art: Tim Parish             


A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

- Tim Leary, The Psychedelic Experience, 1964



A few months back a friend went on a psychedelic pilgrimage to California for his first Grateful Dead concert sans Jerry Garcia. By bizarre coincidence he’d parked his car right near the Googleplex: a series of suburban blocks with interlocking offices and parklands that serves as the global headquarters for Google, the world’s most popular search engine. Tripping through the Googleplex at night he said: “there was this inescapable feeling that we were in a maze... You couldn’t help but feel you were *in* the search engine.”

Neither Google nor the acid could help him find his car, but his story does highlight what is potentially the biggest issue facing planetary culture in our turbulent times: the need for a map. What exactly does that mean? And what does all this have to do with psychedelics, you might ask?

Well the type of map we need to help steer us to a sustainable future can’t be drawn by hand. We need to see beyond the contours of the collapsing global paradigm and the reality tunnels we have inherited – and we need to do it fast. Psychedelics, hallucinogens, entheogens, sacred plants, spirit molecules: whatever you want to call them, they function at the level of dreams, poetry and magic. Under their spell the invisible landscape becomes visible and the profane world is once again understood to be connected to the Divine.

Psychedelics are one of the change agents that can help us make this connection back to the sacred, but they are not the only one. Unlike meditation, prayer, or art, however, they have been made illegal by the temporary laws of the day. Why? This is one of the central ethical questions which must be answered.

As anarchist-theorist Hakim Bey has said: “Global Capital and universal Image seem able to absorb almost any ‘outside’ and transform it into an area of commodification and control. But somehow, for some strange reason, Capital appears unable or unwilling to absorb the entheogenic dimension. It persists in making war on mind-altering or transformative substances, rather than attempting to ‘co-opt’ and hegemonise their power. In other words it would seem that some sort of authentic power is at stake here.”

Over forty years ago another generation tried to seize back the power of defining their own reality. We forget in this day and age of fast breeding social networks, virtual economies and Second Lives, that we are living in an altered technological space birthed by the expanded awareness of the 60s generation. Modern media would have us believe that the psychedelic experience is something intrinsically bound to ageing hippies, tie-die, acid tabs and cosmic pronouncements, but nothing could be further from the truth.

As the stories in this collection show, the shamanic perspective has existed in all indigenous cultures, and it is now slowly resurfacing in the West in what underground philosopher Terence McKenna has called an ‘archaic revival’. The Journeybook allows you to travel through time and space and partake of mushrooms at Harvard, hemp in Nimbin, DMT in the Amazon and anti-depressants in the suburbs of the West, to name but a few of the experiences which await you. Dance at Dionysian festivals, meet alchemists in the laboratories of Switzerland, trippers in the corporate highrises of Brisvegas, and journey to the edge of the universe within our anthology’s pages...

As the observant reader will also note, The Journeybook has a different format than the traditional linear reading experience. With the ‘flip-book’ format you can start your journey with the shamanic history of altered states, or begin with the chemical stories of the 21st century. The page numbers count down from the edges and both pathways lead to the centre.

Read on. Tune in. Discover.


Rak Razam
Editor