Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change

Tao Lin doesn't realise he's not living. He is completely dysfunctional having a bad life. He thinks it's OK to spend his days refreshing web pages and blaming pesticides for his issues. His issues are simple: he has no life. He avoids this depressing fact by hiding in psychedelics. But actually has a really awful experience every time he tries them. All he can do is get really paranoid and destroy his computer and online presence. This should tell him something: he's got no real life. The trips keep trying to tell him, but he doesn't listen. Instead, he takes every opportunity to get stoned and carries on not living. What is telling is that he cannot see that McKenna died because he did psychedelics - who gets frontal cortex cancer? And he regretted it. McKenna's son catalogues porn and somehow Lin thinks he's a genius. This poor author who hasn't even ever seen a hash plant...really? There are clues everywhere in this book that Lin should take heed. He's not Hamilton Morris, who is completely aware of everything he is doing. He's basically a naive and gullible person with no friends hiding in another reality he doesn't even enjoy. Furthermore, this book is badly written. Summarisng McKenna's work and videos is not writing a book. The editing is atrocious. Maybe it was cute to have run-on sentences in fiction but run-on sentences that don't finish are unforgiveable. I feel like very young people who have never heard of McKenna etc. will find this interesting but it's such a low level of basic understanding and so derivative I'm not sure why it got published. What's more immediately frightening is the level of nihilism and lack of self. If this were a fictional book, I imagine it would read like Patrick Bateman Tries Drugs. I can only assume that's what happened in Lin's fiction books: people assumed he was writing a character. But it's actually just him. He's a sociopath, not one scrap of empathy, alwasy about himself. It's a very scary personality, and the only reason I kept reading was his utterly revolting way of acting with others. I hope he gets help. The publisher should have been more responsible than to publish this work, in which Lin is clear he thinks everyone is a CIA agent and doesn't actually say this with any irony. Probably the best book on psychedelics if you want to read a horror story on why not to take them. Tao Lin has not expanded his reality, just found a really horrible space to hide from his.

Wonderful book full of curiosity and awe and appreciation for the vast amorphous multiplicity of life and our existence. Unclassifiable as an artistic object and I find this very exciting. He encourages acceptance and tolerance and openness as both an individual within society and society itself, and encourages us to explore and LEARN and to KEEP LEARNING! Tao is one of the few writers with his dial set to the right place on the meter, and I'm anticipating his next novel, Leave Society! Thanks, Tao!

A rollicking psychedelic read that I highly recommend. Ok its a deeply personal anarchic account as are all such accounts, and reads at times like its fiction because of its far out nature but its subjectively real and factual even though its antics are chemically induced. One of those books I devoured and often didn't want to put down. Contains many interesting facts memories and stories about the great psychedelic bard Mc Kenna many new to me to. Twisted fractal delight....A++++

Often hilarious, sometimes melancholic. Always fascinating.

Durante a semana em que li Trip, me senti leve. É um livro que diverte e informa sobre um tema que, ou é tratado de forma científica e desconectada de seu tema, ou de forma extremamente cômica e não tão informacional. Trip é o livro sobre drogas mais original que eu já li. Tendo um preconceito, ou não, com este tema, acredito que todos deveriam ler-lo.

this book was cool but i found myself thinking "why am i not just reading terrence mckenna?" tao lin is pretty funny i guess, if you're a fan of him already i can understand why you might read it just for his writing style.

This book is worth the price if you are fascinated by Terence McKenna as the author, a devotee, has an extensive knowledge of him. The first section focuses on Terence and his insights. Otherwise a self indulgent account of a relapsing pathetic drug addict, impossible for me to finish. If you want to be inside the muddled self centered mind of a person struggling with addiction you might rate it higher than me.

Started well ... no rhythm very scattered near the end. Author is a interesting person but he and his writing seems schizophrenic. It’s basically him sharing his random thoughts with us the reader, but there is no conclusion no real insight just a random stream of consciousness. I was hoping for more.

Its all trippy here. Good reading, great insights, great information, excellent writing. Loved it.

I selected this book to read during 26 hours of travel. Parts were interesting and engaging, but the excitement was not sustainable

Overall, the book was ok. The author does a great job writing about Mckenna; those were the parts of the book that I liked: in particular, chapters 1 & 2. I stopped reading after the section on DMT... that part of the book seemed so painfully irrelevant, so scattered, and the next chapter seemed to be going right along in the same direction... I just had to put it down. Sorry, Tao.

Tao Lin's unique language, which synthesized his experiences with Terence McKenna, psychedelics, and Kathleen Harrison, wormed its way into my heart, soul, and actual dreams at night. I learned a lot of new things that I can't quite put into words.

If you've never read or listened to Terrence McKenna before, or are a beginner in psychedelics, this might be interesting to you. If you're experienced with both, it's likely going to be highly redundant for you.

Great literature

Enjoyed a lot. Felt good about the psychedelic stuff. If you've listened to a lot of Mckenna some parts feel familiar but it's fun to read Tao extrapolating from that and compare with ideas/events from his own life, like he also does with Weston A. Price and Riane Eisler. I like how he doesn't completely subscribe to any one view of the modern world. He seems to simultaneously be able to view a lot of parts of it as bleak and other parts as exciting and even hopeful. I think he took Terence a little too seriously about the 'I don't believe anything' thing. He said that a lot but it still feels, to me at least, like he strongly leaned towards Novelty Theory being true, and was also firmly rooted to the need for an Archaic Revival. He often seemed to me like a 'True Believer,' but one who was savvy enough to know how skeptical people were of both experts and evangelicals and so said things like that he only had 'models' (but I think it's only the top level stuff--things that seemed obvious to him, like that psychedelics would have to become important for a positive future outcome for humanity --that I think he firmly held to. A lot his ideas he did probably, it seems, view as expendable) But since I kind of believe that stuff it didn't really bother me.The book also encouraged me, through reading about Tao's experience with and gratefulness towards it, to begin again to use cannabis with a new attitude of viewing it as it's own intentional helper. I like this new view and how it's making me feel. I wanted to see some more things about the relationship between psychedelics and spirituality. Terence said different things. Like he sometimes said they were obviously intertwined, maybe earlier in his career i'm guessing, and then other times said stuff like he wasn't sure they had much to do with each other. I wanted (at some point before reading the book, imagining what the book was going to be about) to hear about Tao's view on the matter, but maybe it wasn't considered to be interesting or relevant or maybe it was not considered at all. The back of the book said stuff about 'what happens after death?' but that wasn't really talked about except for repeating without not a lot of examination Terence's 'death is a release into the the imagination.' Realizing now that I'd been assuming that a lot of people reading the book would be familiar with Terence's ideas but I overestimated the overlap of people who are interested in him and Tao because of his (Mckenna's) prevalence on Tao's online, (mainly Twitter it seems) presence, and that maybe to a lot of people these are going to be 100% new ideas which will, due to their newness, have a large effect on them, which seems exciting (just to have a lot of people discussing, or maybe just thinking about, interesting ideas, even ones that are maybe smirked at by certain different kinds of people).One of my favorite parts of the book was in the epilogue when Tao feels depressed and poignantly assures himself, despite the depressive thing of it seeming permanent, that there would come times that he would feel better. I view 'Trip,' or at least a lot, of it as kind of a culmination of the last months or maybe years of Tao's online presence, having followed probably all of it. I view the new, before-unseen parts, like his detailed trip reports and a lot of the Kathleen Harrison stuff as a sort of 'bonus.' I intuit that there are more things I vaguely feel like I can convey about my experience of reading 'Trip,' but am self-conscious about how long this review is for an Amazon comments section, and am so going to stop typing after the next sentence. I greatly appreciate everything Tao Lin writes makes me feel more interested in art and less alone in the world, and I feel massively grateful for him having communicated his Mckenna-influenced worldview and sharing his often-convincing view of and beliefs about both modern and general living.