The psychedelic experience itself is transformative. Like a rebirthing, it enables a neophyte to fast-track and rewind through memories, coming to terms with the psychological processes of the 'self' and the evolutionary processes at work in the cosmos. To take a 'trip' is to experience the past, present and future simultaneously. Like riding a lightning bolt, it's a dangerous ride that's fit only for the existentially tough. Once the necessary precautions have been taken, however, it becomes a viable access route for responsible contemporary shamanic neophytes who want to touch base with the dynamics of historicity. As Terence McKenna put it, "psychedelics allow you to see the wiring beneath the board … to understand how the world really works".

Although the inner science of alchemical exploration has been in disrepute since the scientific enlightenment of the 18th century, the recent revolution in molecular biology has inadvertently tuned into the alchemical magnum opus once more. When experimental chemist Dr Albert Hoffman synthesised history's greatest chemical destabaliser, LSD, in the Sandoz laboratories in the early 1950's, he literally blew open the doors of perception. LSD has been called the atom bomb of consciousness; like the bomb it achieved the alchemical goal of transubstantiating matter – and, like the bomb, it ushered in a new epoch. Along with a host of other literary, artistic and scientific luminaries of the period, novelist Anais Nin was one of the new wonder- drug's early guinea-pigs. At the dawn of the psychedelic sixties, she saw herself as part of a larger social organism that was liquefying; opening like a sea-anenemone to countless imaginary worlds of the imagination made flesh. Like the generation of psychonauts that followed in the wake of the bomb, she experienced an epiphany that, for a few brief and glorious hours, exploded her right out of history.  The term 'psychedelic' was coined to describe this experience of the ineffable. It means "mind- manifesting" and represents the transposition of inner and outer psychological and experiential realities; the detonation of the 'self'.

When the military-industrial complex discovered that LSD and other psychedelic compounds were, like H-bombs, socially volatile, there were inevitable crackdowns. The "gylanic wave" (a term used by mathematician Ralph Abrahams to describe the nuclear impact of psychedelics on contemporary culture) had, however, already broken on the shores of the present. Waves of anti-flower-power sentiment following the social forment of the 1960s couldn't quench or completely discredit the psychedelic spirit. Despite of the escalating war on drugs, infamous biochemists like Dr Alexander Shulgin carried on where psychedelic biotechnicians such as Hoffman and Richard Evans-Schultes had left off.  

Synthesising a veritable host of new psychedelic chemicals in the early 21st century's equivalent of the 'sacred laboratory', Shulgin has become one of the high-priests of a growing community of wired psychonauts. Not content to let governments curb their freedom to explore consciousness, their ongoing legacy is the modern revolution in consciousness. These psychedelic technologists "are abandoning themselves to the reservoir of possibilities represented by non-linear stabilization and diversification," writes philosopher Manuel de Landa who, alongside a host of new-edge scientists, mathematicians and computer geeks, recognises the connections between psychedelic exploration and technological innovation. As artisans of the 'new', explains de Landa, psychonauts are exploding out of their heads and out of history, "searching for a better destiny for humanity … climbing from one strange attractor to another as they track the machinic phylum."  This is the journey undertaken, in greater or lesser degrees by all psychedelic travellers everywhere.  Their transformations map the dynamics of non-deterministic forces, subtle patterns and strangely unpredictable energies that underlie consciousness. Be warned, however: not everyone survives the trip; hardly surprising given the nature of the territory.  "Perhaps the most novel type of stability in a world that's fundamentally out of control," ponders Manuel De Landa, is the imagination that sees the world as "a dynamical state of transitions and transformations … that [is capable of] exploring spaces of 'structured' possibility."  
    
The triggering of a non-linear "paradigm-induced gestalt switch" is necessary before human beings can begin to see things that were previously invisible, insignificant or anomalous.  For French poststructuralists Deleuze and Guattarri this "gestalt switch" can be turned on through experimentation with drugs, or through the speculative hallucinations of science fiction (sf).  Together, these two "events" (sf and drug experimentation) constitute the "memories of a sorcerer", imaginative explorations that scout ahead into possible futures, scanning informational spaces and articulating "new engineering diagrams" that point the way toward the new flesh.  "Events or new ideas can radically change the way in which we perceive the world around us," writes Guattari.  Even "mutations" in a specific domain can have a "fallout" effect, thereby "transversally contaminating many other domains around them." Psychedelics are viral in nature; their effects spread through minds and communities of minds. The effects of one mind transformed is the equivalent of a ripple in the collective; many minds transformed could build into tidal waves.  

The psychedelic shaman's dive into "flows of intensity" replaces the self with "becomings-animal, becomings-molecular," write Deleuze and Guattari.  Able to glimpse "other universes and other levels of reality," the psychonaut can discover "what it is like to be every animal and plant … a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun," explains physicist Michael Talbot.  In a sense, notes de Landa, the destabilized shaman becomes an "abstract machine … a probe-head capable of exploring a place of possible forms."  The psychonaut, then, is the highpriestess of a new and emphemeral inner science that is tearing through into the external world. Perhaps the terrifying beauty of the 'trip' is nothing less that a 'direct pointing at reality' – a Zen arrow aimed at the glowing heart of the Aeon.