Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change

by Tao Lin

Part memoir, part history, part journalistic expos�, Trip is a look at psychedelic drugs, literature, and alienation from one of the twenty-first century's most innovative novelists--The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for a new generation. A Vintage Original.

While reeling from one of the most creative--but at times self-destructive--outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin's first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe?

In exploring these ideas and detailing his experiences with psilocybin, DMT, salvia, and cannabis, Lin takes readers on a trip through nature, his own past, psychedelic culture, and the unknown.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Drugs, Psychology, Science, Biography, Spirituality

320 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2018

About the author

Tao Lin posts on Substack and lives in Hawaii.

Reviews

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first nonfiction book and first book in five years.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved reading this, loved holding it on the subway with its subtitle and author-drawn mandala, wanted nothing other than to read it when I wasn't reading it, loved the symbiosis of life and literature in the third-person epilogue, loved how this champions complexity and at least once uses the word "complexify," but ultimately it's the overall structure I most appreciated the morning after finishing it, the clearly delineated rational movement through its subjects, with every conclusion more like a propulsion into the next chapter, the divisions as clear as the segues, layering like that as the author self-transforms in life and lit like Terence McKenna's self-dribbling mirrored basketball elves composed of visual language. Loved the transition from Terence McKenna's psychedelic extremism ("heroic doses") to Kathleen Harrison's sustainable plant-centricism (most troubling mental states can be alleviated by looking at a leaf for two minutes), along the way detailing the histories and chemical consistencies of DMT, LSD, psilocybin, salvia, cannabis, and Tao's own experience with each, as well as his own history and existential consistency thanks to video games, punk music, literature, depressions, anxiety, alienation, pharmaceutical drugs.

In 2004, I posted one of his first stories on the weird little lit site I edited from 1999 to 2014, Tao actually first invited me to Goodreads in 2007, and I talked to him for a while at a Karl One Knausgaard event at McNally-Jackson Books a few years ago, but I don't use the "potential conflict of interest" tag I use when I know someone whose book I'm writing about, even if I've been an online literary acquaintance of this author for ~14 years. There's something about his writing/perspective that seems to prefer a sincere response, without restraining or softening critique (see my review of Shoplifting from American Apparel) or erring on the side of praise. With this, when I saw Tao announce it a few months ago on Facebook, I immediately preordered it since it's up my alley, or aligns with an interest dormant since my teen and early college years stirring again, most likely among mid-life crisis rumblings related to a resurgence in playing music and listening to The Dead again after nearly two decades away from it. I recently read (and didn't love) DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible after watching DMT: The Spirit Molecule multiple times on Netflix, loving the descriptions of the DMT experience, the molecular interconnectedness of plants and animals, the promise or at least possibility of a burst of endogenous DMT upon death in particular, and of course I get all giddy when Dennis McKenna talks about elves in the form of self-dribbling basketballs. In high school, I'd read Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" and "Island," Tom Woolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream," and maybe a few others as I experimented with my own related real-time experiences with friends or tens of thousands of similarly addled others first at late-'80s Dead and then early '90s Phish shows. I once experienced the visual language McKenna talks about -- words emerging in color from a friend's mouth -- but generally the extent of my related reading and experience is mostly confined to when I was fifteen to about nineteen years old, a long time ago now. And the more I peek into this world now the more I see that I've just barely scratched its surface.

So, with that significant yet sufficiently superficial previous exposure/experience in hand, Tao's book interested me in part in that it ignored the traditional division between Timothy Leary's controlled set/setting and Ken Kesey's all-out freakout schools of psychedelic experiences. I liked that he instead focused on McKenna and himself and Kathleen Harrison. Something that occurred to me at times was that Tao wasn't necessarily allowing himself to be self-critical regarding his current path and transition from opiates, downers, synthetic drugs to natural psychedelics in that he never seemed to question that he's essentially transforming into a hippie, someone interested in macrocosmic consciousness (you ever think that there are like as many atoms inside us as there are galaxies and stars in the universe, man), organic healthiness, plant appreciation, etc. But it works since Tao is otherwise super-self-reflective and his parents live in Taipei instead of Vermont or Oregon -- meaning the sort of newfound hippiedom he's expressing doesn't seem like his birthright or a stereotypical progression/well-trodden path and as such it seems sincere and makes for interesting reading. He also listens to Chopin instead of The Dead or Phish, not that there's anything wrong with those bands (I've always been a "Dark Star" enthusiast). This is autobiographical non-fiction but the autobiographical element emerges from someone without the constraints of conventional employment, marriage (I suppose his official marital status is separated but he's essentially divorced), mortgage, fatherhood -- that is, it's the memoir of a man without responsibilities (no pets even), who can afford to throw away his computer once and snap another computer's screen another time and possibly intentionally discard his iPhone. Not a serious critique, just something this reader was aware of as someone filled to capacity with responsibilities at the time.

But again, generally, I loved reading it, found it surprising, thoughtful, a champion of complexity over unnatural reductions of reality (maybe other than the masculine/feminine duality toward the end), at times I found it funny (LOL'd when he said he was now in better mental and physical health and therefore had no excuse not to try DMT), it added a few books to my reading list (I started True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna immediately after finishing this), and even if Tao is transforming into a West Coast hippie, I liked the focus on change (I loved at the end when the guy I've always assumed subsisted solely on kale smoothies orders half a chicken since he's trying to eat more like an aborigine). Also, I like that it's essentially evangelical about psychedelics -- I hope it inspires Tao Lin fans to elevate their dead-pan depressed single-quote consciousness and contributes to the overall easing of laws throughout the country. It's hard to believe that in Pennsylvania, where I live, salvia and other psychedelics and THC are illegal but I can go purchase a gun, no prob, or of course can drink myself silly and take my car out on the highway whenever. There are tons of more pressing issues in the world than the illegality of cannabis/psychedelics but they definitely should not be in the same legal class as potentially fatal, addictive drugs, and decriminalizing or even fully legalizing and seriously taxing them seems like something a semi-enlightened rational society would do. Anyway, if you're at all interested in this sort of thing, or if you watched and enjoyed "The Spirit Molecule," this is definitely recommended.

Also here's a podcast with Tao about the book: http://expandingmind.podbean.com/e/ex...

[Helie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hot garbage. I was hopeful at the beginning, when Lin complained that many advocates of psychedelics are irrational and strange, and hoped that he'd present a more rational, introspective approach. But no, it was totally self-indulgent and weird.

The "research" was mostly reading the assorted works of Terence McKenna, whose wild theories are the exact hyperbolic bullshit Lin claims to dislike. Add in an assortment weird anti-science (electromagnetic radiation is our generation's DDT, and "inflammation" as a holistic medical concept), and this book was truly a waste of time.

Lin writes about psychedelic experiences with a stunning lack of creativity, considering the subject matter. Living proof that drug use alone does not an interesting personality make.

[James Payne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not good. A shocking number of adverbs. Confused structure. Purposeless pomo crutches. Interminable descriptions of tedious drug experiences. Conspiratorial mindset. Hero worship of a sophist. The work of a muddled mind. Joe Rogan on first page. Many citations of YouTube videos.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Lin, I've listened to hundreds of hours of Terence McKenna's talks. Although there's much I disagree with, McKenna is one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking lecturers I've ever heard or read. Sharing Lin's interest, I thoroughly enjoyed his celebration of McKenna which constitutes at least a third of this book.

Otherwise, I found his detailed descriptions of some of the minutiae of his life, especially in his lengthy 'Epilogue', to be tedious and generally uninteresting. I seemed like padding without much of a point.

[George Wu Teng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trip's very first word is the first-person inclusion "I," opening the book's introduction. Aside from his very early short fiction, and in some of his poetry, Tao has wholly refrained from this sort of direct, first-person inclusion, opting instead to frame his otherwise semi-autobiographical works in a third-person, arbitrarily-named fashion, be it Taipei's "Paul," or Richard Yates's "Haley Joel Osment."

It's this direct connectedness that runs throughout Trip which places it separate from anything else in Tao's oeuvre; that the book is also a work of non-fiction seems almost secondary to this designation, though these non-fiction inclusions are plentiful, informative, well-researched—they're also interwoven, in a dance-like manner, between paragraphs or chapters featuring Tao's personal life, creating some symbiotic and organic, enveloping, comforting webbing. This is not so much a book about psychadelics in themselves as much as it is a book about finding one's footing in the world, or, the ceaseless attempt to.

There's also the unavoidable connection to Taipei, the novel which immediately precedes this work, both chronologically, in Tao's published output, and that Trip actually begins immediately after the events in Taipei. Where Taipei's cover featured harsh, shimmering, artificial lettering, superimposed atop complete blackness, Trip trades this for one of Tao's own hand-drawn illustrations: chaotic, intricate, but inviting, with tranquilizing soft-blue hues, and endlessly pleasing, discoverable patterns. There's a passage in Trip specifically mentioning yin and yang, and it feels, palpably, that Trip acts as the yang to Taipei's yin, both necessary, but working in entirely opposite spheres. It's hard to read Trip and not feel hopeful, as both audience-to-and-participant-with Tao's "recovery process" from a period of intense, non-hyperbolically interminable, almost unbelievable drug use, featured with maximal specificity in Taipei.

These chapters—Introduction, Why Am I Interested in Him?, Terence McKenna's Life, My Drug History, Psilocybin, DMT, Salvia, Why Are Psychadelics Illegal?, Cannabis, Epilogue, Appendix—flow between one-another in trance-like fashion. Trip is a friend discussing, in an intimate apartment, one-on-one, their experiences with trying to feel at-home with themselves in the universe. Tao's prose is neither the dense, drug-addled, amnesiatic miasma of Taipei, nor the blunt, lancinating, concrete stiffness of Richard Yates, nor even the prose utilized in his previous essays. Rather, it is suffused and expansive with humanity, empathy, understanding, and desire for meaningful interpersonal connection.

The book's final section, a novella-length, third-person epilogue chapter, describes Tao as he travels to California to attend Kathleen Harrison's plant-drawing class. Trip seems to coalesce into this moment, a synecdoche, and, as Tao might describe it, fractal-like representation of the work as a whole. After finishing the closing sentence and setting the book down, I found myself silently weeping. I don't know why I was, and I don't know when I started.

[Steve Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tao Lin makes a good case that recovery from substance abuse can be accomplished better by disentangling from the Internet, eating organic foods, engaging with the world and changing exactly which substances one takes (in his case, dropping benzos, opioids, Adderrall and MDMA for DMT, salvia, cannabis and mushrooms) instead of completely stopping using all drugs, however one defines them. He also makes the late Terence McKenna's ideas, especially about the value about disbelief and the inevitability of being alienated in a society as fucked-up as contemporary America and the pointlessness of trying to make oneself "well-adjusted" in its context, more compelling than they were when I actually read one of McKenna's books. However, there's no denying that Tao also comes across as an upper-middle-class hippie, and he never really acknowledges that some of the means by which he revived himself from depression - such as using edibles several times a week during the day, even when he had jury duty - wouldn't work for someone who had a 9 to 5 job, who might have to rely on the Big Pharma-approved drugs Tao hates. This is a better piece of writing than his fiction, though, and its structure, which starts out describing McKenna's ideas, Tao's encounters with American attitudes towards drugs and his fairly late personal experiences with them, his attempts to use mushrooms, DMT (which culminated in a deeply paranoia-inducing, if ultimately productive, trip) and salvia to help himself, a history of the criminalization of drugs (which suggests a division between a view of human society as partners or dominators as the crucial one), his much longer use of cannabis and then a third-person epilogue is well-researched and seems honest (although it never addresses the accusations that have been made about his behavior towards women, and he writes like a feminist ally- perhaps he's honestly changed his attitudes.) A very good book, and in terms of legal debates in America right now, a provocative one, but one that would benefit from recognizing how unusual Tao's situation was.

[Ken Baumann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin. The book reminded me of Tolstoy's Confession, because both books are about recovering from depression by trying to live in ways boring people call "radical." Trip is an informative book, written in a calm and curious style, that encourages us to think broadly, seek awe, and heal. I imagine rereading Trip in the future; when I imagine this, I feel warm.

[John Pistelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trip is the story of how novelist, poet, and short story writer Tao Lin, shortly before the publication of his breakthrough novel, Taipei, and after a lifetime of vague physical and mental ailments, recovers when he finds psychedelic guru Terence McKenna on YouTube (via Joe Rogan) and listens to him speak "for more than thirty hours." Under McKenna's tutelage, Lin slowly weans himself from what he calls "drugs," synthetic substances such as MDMA, Xanax, and Adderall, as well as sugar and alcohol. He begins using plant-based psychedelics instead: DMT, magic mushrooms, salvia, and cannabis. These, instead of managing the symptoms of an alienated modern lifestyle, convey the immemorial wisdom of the indigenous groups that long cultivated them and the wisdom of the vegetable kingdom itself.

Through McKenna's bibliography, Lin also outgrows the despairing philosophy of existentialism and its insistence that we are alone and alienated in the cosmos and need to create our own values individually. He discovers in its place a new worldview of cooperation and interdependence based on New Age feminist speculative anthropology (Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone). According to these thinkers, human life was once organized into pacific goddess-worshipping matriarchies, which were sadly supplanted by the abstract father god and his avaricious war-like "dominator" ways after the invention of agriculture, a masculine usurpation that set us on the road to our killing modernity. With McKenna, Lin believes that the widespread use of psychedelics will lead to our reintegration into the natural order via our communion with the sacred mushrooms and magnanimous herbs and will bring us out of history and back to the garden, which aboriginals never left.

Trip devotes chapters to McKenna's life, to each of the major plant-based substances Lin uses, and to a reflection on why psychedelics are illegal, though Lin judges them safe and effective remedies for our dominator society. He concludes with an epilogue in the form of a third-person novella, reminiscent of his spare and hyper-conscious fiction, about his encounter with McKenna's ex-wife, Kathleen Harrison, and her family in California—his book, he says, moves toward the feminine, from Terence to Kathleen, as our culture should return to the mother goddess.

Lin is correct, I'm sure, when he denounces our literal collective poisoning by corporations. He's right, too, about the limitations of western medicine. Iatrogenesis is almost as deadly as cancer and heart disease—a fact that is no abstract statistic to me, unfortunately, as I've seen its lethal or near-lethal consequences more than once in my own family, terrible experiences I've thought about a lot in the past year and a half when we've been urged almost to deify physicians and when so-called liberals made a veritable pope out of a wily, smug, dishonest, and self-serving medical bureaucrat. In that way, Trip, though only three years old, felt much older and was refreshing to read in its wise refusal merely to "trust experts." (I have a Ph.D., which qualifies me to say the following and little more than the following: I've been to the factory where they grind the sausage of expertise, and I'd at least advise you to cook it thoroughly in your own kitchen before consumption.)

However sound the diagnosis, though, I dissent from the book's prescription, and I mistrust, as well, the alternative cast of outsider experts to whom Lin turns in his distress. He has possibly been ill-served by his education. As far as I can tell, he'd read or at least retained no book by a writer older than Jean Rhys or Raymond Carver by the time he fell down his YouTube rabbit hole in 2012 (the date, incidentally, that McKenna popularized as the end of history, from a possible misinterpretation of Mayan cultural materials). Lin writes that he hadn't understood anything of history ("a subject in school involving wars and treaties and generals") before finding, through McKenna, the New Age anthropologists who finally provided him a satisfying explanation of the cosmos and his place in it. In a survey of his modern illness, he portrays himself as having been interested in counterculture while in high school—punk music, radical politics, online video games—but seems not to have thought deeply about serious subjects until his Rogan encounter at the age of 29.

I find this narrative strange because I am only one year older than Lin and attended a large suburban public high school like he did; I was interested in counterculture, too, but I remember psychedelia being everywhere, through the hippie revival that ran from the release of the Beatles Anthology and Bob Dylan Unplugged and Woodstock '94 to Woodstock '99 and the big Free Tibet concerts as well as through the then-novel and controversial raver subculture. The boys wore tie-dye shirts, the girls wore Indian-print skirts, and everyone padded around in Birkenstock sandals, at least at my school, even if I tended to dress all in black and hang out with the goths instead. I found out about Terence McKenna and his theories in the late '90s through The Invisibles comic and its wild letters column, but I was also discovering Camille Paglia around the same time, with her irresistible and no doubt overstated heckling of just the type of feminist historiography Lin cites so credulously. (The myth of primordial matriarchy, like most forms of dubious identity politics that claim to challenge the reign of evil white men, appears to have been invented by a white man writing in German in the 19th century.) I suspect that lost paradises, Gardens of Eden, no less than futurist utopias, are psychic projections of a wholeness not actually available to us on earth.

I have also, to be honest, always distrusted recreational drug use, hallucinogen and otherwise. Whatever insights the friends who devoted themselves to cannabis, mushrooms, and LSD claimed they were having, their visions never translated into anything I found intelligible, just as the most tedious passages of Trip are the trips themselves, meaningful to Lin but not to the reader. And to put it bluntly, pun intended, you could watch their IQ drop from year to year. My own experiences with cannabis have been very few and worse than disappointing. I don't think I ever read McKenna's Food of the Gods, at least not in full, but I did read some other books in the same vein, like Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head and Narby's Cosmic Serpent (the latter, with its claim that ayahuasca vouchsafes a vision of the double helix, cited in Lin's bibliography). I wasn't persuaded by their fantasias, which seemed to me so much Noble Savage mythology and white liberal guilt and projection, just as the psychedelia in Grant Morrison and even in Alan Moore (a more serious writer) eventually wore thin. In their place I discovered authors devoted to the long discipline of art and less gullible when confronted with counterculture's banal adolescent slanders, mostly fed to children by marketers, against the humanist tradition.

Furthermore, for all the time that Lin spends in Trip exploring the intersection of psychedelics and deep-state skullduggery (e.g., MK-Ultra), as well as his own paranoia, played for laughs throughout the book, that the CIA is following him around, our extremely-online psychonaut never even mentions the longstanding rumor—I probably first read it on the Rigorous Intuition message board back in 2005; Lin must be aware of it—that McKenna himself was at the very least an FBI informant if not worse. I obviously have no idea if that's true or not, and I don't mean to libel a dead man, but I do think it's far more likely that power wants us locked in our rooms on inner vision quests barely communicable to the outside world—to "leave society," in the injunction Lin's first psilocybin trip inspired, which furnishes the title of his next novel—than they want us awake and alert in real life, bringing our creative and critical imagination into articulate form and contesting power's own ambitions where they do not coincide with ours.

McKenna, in any case, was happy to represent himself as the envoy of authority—he claimed to be working for Big Mushroom—and I suspect he got a kick out of describing his mycological conscription in terms that recall intelligence recruitment. McKenna claimed psychedelic mushrooms came from the stars and had seeded themselves among innumerable worlds and civilizations. Lin relays the following information from McKenna's visionary colloquy with the colour out of space:

In the two-page quote, the mushroom explained that its nearly immortal body ("only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out") was a network in the soil with potentially more connections than in a human brain and that it sought symbiosis—a relation of mutual dependence and benefits—with humankind. In its memory was "the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them." It would trade this knowledge for a ticket—via humans—to worlds around stars younger and more stable than the sun.

I'll need more assurance than this before I will surrender my psyche to glorified mildew. (And let's not even get started on the "DMT elves.") The mawkish platitudes about cooperation that Lin finds so appealing are just the sort of manipulation tactic corrupt authorities use to get us to give up our volition to forces that don't have our best interests at heart. A certain style of religious conservatism does iron-fistedly prohibit our exploration of much sensory and spiritual potential; but surely our own era of progressive corporatism, with its wild-eyed bearded CEO-kings, who look like they just got back from drinking the ayahuasca, or at least from Burning Man, should challenge any easy equation between human freedom and hallucination. Power doesn't only announce itself in jackboots; it fawns and cajoles and plays on our compassion and curiosity to lead us into traps or down blind alleys. So it is, in my judgment, with the whole psychedelic culture Lin is so eager to promote.

On the bright side, by which I mean the literary side, I found Trip both extremely readable and fascinatingly experimental as a work of hybrid structure—Lin, with his pleasing detours into Mandelbrot, would say "fractal"—transitioning with ease from exposition to narrative, from memoir to argument, from dialogue to monologue; it felt like having 50 browser tabs open but in a dream of absolutely complex clarity. For better and worse, Trip is a book of and by the Internet even more than it is of and by the plants and mushrooms, though the Internet, perhaps the ultimate psychedelic, is not its overt theme at all. I enjoyed Lin's speculations that language and literature model within life the unimaginable complexity of the imagination that contains life—a conclusion, I must note, similar to the one that Emerson managed to arrive at in "The Poet" even while advising the apprentice bard to avoid "procurers of animal exhilaration" and instead drink "water from a wooden bowl."

[Robert Frecer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Vapid reading by the most self-important of self-proclaimed nihilists. Oh, will you please pity him? But... but..he's taken so many drugs!

Books like this should be considered a public health hazard - they can make lay readers believe there is no such thing as a normal, fun and helathy psychedelic experience. You either don't get it or go absolutely nuts, lost in your "revolutionary" observations and your own in vanity. I'm glad to know that's not true.

[Chelsea Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

extremely extremely good

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I approach any Tao Lin content with the same apt attention that I would apply to watching a slow motion car crash drawn out to the time span of a career. I can earnestly say that, in spite of a lack of interest in the subject matter and a passive hatred of the author (if I’m being frank: I find the subject matter of drugs over-mythologized and dull, but it is interesting to see his turn towards nonfiction and exploring the ideas of the nutty egoist Terrence McKenna), this is Tao Lin’s most coherent, ambitious, and interesting piece of writing. It’s refreshing to see the author of Taipei taking a healthy direction in his life, for once, and I think he comes off as refreshed and interested - words I have never associated with Tao Lin before lol.

[Ryan D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trip is an excellent intro to the core ideas of modern, pro-psychedelic revival culture. You essentially get a summary of Terrence Mckenna's main themes as well as ones that aren't necessarily his but heavily associated with him.

The author provides a good mix of his own anecdotes and experiences with drugs as well as the concepts McKenna talked about in his life.

If you are a complete beginner to modern 'intellectual psychadelic' culture, this is a convenient and entertaining book to get all central ideas in one place, with a story of a man's life and experience stitching it all together with direct experience.

[Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trip, Tao Lin’s first explicitly nonfiction work, was a fascinating account of his personal transformations regarding psychedelics and the role they played in stabilizing his life and giving him a sense of well being. It was very interesting to see him use the first person for the first time, allowing him to inhabit the role taken by various ostensible self inserts in his works of fiction. In some ways, this is definitely a sequel to the events and moods of his earlier semi-autobiographical works, Taipei in particular. I still find his voice exemplative of the moods and zeitgeist of the “millennial” generation, here more than ever as Lin struggles against the “bleak ideology” of existentialism he’d focused on, evident in much of his earlier work, which worked in themes of nihilism couched in an autobiographical, deadpan examination of everyday life.

In Trip, Lin recounts his discovery of the work of the late psychedelic proponent Terence McKenna on YouTube after years of feeling “zombie like and depressed,” sparking him to refocus his use of drugs from opioids and amphetamines to psychedelics. Beginning as an informal biography of McKenna and his ex-wife Kathleen Harrison, he goes on to discuss the effects these substances they advocate had upon his life and attitudes.

While telling us what he's learning, Lin wrestles with questions that, in our current state of political instability, economic worry, and one deferred crisis after another, are pressing many people, the young especially. His use of psychedelics, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, DMT, salvia, and cannabis specifically, in order to improve his own state of being and peace of mind, decreasing symptoms of anxiety and depression, were fascinating, even inspiring. I found some of his descriptions of the trips themselves a little tedious, I guess. He does leave me very curious about the effects of psychedelics, especially psilocybin and I feel that they could conceivably be useful in confronting mental distress and sparking creative inspiration, but it also seems very subjective. As Lin’s first non-fiction work, I would take this more as memoir, focusing on Lin’s own experiences with drugs and psychedelics rather than any rigorous research or journalism, though.

Lin definitely makes a good case for the legalization of psychedelics, especially in his account of serving on a jury, dealing with sentencing of minor drug offences, the strongest and most interesting portion of the book. For the most part, it appears that he obtains a large portion of his research material from a few choice reference works and a lot of YouTube and Wikipedia. In the last section of the book, Lin switches back to his usual third person style in describing his meeting with Kathleen Harrison, an important influence and teacher herself, spending time asking questions about her life and beliefs, though in the end losing his notes and concluding that it is better that way. In using the third person, he again distances himself from this while still focusing on his own emotional reactions to the world. He definitely evokes some thought provoking and intriguing ideas, ones that will definitely keep me thinking for awhile. In particular, he fixates on how indigenous peoples may have better ways for dealing with existence than our own.

However, Lin also seems to go deeper into some, to me slightly disturbing, fringe directions involving fears that technology itself is the cause of these issues. As elements of anti-vaxxing were introduced, I began to question where his arguments were going. While he might be coming from an entirely different political viewpoint, with this talk of “degeneration,” of a yearning for some period in the past where things made sense, I can’t help but view these as related to the very same ideas pushed by such right wing hacks as Jordan Peterson. Peterson, though he might certainly not advocate the use of psychedelics to best respond the world, also discusses the importance of “myth” and the “mystical” along with some diet advice, and he definitely has his own fixation with the problematic “noble savage” trope. I definitely don’t want to equate what Lin is arguing with the quasi-fascist murmurings of some doofus like Peterson, but the parallels between the two approaches dissatisfied with contemporary existence are interesting and concerning. Two reactions to the same ennui felt by many in today’s uncertain world, each, to me, questionable in their own ways. In the end, it seems like he advocates psychedelics and an inflammatory free diet as a cure all for all of modernity’s ills.

He writes that he is explicitly writing to convert his readers (“the cynical, depressed, atheistic” literary types his fans consist of) to this worldview, and in spite of all of the intriguing aspects, I guess I can’t quite get over my skepticism. I'm not convinced. I’m just too atheistic, I guess. Abandoning society is not an option for most people, after all.

[Chandini · Rating 5 out of 5]

truly inspirational..this book gave me many dreams and visions to manifest. and more books to add to my reading list

[Theo Thimo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I initially tried to publish this review on amazon but it wouldn't let me so I'm copy/paste here but I think it didn't format correctly:
contains very courageously published, I felt, DMT trip report in which the majority is spent in a confused, paranoid fugue coming down from a psychedelic trip he can't recall, ~pg108, a depiction of breakthroughs that goes often unheard or untold in the genre but I think is relevant, dosage is difficult for DMT, I have thought in the past
cannabis is very sentimental section, very ode grecian urn-like, mentions euphoric/cathartic? bouts of crying while on cannabis, happy to see a wide range of depictions in regards to the effects of this plant, again breaking the public image of these drugs is good, mentions spontaneous dancing along with nice description of enjoying dancing, contains a useful section on drug recovery, pg205 pt 19, you will learn a lot about how old this plant and other plants are
contains endearing sections about middle school text based rpg game and punk music
I've only read maybe 40% of the book so far, salvia section is very cool, I've taken salvia more than most psychedelics, it's not very fun, in Miami I did it in front of a lot of ppl once as "performance art" and someone asked me if its like really strong weed, also learned, by reading the book I've been referring to, that we, based on indigenous ritual, shouldn't smoke salvia, or even dry it, that you should like roll it's leaves like iirc "a cigar," or I'm imagining it like a long grape leaf or something, and chew on it, oh and that salvia is a girl and you should refer to her as a she
psilocybin section has relatable shroom induced online meltdown, tao texts and tweets "I'm laughing," which I will often express in texts/tweets while on shrooms, everyone from my perspective with a twitter and shrooms has seemingly done some sort of spam meltdown at some point or multiple points, "I suddenly felt it didn't matter how I released information--emails, texts, tweets, even thoughts," I have had this revelation more than once from taking shrooms and using my laptop in my room between yrs 2014 and 2015 often, it's very helpful revelation from my experience, I recommend having this epiphany on shrooms, has changed the way I view private and public interaction/art/performativity and usually using the computer tends to make it feel as if u r connected to a giant collective conscious AI sentient almost thing, again v helpful stuff, not ur normal everyday to do erowid trip report, it's got some nugs here, I ate a pbj sandwich of shrooms, maybe ~4g and took a shower, 20 mins later realizing I was becoming too high, cancelled a date I had planned (or perhaps didn't cancel and ghosted), and stayed in bed out of fear of oncoming trip, was likely the highest I've been but luckily prob the most controlled setting (locked in windowless room, underneath blanket), aware that the darkness would potentiate the effects but equally afraid of the dark as I was light and getting out of bed, hallucinated, which is not really the correct word, multiple friendly, cool-seeming, people of color, kind of had a 90s vibe to them arrive, felt like the shrooms were a very close friend, saw sacred geometry which came into my vision and felt like a small turret of unpleasant orgasms being shot into my eyes, at times my phone would vibrate menacingly and shine brightly from the other side of my bed and I would do my best to ignore it
anyway, I almost want to give this book a 4 because I think it should have included more about dissociatives which instantly cure depression and give profound new outlook on life, microdosed for varying needs and nootropic-like benefits, safe relative to the class of anesthetics (iirc, you won't stop breathing on ketamine), not physiologically addictive albeit more psychologically addictive than cannabis, but I decided not to as I haven't read the whole book yet and I'm hoping there will be more mention of dissociatives before I finish

[Devon DeRaad · Rating 5 out of 5]

The working title of this book was Beyond Existentialism which may be less descriptive of its contents than "Trip, psychedelics, alienation, and change" but is undoubtedly more descriptive of its intent. It is one of the only pieces of literature I've come across that recognizes the inherent bleakness and isolation of existentialism and works toward transcending what has become the standard state of being (frustrated, cynical, searching) in our post-modern time.

Lin's gift is to write with complex structure that is simultaneously so smooth and intuitive that the reader does not even notice the non-traditional organization. Eminently readable, logical, and followable, Trip is a calm walk through a dense garden with an old friend.

Lin investigates without answering, and discovers without sermonizing, allowing him to delve into nearly any topic without losing credibility. He embodies a quote from Terence, "my technique is don't believe anything" to a T, allowing him to critically evaluate nearly any idea without the inherent bias of belief. Because of this skill, Lin can present Terence in the most honest way possible including his most unsubstantiated and wild opinions, without losing the reader.

One of the most striking passages comes when Lin takes psilocybin, and becomes increasingly paranoid and distraught. But upon being asked if he had a 'bad trip' he says no. Lin states that a bad trip to him would be "eating candy and watching tv for three hours". In that moment I recognized that Lin's relationship with substances is so different from everything I have been taught about drugs. Lin wants to genuinely experience the effects of chemicals and use them to shape his life and experience. In this way, he utilizes psychedelics and all their effects to broaden his perspective and get what he wants out of life, contrary to the common perception of drug users as being controlled by and eventually devastated by the substances they use.

Nearly everyone has had the experience of having a beer with friends to break the ice and activate the more social, empathetic parts of ourselves. Lin removes the mask from the world of chemical substances and reveals the fallacious human constructions that constitute "good" and "bad" drugs. This book directly challenges our social state of viewing drugs as a punchline. It breaks down the dichotomy between "on a substance" and sober. Lin talks about the many types of receptors in our brains, and the natural compounds our bodies make, specifically the endogenous cannabinoids which are constantly binding to receptors in our brains. Lin talks about the inflammation that pesticides, specifically glyphosate, cause, and how this modern condition of inflammation leads to decreased binding affinity between cannabinoids and our brain receptors. Lin postulates that the modern condition is inherently "a little less stoned than we used to be", and that life today feels physically and chemically different than it did a hundred or a thousand generations ago. Lin values what we consider "drugs" as a way to control brain chemistry, control his experience, and control how he interacts with the world. The transition in our society from seeing drugs as a punchline that leads to funny behavior, to seeing drugs as naturally occurring substances (from sugar to caffeine to cannabis) that mediate our interactions with the world and our own selves, will be portend a true societal transition from repression and criminalization to trust and empathy.

As I began the epilogue, I found myself reading at a slower and slower pace. As Lin reveals that his story has trended from the masculine to the feminine, Terence to Kathleen, the reader is reminded of the complex fractal structure of the story. I began reading paragraphs repeatedly, stretching out the final chapter in any way I could, mourning the impending loss of closing this book. I didn't want this book to end because while I was reading it, I felt less alone.

[Colin Gallagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was thoughtfully given this book for my birthday and it was such a fun read. Felt both informative and wholesomely personal, and made me walk away thinking more about the intertwining of nature, history, body chemistry, and inner experience. Looking forward to the next Tao Lin book I read.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

this wasn’t bad actually. his weirdly rigid neurotic style works much better here than it does in his fiction, though disappointingly he reverted to his old minutiae detailed third person in the ‘epilogue’. I’d be interested to read more of his non-fiction in the future if he continues in that direction.

[Bailey Simone]

DNF @ ~30%

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tao Lin has been perhaps my favorite contemporary prose author since shortly after my friend in 10th grade introduced me to the man's name, within the statement "Friends don't let friends read Tao Lin," after which I found a copy of Richard Yates among my local library branch's "New Releases," drawn in by cover art, which, at a distance, looked like a man with a cunt for a face, spreading it open (it turned out to be, upon closer inspection, a mere seashell, which made a hell of a lot more sense).

Anyway, I've always struggled with my own appreciation of Tao Lin and his works. I own all of his print material as of Trip (including Selected Tweets, though I did deliberate on buying that one for a year or so after its release), yet I cannot really stomach anything from his peers (that is, all other "alt-lit" I've read just feels like a rip-off of Lin's work). I frequent a particular pseudointellectual hangout on the Internet which upholds Mr. Lin as a meme-person, with supporters of his works always instructed to "go to bed," under the assumption they are Lin himself roleplaying as one of his fans. I firmly believe it is too early to consider any writer from the past two decades to be "great," yet I made the choice to be a useless piece of shit and change majors to English not long after finishing my first reading of Taipei in Nov. 2013. I would never recommend anyone read Eeeee Eee Eeee, yet I was immensely moved by his apparent disdain for Orlando and thereabouts, yearning to move to a more interesting city in the vague hopes it might lead to an interesting life, much as I also felt while attending UCF (and of course I loved the argument about Batman Begins being neither clearly ironic nor sincere), and I saw too much of myself in "Haley Joel Osment" when re-reading Richard Yates.

Terence McKenna is a bit of a different story. I've only read Food of the Gods, in Aug. 2014, about a year and a half since I'd first experienced psilocybin, having long since cooled off on any inclination toward that, or any other, drug. I still retained a mild "openness" to further drug experimentation, but it seemed worthless to meet new people for the sole reason of copping new and different drugs. I think the reason I initially read Food of the Gods was that I was planning on cultivating a neo-hippie persona, intending to wear those "drug rug" hoodies and quote McKenna and Watts and shit, as a new identity with which to play around after having transferred universities, but I dawdled for too long, and I don't think I bought/read that book until a couple weeks into the Fall semester, a bit too late to change my identity. The book itself was quite interesting, and many ideas influenced my mode of thought at the time (partnership vs. dominator societies, mainly, which wasn't even McKenna's own idea!), but mostly the book was just silly enough that I couldn't take it all strongly. Homo erectus ate shrooms, spontaneously developed consciousness, and evolved into Homo sapiens? I love the idea, but mostly for how batshit insane it sounds, especially compared to some otherwise more reasonable points (which have not stuck in my mind these past 3.5 years at all).

I was anticipating the release of this book for some time, since it was originally titled "Beyond Existentialism." I didn't bother reading the "Tao of Terence" articles at all, but whatever. I was pretty excited to see what mindset Lin would take w/r/t to McKenna's character and body of work. Lin's prose has always felt incredibly "detached," his semi-autobiographical fiction with his own name changed to something different every time always felt as though he was "detached" even from his own life, that he might see himself better as a character in a novel than a human being in the 3D world. So how could he write about Terence McKenna, a man so enthused about the wonderful world of psychedelics and their insight to "the imagination"?

I don't feel like writing too long a review, nor too deep an analysis, so I'll simply say this: I liked this book. I've liked all previous Tao Lin books, and, with the exception thus far of Selected Tweets, I've read each piece at least twice. So, too, will I read this one again. Indeed, there were points where I really wanted to underline or otherwise mark certain lines and passages, but I decided instead to postpone that gratification for a later reading of the text. I imagine my second reading would decorate the book as much as with my copy of Taipei, with so much shit highlighted I actually felt compelled to erase a few markings before lending it to a friend a couple years back.

The structure of the book is alright. Lin first introduces himself, then McKenna, then how he's been influenced by McKenna's words/works, before going chapter by chapter discussing his own experiences with certain psychedelics, including McKenna's views on the drugs, where applicable, and maybe some quotes from more scientific studies that don't really vibe too well with Lin's prose. The highlights are really Lin's first-hand, subjective experiences with psilocybin and DMT, written comfortably in his own prose, not burdened with more near-objective "facts" (including McKenna's own subjectivity, so far apart from Lin's own life, in space and time), fitting better in line with Lin's previous oeuvre. Curiously, there is a break between drug-centric chapters, with a chapter on why drugs are illegal disrupting Lin's train of thought before going into the "Cannabis" chapter. Lin regurgitates McKenna's idea that psychedelics are banned because they promote free thought, but Lin does not get nearly as in-depth as McKenna did in his own Food of the Gods (if I'm remembering correctly, McKenna spends much more time talking about how cannabis and heroin were banned because of association with degenerate Negro jazz culture and its perceived harmful effects on white America [not my own language, but I'm eschewing quotation marks because of obvious paraphrasing]). The "Cannabis" chapter is also clearly more an interlude between the greater McKenna-focused text and the lengthy "Epilogue" following McKenna's ex-wife Kathleen Harrison.

The "Epilogue" is fantastic, with Lin kinda-sorta "fictionalizing" his life (as per his novels) by presenting a narrative of his time meeting Harrison, written in the third-person (as opposed to the first-person view throughout the previous ~200 pages). Whereas Lin's previous writings were bleak, Trip's "Epilogue" presents a thoroughly "positive" vibe, occasionally touching on anxieties Lin may face in the present, but it is clear his love for McKenna has turned his life around, and the result is the first Tao Lin story that could truthfully be considered Sincerely Happy.

[Radia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really, really loved this book. As a person who is curious to a fault and frequently experiences some sort of existential/mental health crisises, I found this book fulfilling, refreshing, creative and thought provoking.

First off, I love the style. I felt like I was being given access to a slice of Lin's brain, while also being presented with the worldviews and ideas of others. I loved how the book goes from McKenna to Harrison, from McKenna's intense psychedelic perspectives to Harrison's more palatable, plant-centric, animist lessons, shifting from man to woman, mirroring and reversing the theme Lin mentions in the later part of his book, of God going from woman to man. (Although upon reading other reviews it does become more apparent to me that he doesn't even really talk all that much about Harrison at the end and more just about himself and her son, fair criticism) And the epilogue was so fun to read!!

I loved that Lin shared his own personal experience with drug use and how technical he was in his descriptions, outlining dose amounts, as well as the receptors in the brain that were effected by the drugs he imbimbed (even something as seemingly mundane as caffiene was accounted for!). The added pictures were awesome as well :-)

I loved the summaries of McKenna's work, and the work of others in the fields of psychedelics, cannabis and conciousness-- it was clear how carefully researched this book was, and how curious Lin himself is. I was especially excited by his summary of McKenna's perspective on language and conciousness. Additonally, Lin's consideration of the sociopolitical context of drug use and legality was useful and needed-- the book would have been lacking without it. And the book was pretty funny at times too!

I appreciate how this book, while at it's root, perhaps, is about psychedelics, is about so much more. It is about nature, detail, conciousness, isolation, alienation, awe, history, biology, time, patterns, growth, finding peace, and above all, being a human and coming to terms with/existing within/negotiating our way through a world, universe, existence so much more complicated than any one person could ever know.


This book left me with feelings of immense gratitude for the Earth, my ancestors, connections between people, and all the things there are to learn! Thank you for this book, for sharing what you know, Tao! I hope to look at the world with awe in my every day, and look forward to returning to the ideas this book put in to words again and again.


Note: I do want to state, however, that Lin's distaste for the "unnatural" and suggestion that cannibis/psychedelics could replace anti-depressants/anxieties etc does seem a bit far fetched, as that is not the answer for everyone. But then he also seems to make clear that this book is about his personal experience, so maybe this note is unwarranted. And I'm also not sure I believe his complete trust in DMT lol

[tao_lin3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this book. I can read this book in any mood and enjoy it, I think. This book is sweet, insightful, positive and smart.
The words all have meaning that my brain can process. After I read the words I feel emotions. Each drug makes me feel awe.

[Álvaro Arbonés]

Existe cierta tendencia actual que nos pide regresar hacia formas más simples de la existencia. Centrarnos en lo importante, deshacernos de lo innecesario y encontrar en ello cierta forma de paz que creíamos perdido. Algo que, en términos de literatura, se ha caracterizado de dos formas: con el neo-ruralismo, esa fantasía tardocapitalista de volver al campo porque allí todo es más sencillo, y con el minimalismo, la idea de que una prosa donde todo lo magro ha sido debidamente estirpado es necesariamente mejor. Y si bien la primera es una moda absurda y temporal, la segunda tiene largo recorrido. Representada hoy por Tao Lin.

En Trip , Tao Lin nos cuenta su experiencia con las drogas, con los psicodélicos, sobre cómo varía su experiencia interior, cómo descubrió los textos de Terence McKenna y cómo aborrece el existencialismo y cree que todos deberíamos abrazar una vida más simple, preocupándonos más por nuestra dieta y todo lo que consumimos. Todo ello hilvanado, de forma magistral, bajo un supuesto lógico: toda forma de interacción con el mundo es una forma de drogadicción, porque manipula y da forma a nuestra percepción del mismo. De ese modo, sin ser nunca explícito al respecto, mientras habla de drogas y su experiencia con las mismas, Lin reflexiona sobre el lenguaje, sobre las relaciones sociales, el paso del tiempo y la dieta, todo ello siempre asociado a esa idea de que, en última instancia, toda interacción es siempre una forma de drogadicción.

Aunque lo parezca, esta no es una idea descabellada. Casi todas las drogas que podemos consumir, por no decir todas, son básicamente compuestos que nuestros cerebros generan de forma natural. La comida produce diferentes cantidades de esos mismos compuestos. Nuestras interacciones con los demás, a través del lenguaje hablado, escrito o físico, hace exactamente lo mismo. Nos drogamos, incluso sin tomar lo que denominamos drogas, porque todo produce estados alterados de la consciencia. Y eso es así porque no existe un estado puro de la consciencia. La consciencia es, por sí misma, una forma alterada de ver el mundo.

Por eso, según va avanzando el libro, abandona su desprecio hacia el existencialismo y su abrazar las teorías de Terence McKenna, que cree en la existencia de un fin último universal, para aceptar que de hecho lo importante es nuestra relación con los otros. Con las drogas. Con las puertas que se abren a nuestra consciencia con cada estado alterado que sufrimos, sea por lo que sea propiciado.

Trip, al final, es eso. Un viaje. Uno donde no sólo describe su experiencia con las drogas, sino también la experiencia en la experimentación con las drogas, su descubrimiento y estudio, poniendo su fluctuante estado mental sobre la mesa. Por eso incide constantemente en cómo se siente. En cómo cambia cómo se siente cada una de sus interacciones. Porque el objeto de estudio de Trip no son las drogas, sino la consciencia que conocemos como Tao Lin.

Esa es la razón por la que en el epílogo cambia a tercera persona. O la razón por la que, siendo un ensayo, se lee como una novela. Porque tiene un tema y todo se subordina a él. Porque Lin, de forma magistral, construye un mapa de su psique a la vez que eso sirve para explicar como funcionan todas las psique.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first book on psychedelics I'll recommend from now on, I think. Phenomenal. Wonderfully experimental in form, rich in content. One of the best non-fiction books I've read.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 3 out of 5]

He's a bright guy and he can write. Terence McKenna, the subject of much of his, was also bright, and surprisingly funny, for a psychedelic pioneer- Lin cited a You Tube discussion between McKenna and Ram Dass, in which the old man, who's been around a lot more of these movies, added some badly needed perspective. But he's also, objectively and subjectively speaking, nuts. (I won't get into the specifics, I'm sure the fractalites, believers in mushrooms that talk to you and UFO junkies will have plenty to say on the subject.)

I felt a little sad for Lin - he frequently writes of himself in the third person, seems to have few real connections with people besides his mother, who he frequently emails, is long estranged from his ex-wife, etc. The ending, though, just in a literary sense, was well done and paced. As long as you don't pay attention to the "arguments,'' which at least one poster here has identified well.

Funny that the p.r. hype for the book cites it as a successor to the "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,'' which completely misses the point. Wolfe's book, like Didion's "Slouching Toward Bethlehem,'' was a critique of the counter-culture, not a celebration of it. (I guess the title got people confused). Ah, well, he's a smart guy - I've heard of his previous work but haven't read it - and I hope he finds a way to dig himself out of the hole he's dug for himself. Just saying he's moved beyond existentialism doesn't cut it.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn’t put it down

[ebabehh]

My first Tao Lin, and I was surprised by how poorly written it was. Here he describes the minutia of his diy-homework-assignment-like trips, whose significance in the moment do not seem nearly as profound as he later attributes them. His mode of description involves stringing adjectives together into a misshappen clump. He seems stuck in a cycle of anhedonia and hedonism. One set of drugs (pharmaceuticals, attention-focusers) stops working for him, so he switches to another ("natural" psychedelics). Does he realize that drugs may be his religion, that true personal change and positive feeling might not come so easily, from them alone, but from a combination of inner-discipline, attention, focus, and hard work on the one hand, and healthy relationships with other people and a conducive environment on the other? How did it take him so long to realize that New York exacerbated his anxiety, that eating healthily, being surrounded by more trees, might help? McKenna's philosophies feel equally "no duh." Expecting more enlightenment from Michael Pollan.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was all set to give him 4 stars for this one. The first several chapters are interesting, well-written, Tao-like pieces of prose. Tao Lin made me laugh, smile, grin, think, contemplate, and consider. The epilogue, written in the style of Taipei, was just a beauty. The ending of it was such a beauty that I have no choice but to give him the full five stars. Nice going Tao!

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievable book that I see myself returning to many times in the future. Really uniquely laid out and interesting techniques used by the author throughout and he does a good job explaining his point, which I would say is that you should question everything and that psychedelics can greatly open one's understanding of the world.