100 Books Like The Way of the Psychonaut Vol. 1

This book is at the leading edge of providing expert insights and techniques for advanced use of psychedelics, particularly 5-MeO-DMT. Martin Ball validated the profundity of my years of working with psychedelics and fractal energetic yoga. He provided me with new techniques and thought forms for working one-on-one with others in sharing consciousness, clearing energetic blockages, and delving into the infinitude of nonduality.

I found his description of the ego as an energetic construct particularly valuable for understanding how we navigate the physical world and its positive and negative impact on the body's energetics. I also benefited from his knowledge of the opportunities and challenges associated with using psychedelics.

This book chronicles the heroic journey of Christopher Bache’s 73 high-dose LSD sessions over twenty years and how these sessions impacted his life.

His story was a testament to me of the incredible hard work and persistence required to clear the body of energetic blockages when using psychedelics to reach the highest states of consciousness, including tapping into the cosmic creative principle of the living universe, exploring hell and heavenly realms, and nonduality. I loved how compelling and inspiring Bache’s story is.

While this book is not about the use of psychedelics, I loved how this book on astral travel provided me with expansive maps of what realms and beings can be explored in the infinitude of consciousness when using psychedelics.

Leland provided me insights into a long list of energetically advanced beings, whom he defines by their function, who can be called into psychedelic sessions for guidance and help. He also taught me how my biography and cultural beliefs can create the visual personal experience of cosmic energies experienced during psychonautical explorations.

Learning the nuances of using thought forms to create my immediate reality and experience was of the greatest value to me: awareness follows thought, and when out of the body, thought manifests itself instantly.

This book is a tome of Ken Wilber's lifetime wisdom. His book thoroughly explores a vast range of states of consciousness that helped me navigate the vastness of psychedelic experiences. More importantly, Wilber’s wisdom helped me integrate years of psychedelic experiences through his philosophy of integral theory and concepts of Growing Up, Waking Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up. And, funny enough, Wilber does not discuss psychedelics, yet his book is a psychonaut's guide to the universe.

This book rates in the top five books I have ever read. I felt heavily rewarded for the time and effort required to work through this epic book.

Michael Pollan’s scientific and personal investigations into the powers of psychedelics reveal how malleable our brains and minds are and illustrate the potential for people to change from a closed-minded way of viewing the world to one that is considerably more open-minded.

Pollan’s review of the scientific research on psychedelics shows, for instance, that the psychedelic compounds can lead to changes in the openness to experience dimension of Big Five personality traits. This and other similar findings, as well as Pollan’s narrative about his own personal experiences, are useful for suggesting another potential mechanism for changing minds.

This little-known paperback journals the psychedelic exploits of its pseudonymous author, a young bookkeeper who is equally adept at traversing far-out realms of consciousness and, crucially, writing about them.

Each of the twelve short chapters focuses on a unique combination of an obscure “research chemical”—a designer hallucinogen that has not gone mainstream—and a public art exhibit or concert. The result is outstanding. This little volume offers a peek into the life and mind of an avid psychonaut who, thanks to his insightful, relatable tone and strong writing, should appeal equally to trippers and teetotalers alike.

If all my choices so far have been, in some way, about the psychedelic experience, this is a practical hands-on guide about how to occasion one yourself. Psychedelics can be consumed safely, but there are attendant risks, not least from their continued illegality in many parts of the world. Vayne, who has decades of experience as a psychedelic user and ritual technician, talks the reader through recommended ways to prepare for a psychedelic experience, how to navigate what subsequently unfolds, and how to integrate it afterwards. This is the indispensable guide for the psy-curious, and even better it comes with a cover designed by legendary British psychedelic comic artist, Pete Loveday. 

Davis’ style is analytical swank and this excavation of the 1970s is his odyssean opus. High Weirdness is a fascinating trip of a book in which the psychedelic epiphanies and freak experiences of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick are each explored and compared for their extraordinary contributions to “consciousness culture,” and for their entrees on the radical form of realism Davis calls “weird naturalism.” The book serves as a remarkable introduction to each of the trio upon whom Davis has made extensive study, from the epicenter of the weird that was the 1971 Experiment at La Chorrera, to the origins and impact of the Discordian “mindfuck,” to Dick’s “perturbations in the reality field,” notably the 1974 events he named “2-3-74.” In the literature, philosophy, and practice of each we see “freak bricoleurs cobbling together their own technologies of the self.” Across this extensive freakography, we have… show more.

When I was conducting research for my own book, Plants of the Gods never left my desk and accrued an alarming number of bookmarks and footnotes. This is the reference book on nature’s extensive pharmacy of psychedelics. But don’t expect a dry textbook—this is immensely readable and bursting with color illustrations.

All three of the authors were giants in various fields psychedelic research. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered LSD and was the first to identify the active compounds in magic mushrooms. Richard Evans Schultes, a biologist and the father of ethnobotany, was the first Westerner to study ayahuasca in the Amazon. Christian Rätsch was a world-renowned anthropologist and writer.

Their iconic collaboration transcends the genre of reference book, and brings the exciting world of natural psychedelics to life.

In 2021’s most widely-discussed literary novel, Lin, the former enfant terrible of the early 2000s alt-lit scene, rejects that movement’s terse and affectless style in favor of a more startlingly inventive prose alive to everyday experience’s strangeness. This autobiographical novel recounts its narrator’s attempt to wean himself from the toxic habits and substances of our “dominator” society and, through natural foods and psychedelic drugs, to return to a matriarchal cooperative tradition he describes at length. Whatever we think of Lin’s potentially sentimental historiography, he embeds it in a gentle family comedy that effloresces into a tender romance. I appreciate Lin’s countercultural commitment to rejecting fashionable pessimism and unthinking science-worship, and I respect his evolving ethic of personal kindness. It would be preachy if issued as a proclamation, but becomes a practice we can all learn to share when shown in a novel.