of early psychedelic research. While it seemed neither insightful nor particularly well told, it nonetheless brought some new shit to light. It would have made a great magazine article.
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