Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
60 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A dated reference, read with caution, January 6, 2005
DeKorne's _Psychedelic Shamanism_ continues to be a Must Read for anyone who considers entheogens and psychedelics to be indispensable allies in their spiritual quest. I can, however, only give the book three stars at the present time. There are several reasons for this:
- His advice on extraction of DMT from familiar grasses is, he admits, flawed. Instead of extracting n,n-DMT, he extracted 5-meo-dmt. This is an enormously different psychoactive material with very different dosing guidelines and effects. Any search on the experience vault at erowid will demonstrate that 5-meo-dmt is a powerful and possibly dangerous (if dosed incorrectly) material and qualitatively vastly different from n,n-dmt. But the fact that he is extracting 5-meo-dmt instead of n,n-dmt is presented almost as a footnote. I really feel that whole chapter should be stricken.
- His remarks that Salvia Divinorum is a weak psychoactive omits all of Daniel Siebert's work on the subject. We now know that Salvia Divinorum is one of the most powerful and spiritually useful of the entheogenic allies. Any book on psychedelic shamanism that omits most of what we know about S.D. must at this time be considered quite dated.
The information in this book is so dated that about anything deKorne writes should be confirmed by Erowid and other sources first.
The lack of a detailed treatment of Set, Setting and Sitter is troubling in a book so many use as a working reference. Dosing guidelines are also not dealt with extensively. There is so much missing in this book.
Mr. deKorne's comments on entities and the imaginal realm are right on target. But observing that noetic space is populated, and that not all that we encounter is trustworthy, tells us very little about how to proceed in psychedelic space, and how to regard these entities and deal with these impressions. Psychonauts need better guidance at this point. Psychedelic Shamanism is a good, albeit dated, travelogue. That is a given. But we need much more than that at this point. We need methodology. We need true shamanic guidance.
A really great monograph on psychedelic methodology can be found on the Internet by searching on the phrase "Comments on the Psilocybin Mushroom." I can also recommend many of the books of Eckhart Tolle, Stanislav Grof, and the works of Ralph Metzner. Many of the ideas in Michael Harner's _Way of the Shaman_ can also be adapted to psychedelic work by the imaginative reader.
Unfortunately, there really is not any one good source of information on navigating the psychedelic realm. Start with deKorne, and use his bibliography to read the many other excellent books on the topic. Read everything you can at Erowid. At this point we all have to piece it together for ourselves. Trust nothing you read until you have confirmed it again, and again.
|
|
|
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Indispensable Guide to the Gateways to the Imaginal Realms, May 9, 2001
By A Customer
The ideas put forth in this work have the potential to revolutionize current thinking in psychology, psychiatry and religion, so be prepared to either have your mind blown and/or to suspect the author is a burnt out acid job. Personally I think DeKorne has gone through some serious mental and emotional trials and come out the other end amazingly lucid and wise. This book goes far to dispel some dangerous or romantic ideas going around about the ingestion of certain "hallucinogenic" plants, such as datura and morning glory seeds. DeKorne makes it clear that many of these plants are best avoided because all they have to offer is making the ingester deathly ill, and in some cases deathly dead. He gently steers the reader towards the more reliable substances, in particular psilocybin mushrooms. This is done by sharing a wealth of both personal and researched experience leading the reader to draw their own conclusions. For those adventurous enough to try the riskier entheogens, solid info on cultivation, processing and dosage is provided. Other than the psylocybin the DMT containing plants sound the most promising, though after reading this book (and experience with some of the other substances) I agree with the author that psilocybin mushrooms alone provide all the fuel anyone could ever need to launch into deep inner space, especially taken with an MAO inhibitor. This book further convinces me there is no need to mess with more dangerous substances since the dispersion of the tried, true and unarguably well disposed towards humanity magic mushrooms.
|
|
|
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An intelligent, humorous and entertaining read., January 10, 2000
Even if you have no interest in ingesting the psychedelic substances described, this book is mind opening.If you choose to take psychedelics, then the suggested dosages, tangible descriptions of the shamanic dimensions, color photos and drawings of the following plants will be very useful: Peyote, San Pedro, Salvia divinorum, DMT, Ayahuasca, Psilocybin, Belladonna alkaloids and others. Each one is explored in depth, by the author who has had personal experience in ingesting them. If psychedelic plants came as prescriptions with warning labels, they'd have this book attached to them.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Rick Strassman
by Terence McKenna
by Graham Hancock
