Just picked up Otto Snow's LSD for just $32, so excited to have found such a cheap copy.
I had read the PDF version a long time ago, and to date it is my favorite book on LSD (along with Acid Dreams, which is a fantastic read as well, yet from a broader cultural perspective). It is part autobiographical narrative and part chemistry & synthesis. He has a simple yet compelling writing style that quickly draws you in.
Been looking for a physical copy for a long time, but it seemed unavailable except for those willing to part with €100+. Most exciting book find in a long long time for me, I'm so happy I finally found it
Now if only his other book "LSD & Tryptamine synthesis" was available for prices under €1000, haha

“Beyond the clouds, above people, beneath the skin, inside people, we’re waiting for you. We see you now, as you read. We’ll see you when you stop thinking about these words. Above and inside your face, we know your secrets. We know what you hide from yourself. You can’t escape us. We hold your heart in the palm of our hand. If we like, we can squeeze it. If we like, we can crush it. There’s nothing you can do to stop us. Our gaze notices your every single move and your every single word. Say a word now. Make a move. We smile at your words, as we smile at your silence. No one will be able to protect you. No one can protect you now. You’re even less than you imagine. We’ve seen a thousand generations of men like you. It was our pleasure to let them walk on the lines of our hands. It was our pleasure to take everything away from them. We guided entire generations of men through tunnels we built that led nowhere. And when they arrived at nothing, we smiled. You’re just like them. We’re waiting for you above and inside your face. Continue on your way. Follow that line of our hand. We know where that tunnel you walk through will end. Keep on walking. We see you and smile. Beyond the clouds, we are fear. Beneath the skin, we are fear.”

Before I could do much, however, the ayahuasca kicked in. It was extremely strong, and getting stronger by the second. I remember saying something about how powerful it was, and then I could be of no help whatsoever to Nancy, for I was so overwhelmed that I lost almost all contact with the world I’d known a minute earlier. As that world and its sustaining views — including those rooted in longtime spiritual practices — very quickly became but a fleeting speck on the periphery of the impossibly rich revelatory domain into which I’d been blasted, I buckled with huge awe and equally huge terror.

I thought of leaving the room, but could not move more than a few feet. So I remained sitting up, quivering with an indescribably strange feeling of recognition, periodically fearing that I’d made a fatal mistake in taking the ayahuasca. Who I had been before swallowing it was but the flimsiest and most unreal of memories. Nancy and I seemed to be not observers of — nor even participants in — what was happening. Rather, we were it — and had, it seemed, never really been other than it — the shockingly visceral and now devastatingly indisputable realization of which maddened what was left of my mind.

My world had not so much been altered as decisively replaced, both externally and internally. Nancy soon lay with her head flat on the floor, her face to one side, as if pressed down by an enormous hand. All we could do was ride out the storm.

For its first third (an eternity of about three hours) my ayahuasca journey was extremely harrowing, partly because of the considerable strain it placed on my body — I shook uncontrollably for almost two hours, violently vomiting a number of times2 — but mainly because of the often terrifying, unspeakably alien yet rivetingly familiar Wonder that was manifesting within and all around me.

The dazzling presence and implications of this Wonder, this reality-unlocking Unspeakableness, and my relationship to it made me reel; I could not convincingly stand apart from it, not even for a second, and strongly intuited that I never really had. When I somehow managed for a moment here and there to recall my life before ayahuasca, none of it carried any real depth or significance. That this didn’t terrify me would terrify me for a moment, then bend me with animal awe, then pass from consciousness.

What was now my world — and seemingly always had been, while I’d been dreaming that I was elsewhere — pulsed with a power and knowingness that surpassed anything I’d ever before experienced. No outside, no inside. No time. Flames sprouted from the leaftips of my plants with shapely brilliance. The trees outside the sliding glass doors, blazingly vivid and so, so alive, were fused with the sky, as if all drawn with the same vast undulating brush strokes. The objects in the room were no different than the space between them.

There I sat crazily swaying and trembling, transfixed in an imagination-transcending, overwhelmingly sentient Chaos in which everything, including the nonphysical, was inseparable from everything else. The sky, dripping with terrible beauty, poured into my room like a tsunami, my body seemed to be about to die again and again, my mind frothed insanely, and I felt through all of this an enormous, intensely emotional knowingness, a primordial intimacy and recognition — at once prehuman and transhuman — that shook me like a rag doll in the jaws of a rabid monster.

Looking into Nancy’s eyes was no different than looking into the room or out the windows. It was all, all, the same self-replicating, self-aware Unspeakableness, beyond any conceivable framing. As its perspective and mine merged, I felt as if I’d never really been elsewhere. The Open Secret of it all only affirmed and deepened its Mystery. I was alternatingly terrified and awestruck. I wanted to escape it all, and I wanted to get down on my knees before it all.

Telling myself that I had indeed taken a drug — which I only could remember every ten minutes or so — had about as much effect on me as trying to stop a train by placing a marshmallow in its path. One moment I was convinced I’d gone completely insane and would shortly find myself strapped down in the local hospital ward, and the next I would gasp wonderstruck at what was being revealed. Finally, the intensity of it all faded a bit, and I was on somewhat familiar ground, albeit still highly psychedelic territory, grateful to have survived. The last two thirds of the journey were quite joyful, which perhaps accounts to some degree for what followed.

I am currently reading a book called Surface Detail by Iain Banks. He is my favourite sci-fi author. I am only 126 pages and so far, so very good.

How to change your Mind: The new science of pyschedelics - Michael Pollan

Any one read this?

Doubt anyone doesn't know it by now, but carlos castaneda made this all up. It's not ethnography on the traditions of northern Mexican indigenous peoples, it's fiction.

I am about halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky. I am enjoying it much.

Currently reading one of the most arresting books I've ever read, The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith. Quote, "To understand, I destroyed myself." Reading it is a continuous "Wow."

Chaos
Chaos never died. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated.

Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin — your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.

To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age — shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.

Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror — everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.

The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they’d call it an act of terrorism — so let’s take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.

And here is my own recommendation: T.A.Z by Hakim Bay ( available for free online).
The full name of the book is actually: T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism