Tripping
An Anthology of True-life Psychedelic Adventures

Edited and with an Introduction and Other Material
by Charles Hayes
Penguin Books, 492 pp., $18

Reviewed by Reppy Duart, D.D.

Whaddaya gonna do? You get 400 pages into a book, you’re already composing all-stops-pulled, laudatory opening lines for the review:

"You probably don’t know it, but if you have any interest in the history of consciousness, your own as well as that of everybody else, you owe a debt of gratitude to Charles Hayes, editor of Tripping: An Anthology of True-life Psychedelic Adventures."

Yep, 400 pages of really good stuff, and you’re all set to write an unqualified BUY-THIS-BOOK review.

Because, truly, Charles Hayes has done us all a great service. By various means, including one of those teaser requests for help in the New York Times Book Review, he compiled fifty interviews with an extraordinary range of people, famous to infamous to unknown, concerning their first experiences with psychedelics. Skillfully transcribed, the stories he got speak vividly, candidly, and grippingly of the reality of the so-called mind-expanding drugs. From ecstasy to despair, bliss to befuddlement, serenity to slapstick, it’s all here.

These are definitely not the stories your parents want you to read, and definitely not the stories your highly paid ersatz parents who run the so-called war on drugs want you to read. Yes, many of the tales are profoundly, movingly, even frighteningly cautionary. Not everybody has a great trip. Far from it. But even the most harrowing experiences produce thoughtful, considered responses. Not "Just say no" but more along the lines of, "If you’re going to do it, know beforehand what you’re getting into."

What comes so clear is the stupidity of the conflation by world civilization of ALL mind-altering drugs, except of course the big three (alcohol, caffeine, nicotine). The misguided and dangerous futility of an anti-drug policy which lumps heroin with marijuana, cocaine with mescaline, is implicit in every page of this book.

Human encounters with psychedelics have been going on for millennia. They will continue to go on no matter the myopic fears of the brain police, the legislatures, the courts, the churches, the schools of a given culture. Why? Because they’re fun? Sure. Because they’re recreational? Sure. But primarily because these drugs, as Aldous Huxley cribbing from William Blake pointed out, do nothing less or more than open the doors of perception.

Dangerous? Yes. Hayes’s adventurers sometimes get themselves into some pretty awful fixes. (Not to mention a few that are also pretty funny.) We are all products of a highly controlled and controlling society, one which with heavy hand defines and structures and reinforces its own narrow version of reality. To put yourself in a position where a door opens and you step out of that reality into a vaster realm is, to some extent, to put yourself at risk.

The people in Tripping all did that. They put themselves at risk. To write that sentence more accurately: They put their selves at risk. But the news that the Big Daddies all over the world think they can conceal by teaching us to Just Say No is that these people came back not just changed but changed for the better. Not every time, and the change was not necessarily what had been expected or hoped for. They saw more, and they saw better. Or at least: they were given the opportunity to see more and better.

The danger here, as these stories remind us, is not in the drugs themselves but in the gross mis-information surrounding them, both the "official" version and the street version. Anyone, for example, who takes DMT as a recreational drug is at best a fool. Or, for that matter, pure LSD.

Indigenous people know this and approach the drugs with awe, caution, and a certain sacramental attitude. We more advanced people slap a big NO! label on them and then leave the young to the most haphazard kinds of experimentation.

What I came away with from 400 pages of stories was a renewed appreciation for the determined resilience of the human spirit. We will, by God, explore, and we will explore to the limits of our perception, no matter what the conditions.

Eponymously, I was reminded several times of this publication’s namesake. Magellan had a terrible time getting around the southern tip of South America, that dreadful, storm-lashed archipelago off Tierra del Fuego, finally finding a way through on a path which now bears his name: the Straits of Magellan. And when he finally got through, what did he see? What opened itself before his tormented perception? A vast, calm body of water so lovely, so inviting, that he named it the Pacific Ocean.

Little, of course, did he know of what lay ahead as he struggled to cross this "new" body of water, which turned out often to be pacific in name only.

So too with us and these vaster realities which no secular forces are going to keep us from exploring. An easy trip? Often, but not always. A worthwhile trip? Hayes’s sample of 50 people would surely, almost to a person, say yes, yes, and yes.

So what’s the problem? You remember, at the top I mentioned a problem. The problem is that Mr. Hayes chose to end his marvelous compilation with a 40-page conversation with the late Terence McKenna. Maybe for some this alone is reason enough to buy the book. For others, maybe not. If Timothy Leary was the Billy Graham of psychedelics, Terence McKenna was the Oral Roberts. The "conversation" is actually a 120-decibel sermon in which McKenna preaches relentlessly to the choir: Psychedelics are not only the human panacea, they are the GALACTIC, indeed the COSMIC panacea; they are why we are here; all art, all science falls away as we, through the miraculous intervention of the drugs, encounter and become first gods, then God, and then Meta-God." Etc.

The sad thing is that McKenna, like Leary, has quite a bit of useful information. It’s just very difficult to hear it amidst the thundering pulpit-pounding of his incessant proselytizing. For example, his experience with, and remarks about, DMT are richly thought-provoking.

Still and all, smothered and confined as we these days are by the predictable, over-hyped wonders of the "new" media, including the very medium on which you are reading this, to have 50 first-hand reports from true cybernauts is an effective antidote to the technological anesthesia that today passes for culture.

Maybe the time has come to rename the drugs. How about: "psychesthetics"? What is at issue here is beauty, and our perception of it. Including, perhaps above all, the perception of the beauty of consciousness itself. Tripping will renew that awareness within you.

As I was being booked at the Hall of Justice, I saw several cops tapping away at typewriters. I figured they were poets and that I’d been brought to the poet’s induction center. Far out! At the end of all this, they’ll give me a credential. I’d briefly pledged a fraternity as an undergraduate at UCLA, and I knew that you were put through all sorts of ridiculous hardships in order to joing I thought this must be a rite of initiation into a secret society.
    --Stephen Kessler,
      in Tripping.

One hears much about the dissolution of the ego on psychedelics, but this was more like the discovery of the ego. The small kernel of self that survived the meltdown was actually much deeper than the wordsmith persona on which I’d prided myself. Before I even learned how to speak, this core had existed, and it persisted now after the apparent loss of that ability. I was content to be that nucleus of personality and to be overwhelmed with the visual imagery that was now erupting behind my closed eyelids.
    --Robert Charles Wilson,
      in Tripping.