Author Archive
Good-bye Sasha: Legendary Chemist Alexander Shulgin Dies at 88
Dr. Alexander Shulgin, the influential and beloved psychedelic pioneer, has passed away at the age of 88. He died of liver cancer on Monday, 2 June, surrounded by family and friends at his home in California. Shulgin had suffered declining health in the past few years, including a stroke and the onset of dementia beginning in 2010. About his final days, his wife Ann wrote: Sasha knows that he’s dying, but that doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t know he has cancer of the liver, and there’s no need for him to know; that knowledge would give him nothing...
Zen Float Tent: The First Affordable Isolation Tank for Home
Update: The wildly successful Kickstarter campaign is complete, having raised over $295,000. Good news for all you Isolation Tank “floaters” — a new company is about to start producing the cheapest-ever in-home isolation tank, called the Zen Float Tent. Founder Shane Stott says his float tank “ships inexpensively, assembles in any room and offers personal sensory deprivation.” In a video, he assembles one in only fifteen minutes. They’ve done extensive prototyping and testing, and frankly it looks awesome. Shane seems like a very genuine guy and his enthusiasm is contagious. To raise funds for the first manufacturing...
This Cube of Infinite Mirrors Expands, Contracts, and Blows Your Mind
This light sculpture by Numen/For Use bends reality to a new level. It’s a large cube of one-way mirrors lined with bright lights along the edges. Three of the cube’s six surfaces are made of flexible membrane, which bend as air is pumped into the cube by a huge compressor on one side. The other three surfaces are semi-transparent mirrors, so you can see into the cube’s infinite dimensions without leaving a reflection. In other words, you get to peek into the Escher-esque abyss as it changes shape: “By inflating or deflating the air tank, the membrane turns convex or concave,...
Moksha Medicine: Powerful Excerpts from Huxley’s “Island”
One of my favorite books is Island by Aldous Huxley, a book often prized by psychonauts and others who enjoy looking at society from the outside in. In Island, Huxley lays out the structure for an ideal society while making piercing criticisms of modern Western culture. As the title indicates, Huxley’s utopia is set on a small island, far removed from modern technology and divisive global politics. Some have criticized the book’s characterization and plot, but in Island these are secondary. This book’s main strength is in elaborating a great thinker’s vision of a truly civilized society. I want to share a couple excerpts...
“Room 8” — The Ending of this Short Film is Mind-Blowing
This 7-minute film blew me away. At first the stark tone and lighting drew me in. Then things started getting trippy in Room 8 and I couldn’t look away. It’s a fantastic film with echoes of Escher, Borges, Christopher Nolan, and Richard Kelly. (You probably know M.C. Escher and Christopher Nolan, but Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentinian writer whose incredible stories often featured mirrors, mazes, and infinity. Richard Kelly is the director of Donnie Darko and The Box, two very trippy movies.) Definitely hit full screen and pay attention for this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RGYdbLSizI Incredible as it may be, I...
Moving Into the Sacred World of DMT, by Nick Sand
Nick Sand is one of the most prolific and well-known underground chemists in history. From 1966 to 1996, he produced huge amounts of LSD, as well as MDMA, synthetic mescaline, DMT, and other psychedelics that were distributed around the globe. Along with Tim Scully, Nick Sand was responsible for producing over 3 million hits of Orange Sunshine, a brand of LSD that was renowned for its quality and purity in the Sixties. Sand has a particular fondness for DMT. In fact, it was a DMT vision quest in the 60s that convinced Sand to dedicate his life to...
Life Versus Entropy Tripping on Fractals, God, and the Mystery of Existence
Setting: Early morning at a lakeside cabin in the woods of Vermont. Chemical lens: 25I-NBOMe, a research chemical with effects resembling LSD. (25I-NBOMe is a very new chemical, its safety profile is largely unknown, and lethal overdoses have been reported. Consuming 25I-NBOMe or other research chemicals is risky and I do not recommend it.) I walk outside as dawn arrives. Fog rolls across the lake and wraps the trees in a gauzy shroud. The silence is punctuated only by the chatter of birds and my own footsteps. My breathing takes its cue from the lake, gentle and unhurried. Where...
Are Entities and Plant Spirits Real? A Skeptic's Guide to Tripping
Trips are like dreams. A genuine insight may bubble up from deep in your subconscious, handily solving a problem that your sober mind found intractable. Or you might emerge with absolute nonsense, the product of synapses firing without the guidance of logic and consistency. You don’t take your dreams as absolute truth upon waking, and psychedelics should be no different. It’s crucial to think critically about which lessons to take back into consensus reality, and which to leave behind. Wisdom or Dogma? Many psychonauts spread their personal beliefs and speculations as though they were fact. Sometimes they take an...
Sasha Shulgin Compares Drug War to Persecution of Galileo
I was so struck by this passage from Alexander Shulgin’s book Tihkal (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved) that I had to share it here: Professor David Nutt has made a similar comparison, describing the UN’s ban on psychedelics as “the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Galileo.” You can read the second half of Tihkal (the chemical section) on Erowid, or better yet on isomerdesign.com where it is more accurate and more user-friendly. But the first half of the book remains copyrighted, so if you’d like to read the whole thing,...
How to Make Celestial Music with an Oven Rack
Want to enjoy a trippy concert of chimes and gongs that only you can hear? Great, because that’s what today’s post is about. As you may have noticed if you have ever removed your oven rack for cleaning, striking it causes it to vibrate, and the vibrations create a chiming sound. But the sound is very quiet, which is why strings are necessary for this activity. The strings act as crude amplifiers plugged directly into the ears, transmitting the sound to the listener. This activity is fascinating enough if you’re sober, but it’s ten times more effective when...
Happy Birthday, Psy Frontier! The Best of Year One
To see the top ten posts of the past year, scroll down. My first post — a video of a neon tree that I shot in Austin, Texas while tripping on shrooms — went online one year ago. And what a year it’s been! Say hello on Twitter or Facebook! In its first year, Psychedelic Frontier gathered around 500 Facebook fans, a thousand Twitter followers, and hundreds of thousands of views from people all around the world. But the numbers mean nothing compared to engagement — what really thrills me is when I get to interact with my...
My Story, “Fireworks,” Featured in Psypress UK 2014
My previously unpublished tale, Fireworks, is featured in the latest edition of psychedelic magazine Psypress UK. You can get a copy for just £5 plus shipping (in the US, it comes out to $17 total, but it’s well worth it). Other featured writers include Dale Bewan, author of Dropping Acid, Ross Heaven, author of several books on shamanism, and Neil M. Goldsmith, author of Psychedelic Healing. Plus ten other submissions with titles like Myco-metaphysics, The Dogmatist’s Debacle, and Reigniting Awe. And check out the cover art by Jeremy Beswick on the right. Intrigued? So am I — I can’t wait for my copy to arrive in the mail! My...