I've had a review copy of 'Tryptamine Palace' sitting on my desk for a while now and have been slow to write anything about it because in many ways it perplexes me. On the one hand I was excited to see a full text on 5-Meo-DMT and, more specifically, toads, entering the psychedelic catalog; on the other hand this book is all over the place and tries to cover everything all at once. Moving from Buring Man to a "unified field of everything" theory is not the easiest path to take, but James Oroc does a heroic job of trying to cram it all in there.
'Tryptamine Palace' was written by Oroc over a period of many years, and the subtitle "A Journey from Burning Man to the Akashic Field" sets the basic tone for this book. I felt instantly overwhelmed with Oroc's attempt to re-brand spiritual elements of psychedelic mythology, including a quirky deconstruction of the word "God" into the mathematical formula G/d, which he presents on page 5 and uses throughout the remainder of the text. The technical information presented on DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and
Bufo alvarius is all well researched and will be interesting for people who have not read other source materials, but much of Oroc's material is re-tread of popular theories of transcendent metaphysics or well-worn historical events like Leary's High Priest days and the CIA's MK-ULTRA experiments. 'Tryptamine Palace' reads like a big jumble of psychedelic lore, none of it covered in much detail, making it seem more like a garden-variety psychedelic primer than an important new treatise on 5-MeO-DMT.
Oroc does try to bring some new material to the table by linking the Akashic field of Eastern spirituality to the zero-point energy field of quantum physics. While this connection is alluring I found it frustrating that Oroc buries his case within chapters touting Burning Man as an example of the coming transcendent culture shift. The proof of the central thesis of this book, that 5-MeO-DMT is a gateway to God consciousness via the Akashic field, somehow gets lost in all the meandering, but the chapter entitled, "The Zero-Point Field and the 5MDE" is dense enough to be read two or three times, and links consciousness to quantum Bose-Einstein condensates as interference patterns of space interacting with time. Oroc presents a neat collection of source material on East/West quantum consciousness and sums it all up with some of his own mathematical descriptions of consciousness as a form of light condensate. The few chapters he spends discussing quantum models of God are worthy and fully steeped in Western science and Eastern philosophy. A quantum 5-MeO-DMT deconstruction of the Tibetan bardos is just what we would expect from such a text, and of course Oroc does not disappoint.
For anyone who has studied psychedelic literature there is nothing mind-blowing or outlandishly wrong with "Tryptamine Palace", it is a decent book for anyone new to the field of psychedelics who wants a quick overview of the culture and the influences on the popular metaphysics and mythology of the scene. It is part science text, part history text, part religious text, part cultural commentary, part personal narrative, and part metaphysical conjuring, but there is little new or revelatory about 5-MeO-DMT or toads or quantum consciousness here. Part of Oroc's problem is that he is trying to prove something that is intangible, so his argument essentially boils down to: "Wouldn't it be neat if the Akashic field was actually the zero-point energy field of quantum physics, and that smoking 5-MEO-DMT is a gateway to that field and ultimately to the mind of God?" Yes, very neat theory, but the results of connecting to the mind of God via smoking 5-MeO-DMT are still out. Are there any mentions of the potential negative effects of smoking 5-MeO-DMT in 'Tryptamine Palace'? None that I saw. So beware kids, this could be some really clever God propaganda to make you go out and smoke poisonous toad venom! Your mileage may vary. Ha ha!
