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Journeys Into the Bright World
A guide to the sacramental use of medical technology in raising the consciousness of man. Focused on the therapeutic and mind-expanding effects of ketamine hydrochloride.
- GenresDrugsNonfiction
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 8, 2017
Relevance: This is the definitive case-study/memoir of ketamine's dissociative properties. Moore's findings, while not unique at the time, have been ever more recently validated by icy scientific foray into NMDAR antagonism, lifting ligands like agmatine and IMNT from their former obscurity. If I'm not mistaken ketamine has also been cleared as a treatment for SSRi-resistant depressive disorders. Tremendous read, supplement with K. Jansen's formal scientific review of the substance.
Style: Marcia Moore began and (perhaps prematurely) ended her career as a writer, not a psychonaut, professional activist or neurophysician, and her prose bears those hallmarks. Its very pleasing to read as a memoir, and despite lacking any formal scientific or even clerical qualifications the author articulates her journal in a matter-of-fact way, generously superior to the more prominent titles in psychedelia, with their repetitious new-age babbling or shrill Banksy soap-boxing. It's a dreamy, personal volume.
If you like David Lynch and hate Terrence McKenna, you'll love this book.
Style: Marcia Moore began and (perhaps prematurely) ended her career as a writer, not a psychonaut, professional activist or neurophysician, and her prose bears those hallmarks. Its very pleasing to read as a memoir, and despite lacking any formal scientific or even clerical qualifications the author articulates her journal in a matter-of-fact way, generously superior to the more prominent titles in psychedelia, with their repetitious new-age babbling or shrill Banksy soap-boxing. It's a dreamy, personal volume.
If you like David Lynch and hate Terrence McKenna, you'll love this book.
January 5, 2020
Checked it out because it's one of the classics on ketamine but it's a stupefyingly boring book about a white lady taking drugs while talking about things like "archetypal Egypt" and "oriental feelings." DNF.
February 8, 2008
You can get there from here and you do not need
Ketamine Hydrochloride.. Lucid dreaming is a way..
Ketamine Hydrochloride.. Lucid dreaming is a way..
February 21, 2020
This is one deeply transcendent, therapeutic, psychic, wildly poetic, imagery-dense, and mind-unlocking book. Marcia Moore (along with her anesthesiologist husband Howard Altounian) was one of the very first proponents, psychonauts, & explorers of Samadhi Therapy---a powerful disassociative/psychedelic therapy involving the anesthetic hallucinogen ketamine; flying participants into ego-dissolving K-holes and immersing them with inner mystical spiritual experiences of hyper-sentience & the emotionally supernatural. These experiences involve deep penetration of the subconscious, bright ascendance to the ethereal, contact with other-dimensional entities/intelligences, transpersonal consciousness, reliving of past memories/traumas, soaring through stars & galaxies, among countless other indescribable out-of-body Near Death-esque Experiences. - Back in the 70's when this atlas & guide to the ketaverse was published, her spiritual work has pioneered the way for thousands of changed lives, and taking the first steps towards public acceptance, such as the FDA-approved ketamine-induced spiritual experiences available now in the medical community for treatment of depression, PTSD, terminal cancer despair, and other issues. - There is an entirely endless multitude of universes & perspectives out there to be experienced that your average person (assembled in a capitalist, factory-line, follow-the-rules-of-profit-making society) foolishly writes off as madness or escapism (often out of subconscious fear of their worldview being shattered or the suppressed selves they may find within). But the world is slowly opening its eyes, exponentially more people are having experiences such as these every year and governments are realizing the truth of our enormous collective consciousness. - I highly recommend reading Journeys Into The Bright World and taking this journey with her, it is truly beautiful, educational, personal, intriguing, and paradigm-shifting.
August 7, 2019
Though this book is long out of print, it was very easy to find online, and proved an intriguing read. Though it's filled with 70's new age gobbledegook about astrology, aliens, and other stuff of that ilk, Moore does manage to drop a few good truth bombs about "gratuitous grace" and other aspects of the psychedelic experience. I also enjoyed reading her ketamine trip reports, whose super-feminine attributes was a nice change to the very male viewpoint typically present in psychedelic literature. Sadly, it was hard not to read in between the lines; it was obvious to me she was getting psychologically addicted to ketamine, which eventually lead to her death via exposure (she went outside on a winter night too high to notice it was too damn cold).
May 22, 2022
Although this book attempts to make an academic argument for the use of the narcotic Ketamine, it largely fails. This is compounded by the circumstances of Moore's death whereby extremely high on Ketamine (aka "in the K hole"), she wandered into a forest in the depths of a freezing cold Wisconsin winter night and died of hypothermia.
Ketamine is notorious for its dissociative affects whereby users see themselves in the 3rd person and feel that they've made profound insights into the world and how it works - because they're looking at the world from the outside or, as Moore puts it, from a "God's Eye" point of view. And while Moore attempts to make a scholarly case for this disassociation and the "true-meaning-of-life" insights she claims her prolonged use of Ketamine brought her, the reader can't help but recognise that they're being presented with the addict's destructive cycle of denial and rationale for avoiding a program of recovery. Personally, from some very limited experience, the K-hole is no fun whatsoever, and I am quite amazed at the way Ketamine has become, in the last few years, a party drug similar to cocaine and ecstasy - because it is not a stimulant, it is an anesthetic and users have hallucinogenic experiences and feel removed from their surroundings while also slowing down, or going on a downer, rather than wanting to dance and sing and love everybody around them.
Why do people take drugs? Primarily because they're fun - at the start. But as dependency takes hold and addiction sets in, drug users will find all sorts of rationale for their continued use; meanwhile their lives descend into chaos and eventually they die - in Moore's case in a freezing cold forest on a dark winter night because Ketamine's anesthetic qualities meant she could not feel the cold nor realise the effects that freezing weather was having on her body.
But, of course, because Moore was an accomplished and well published scholar with an engaging writing style, she managed to paper over the cracks of the horrors and terrors of drug addiction with some very neat, seemingly profound, erudite, and stylistic prose.
Very much of its time, the 1970s, if you are going to read this book (and it's not a bad read) you would do well to place it within the context of being a hangover from the counter culture and hippie movements of the late-1960s; a time during which many believed that Ketamine was an wonder-drug that could bring to the user profound insights into the workings of the world, humanity, and the human psyche. This view of non-medical, non-prescribed, and unsupervised use of Ketamine, in the critical opinion of this reviewer anyway, belongs to that historical era and should stay there.
Ketamine is notorious for its dissociative affects whereby users see themselves in the 3rd person and feel that they've made profound insights into the world and how it works - because they're looking at the world from the outside or, as Moore puts it, from a "God's Eye" point of view. And while Moore attempts to make a scholarly case for this disassociation and the "true-meaning-of-life" insights she claims her prolonged use of Ketamine brought her, the reader can't help but recognise that they're being presented with the addict's destructive cycle of denial and rationale for avoiding a program of recovery. Personally, from some very limited experience, the K-hole is no fun whatsoever, and I am quite amazed at the way Ketamine has become, in the last few years, a party drug similar to cocaine and ecstasy - because it is not a stimulant, it is an anesthetic and users have hallucinogenic experiences and feel removed from their surroundings while also slowing down, or going on a downer, rather than wanting to dance and sing and love everybody around them.
Why do people take drugs? Primarily because they're fun - at the start. But as dependency takes hold and addiction sets in, drug users will find all sorts of rationale for their continued use; meanwhile their lives descend into chaos and eventually they die - in Moore's case in a freezing cold forest on a dark winter night because Ketamine's anesthetic qualities meant she could not feel the cold nor realise the effects that freezing weather was having on her body.
But, of course, because Moore was an accomplished and well published scholar with an engaging writing style, she managed to paper over the cracks of the horrors and terrors of drug addiction with some very neat, seemingly profound, erudite, and stylistic prose.
Very much of its time, the 1970s, if you are going to read this book (and it's not a bad read) you would do well to place it within the context of being a hangover from the counter culture and hippie movements of the late-1960s; a time during which many believed that Ketamine was an wonder-drug that could bring to the user profound insights into the workings of the world, humanity, and the human psyche. This view of non-medical, non-prescribed, and unsupervised use of Ketamine, in the critical opinion of this reviewer anyway, belongs to that historical era and should stay there.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews