Very,very interneting topic. Shows how different realms could, and in fact, do co-operate.

“At the end of the book [Junkie, 1953], the narrator says that he has kicked junk and is leaving for Columbia in search of yage. He has heard about yage’s telepathic powers, which the Russians are said to be using “to induce states of automatic obedience and literal thought control” in workers – “the deal is certain to backfire because telepathy is not in itself a one-way setup, or a setup of sender and receiver at all” — unlike literature. He hopes yage will be “the uncut kick that opens out instead of narrowing down like junk . . . the final fix.” Burroughs did in fact make that trip to Colombia the very same year. At the botany department of the university in Bogota, he ran into Richard Evan Schultes. When Burroughs asked Schultes (whose work he apparently knew nothing of) about yage, Schultes produced a specimen, which Burroughs handled in such a way that Schultes could see that he was no botanist. He advised Burroughs that the remote Putumayo region of the southwest Colombia was the best place for him to sample the drug itself. Burroughs made two trips to the Putumayo, described in The Yage Letters (1963), the second with Schultes, and had an unpleasant yage trip with a local brujo (shaman). Moving to Peru, he sampled the drug again and produced one of his most beautiful passages, which later became part of the “Interzone” section of Naked Lunch:

“Yage is space time travel. The rooms seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian — new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants sprout out of the Rock and vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of the body), across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.” This is not just another colonialist, exotic fantasy. Burroughs is talking about the breaking down of the symbolically ordered, overcoded Western imagination into a corporeal hyperspace in which many imaginal space coexist, like different operating systems on a single computer. Every imaginal space, every way of moving in, through, and out of the world, which is to say, every “human potential”, is available. For Burroughs, these spaces would be connected by the Cut-Up, suggested to him by Brion Gysin in 1960, in the form of a montage, in which separate imaginal spaces (different texts for example) are brought into resonance with each other.”

Boon’s book is truly recommended to every Burroughs enthusiast, and while the book is not a book about Burroughs, his over-towering presence can be felt hovering over the Boon’s explorations of the relationship of “drug” experiences, imaginal/oneiric spaces and literature. Truly dense and important book, although it was published in 2002 and seriously needs to be published again with updated information that has become overwhelmingly available since then – the book could be densified to 200+ pages or more – but nonetheless it is a novel research that needs to be read by every Burroughs aficionado.

https://techgnosis.com/mentored-by-a-madman/