http://www.amazon.com/Tryptamine-Palace-5-MeO-DMT-Sonoran-Desert/dp/1594772991



TLDR

Tryptamine palace is an interesting, if misguided book about how James Oroc began smoking 5 MEO DMT and had his life changed. It’s like a cow that makes a good bucket of milk and just kicks it over. Great set up, interesting adventure, then toad sized dumps of pseudoscience and speculation trying to justify the idea that smoking 5 MEO DMT connects you to god and the universal unconscious. He at least admits it’s speculation, and doesn’t press the notion that his ideas are fact. Couldn’t finish it, too much pseudoscience and woo in the latter half of the book.

Review

Tryptamine palace is an interesting, if misguided book. James Oroc presents his journey with 5 MEO DMT, heretofore referred to as 5MD, and it’s a wild ride. Oroc’s first time with 5MD changed his life, a session where he effectively ‘found god’ and was reborn (my words, not his.) Not the Christian god, but that amorphous higher existence that we all want to understand but no one can adequately reach or describe. He insists that he was a thoroughly rational person before hand, and after joined the folds of the faithful; his experience was so powerful it converted him. The book is informally and roughly divided into four sections: the memoir, the science, the history, and the speculation.

Oroc was also a heavy partier, and heavy drug user as well, from the descriptions. It’s not surprising that he would come across 5MD. He recalls experiences of the wildest parties he ever attended (M.O.M’s ball, Burning Man), looking for bufo toads in the Sonoran Desert, and turning as many people as he could find muster onto the ecstatic experience of 5MD. This part of the book is fun, in the sense of reading the memoirs of a life you don’t live (at least I don’t). His recounting of his experiences are pretty amazing, even to having full blown mystical experiences away from the drug.

He then moves onto describing the zero-point field. This is actually one of the best chapters in the book. Since I’m a science reader, this was particularly interesting to me. He describes pretty eloquently what the zero-point field is; it’s the energy in empty space created by virtual subatomic particles coming into existence out of nowhere, a real and validated phenomenon. Here I can see that Oroc does in fact have a mind for describing science. Unfortunately, you can tell this is just setting up wild speculation later in the book.

The next chapter described Timothy Leary, his crazy life and the huge controversy on his work. Namely, he explains the hypothesis that Leary was led by the CIA to introduce LSD into the heart of the left-wing student movement and break them up. Outlandish claims, but he backs them up pretty well, enough that I now want to learn more about Leary and his controversy.

But then Oroc takes a turn for the silly. He begins trying to tie the 5MD experience to connecting to the zero-point field via through some impressive yet less-than-plausible pseudo-science. Aside from misinterpreting science, and thoroughly misusing the term ‘quantum’, his main references are philosophers of science (Erwin Lazlo, Danah Zohar), not scientists, who themselves make grand leaps of intellect and land just short of nonsense. I almost had to drop the book at this point because the descriptions are barely intelligible and not founded in established science. His premise is that we emit biophotons (true) that are the communication medium between Bose-Einstein condensates in our cell membranes (false) and the zero-point field (no evidence). Further he proposes that 5MD raises your consciousness to a point where your brain can communicate with the zero-point field directly.

He goes on to describe the Akashic Field, Lazlo’s mystical term for the zero-point field, then gets into some serious conjecture trying to merge the 5 MEO DMT high to particle physics, eastern religion, and then enters the 36th Chamber, i.e. a whole lot of woo. At this point, halfway through the book, I kind of gave up. This may be great for many readers but was just crystal waving nonsense to me. It may, many years in the future be validated, but it’s doubtful. Most pseudoscience just ends up being fodder in the face of the real mysteries of the universe.