The Essential Psychedelic Guide/No 85198

by D.M. Turner

The Essential Psychedelic Guide provides clear, detailed descriptions of the effects of all major psychedelics, including exotic substances like DMT, Mescaline, Ketamine, and 2C-B. for each substance it discusses the material, history, and effects, plus hard to find information on dosage levels, methods of administration, combinations, and safety issues.

Other chapters give crucial information on understanding set and setting, preparations to obtain maximum benefits from psychedelics while avoiding pitfalls, and novel theories on the philosophy behind these extraordinary dimensions.

D. M. Turner is a courageous adventurer in non-ordinary consciousness whose writing is based on extensive first-hand experience with psychedelics. His involvement with other in diverse areas of the psychedelic community provides for insightful cross perspectives on how these substances affect different people.

The Essential Psychedelic Guide takes readers on a fascinating adventure through the psychedelic realms. These realms are described with such lucid detail that readers may actually feel they've embarked on a trip! This is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in psychedelics.

Genres: Nonfiction, Drugs

112 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

There is more than author in the Goodreads database with this name. This entry is for D.M. ^ Turner.

Reviews

[Said Bouziane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruminating...

As a young person figuring out where I belonged and who I was, this book was a call to adventure.

I feel kind of nostalgic for all the old online forums like Bluelight and Errowid in the hayday of the internet before social media, where people would connect and share and the only social status indications that you'd find in these forums was the number of deep relationships people had built through their genuine contribution over many months and years, or else maybe a one to five star rating or a title going from novice to explorer of the 9 realms, a single line devoted to it beneath your avatar where the only way you'd move up the social ranks was to slowly continue to post day in day out and simply... be involved.

We didn't have vanity metrics back then, there was no such thing as writing or saying something and having the chance of ten thousand or ten million 'likes', 'viral' was very different back then and this book comes from a time before even that level of internet connectivity, when exploration was done in much deeper levels of isolation, connections with other explorers were only made face to face on the off chance you got to find people you could trust.

It's hard not to romanticise a time I wasn't around to experience.

This book really requires an open mind to receive its value. It's absolutely not for everyone.

Now that a decade has passed since I read this, there is much more accessible stuff to get the same impact, to prepare yourself for internal journeys and yet this book will forever ring a very nostalgic and emotional bell in my heart because of probably how young and impressionable I was when it opened me to life.

Maybe also because of what a grim warning it brings, that even experts, people with thousands of hours of experience exploring inner dimensions can fall prey to hubris or their own darkness.

It's an absolute tragedy the story hinted at in these pages and yet a part of me hopes that it was actually just a very inventive and creative introduction made up by someone who had something important to say and thought it best to be said by a dead person to get people to listen.

In any case, I've had many explorations in the bush, under the stars, near water or plants in an altered state of mind to one degree or another, all because of the very zany ideas in this book. 'Spirits' of substances that I interpret more as archetypes that speak about the human psyche more than anything external, but that's kind of the point I guess - once you go deep enough what's the difference?

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in learning about themselves through psychedelics, though The Psychedelic Explorers Guide is really much more modern, easy to read, practical and honestly easier to use.

This book leans very heavily into the spiritual (something I think of as a feature, not a bug).

[Rasak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like to read books that are based on people's experiences and this book has a nice personal feeling. It's more like a journal on experiences of getting high that has been edited to add some extra info like dosages and set and setting to consider before trying substances for yourself. And around half of the book follows this nice pattern on describing the substance, talking about dosages and safety and describing the the feel, which is something that is the most interesting to me. The problem is only that it is not consistent. There are nice detailed descriptions of the high of some of the substances and then for the others it is too vague. But I also appreciated how the author also writes about heavy parts, like his addiction to ketamin and some of the bad trips he experienced and combinations of substances that seem not to work together.

After descriptions of pure substances and their combinations there comes a pretty weird part on author's views on psychedelics and the future and then he goes back to describing his finding that DMT is best taken next to a water source and then he starts philosophizing that maybe other substances are also connected to other elements. Both of these parts have a different feeling and structure than the first part of the book and kind of destroyed a good impression that I had when I started reading it.

P.S. the book is around 20 years old so for the dosages it is probably better to check out newer sources.

[Dimitris Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Link to the full book here.

This was a breathtaking sneak-peek into the experiences and philosophy of a dedicated and fascinating psychedelic explorer. The style and presentation reminded me a bit of Shulgin's PiHKaL, which, coming from me, counts as high praise. Describing the experience entheogens typically produce in words is a bit like describing works by Escher, Van Gogh or Giger to a blind person (with all due respect), and, as far as this kind of experience counts as going on trips, it felt like what reading the original Lonely Planet mush have felt like, but back when Lonely Planet used to be cool.

Turner's death by drowning while apparently on ketamine after his encounter with the 'water spirit' of DMT, and its 'dissatisfaction' with his mixing of the natural and ominpresent DMT with the artifical ketamine, was hair-raising to say the least, but I felt it was a fitting, gloriously sad ending to a life as full of curiosity as this one.

I've always thought that for every single precious nugget of information we have today like, for example, that the death cap isn't the 'yummy cap', or, conversely, for every controversial or varyingly successful foray into pineapple-on-pizza territory, there must have been someone out there in spacetime whose sense of experimentation had to be stronger than their sense of self-preservation by necessity. These people inadvertenly took one for the team, the collective team, even if they couldn't know it at the time. Humanity owes these awesomely curious outliers who were never meant to survive, these unsung heroes, a lot of credit we will never give them.

Here's to those who died so that today we're in a position to take informed decisions.

[James Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for anybody curious about the psychedelic experience. The Essential Psychedelic Guide is concise, very informative (if somewhat out of date), educational, cautionary, wondrous, visionary - an epic dance across the depths of the psychedelic state, documenting the personal experiences of a man the introduction refers to as "the Chuck Yeager of psychonauts - a test pilot's test pilot." Turner's tragically short life saw him venturing to shores of human consciousness rapturous and terrifying, and this less-than-100 page work is a magnificent summation, wrought with such wonderful recall and truly dazzling description, of the depths, potentials, and dangers of opening the doors of perception. Nothing I have read on the subject has been as incredibly powerful, moving, fast-paced, variegated, with such depth, clarity and immense readability.

[Dmitrii · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for those interested in psychedelics. It is a kind of "Bodybuilding encyclopedia" by Arnold Schwarzenegger, but about psychedelics experience. Detailed description based on a first-hand experience. I doubt there is anyone who ever tried that much variety of psychedelics and of their combinations.

[Mikael Mahsudjan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative and interesting read.

[Ivo Onofre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is crazy, very interesting read although I would not rate the substances like him

[Christos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you!