Psychedelic Medicine News would like to introduce an article written by Alexander Beiner, ‘The Seeds of Psy-Fi”

In the silent, rock-broken hills of southeastern Greenland lies a village called Taasilaq. Founded in 1894 by Danish missionaries, much of the community consists of an indigenous population of Ammassalik Inuits. While hunting and fishing are still important parts of Ammassalik life, most live sedentary lives in colourful wooden houses scattered around the curved shores of a fjord, hemmed in by mountains.
In the winter, the northern lights pulse above, lighting the snow as they fluctuate softly. When they were nomads, the Ammassalik would have seen this sight countless times and tried to make sense of it. The phenomenon would have inspired endless stories and poems, words woven to make sense of the sublime glow in the sky.
These stories were important not because they tried to make sense of the Ammassalik’s reality, but because they created that reality. The Ammassalik language uses the same word for ‘breathe’ and ‘make poetry’. This fundamental synergy between language and creation is recognized in hundreds of cultures throughout the world; it appears in origin myths in which the world is sung into existence, coils itself through mantras, shamanic ritual and modern linguistics. As Terence McKenna often pointed out, the world is made of language.
Much as the Ammassalik fishermen launch their boats into the fjord to fish, psychedelic explorers launch themselves with baited breath into the waters of consciousness. What we find there is often beyond language, understood intuitively or telepathically. In a mystical state, it is possible to comprehend a seemingly infinite number of thoughts in a single moment. Language falls apart, revealed as hopelessly inadequate under the heavy swell of the ineffable.
This eternal moment of ecstatic emotion and expanded awareness was known to the Romantic poets as the Sublime. The Sublime is the point at which the parametres of language fail, where what is spoken is not a flickering system of loose signifiers, but a song that contains every thought, word and deed we can conceive of. It is the point at which the poet knows themselves as one with their environment and the rest of the universe.
One of the most difficult paradoxes in literature is whether it is possible to recreate and express this state through language. If language is a complex system of connotation, signification and interpretation shared by a group of perceivers, then translating the ecstatic experience of one person so that another can feel it is a difficult, if not impossible, undertaking.
Most visionary artists create with an awareness that they will never quite capture what it was they saw or felt through their ecstatic experiences. In the psychedelic community we are gifted with a plethora of visual artists who come back from these realms and try their very best, usually with astounding and beautiful results. In fact, due to their prevalence as a medium for expressing altered states, it is tempting to see painting, sculpture and other visual arts as a more reliable way of capturing these states than written language.
Added to this, there are comparatively few examples of Psychedelic Fiction, or Psy-Fi. Some notable examples include Norman Spinrad, Phillip K. Dick and Aldous Huxley.  Psy-Fi is a comparatively new genre; due to the illegality of plant medicines and the resulting damage to their reputation, novels that make the psychedelic experience their thematic core are rare. However, the novel has a unique feature that distinguishes it from other art forms and gives it incredible potential in the exploration of visionary experiences; it is a synergistic story telling medium.
You read a book to journey with characters through their own personal development and in doing so you see the world through their eyes. These experiences are then compared to your own, a process that allows you to expand your definition of who you are. This is a universal and fundamental phenomenon; the world may be made of language, but it is experienced through stories.
Critic Christopher Booker has suggested that every almost every story follows one of 7 basic plots. These are Comedy, Tragedy, Rags to Riches, Overcoming the Monster, The Quest, Voyage and Return, and Rebirth. Booker sees these as Jungian archetypes inherent to all humans. This archetypal facet of plot, combined with the synergistic nature of reading, means that novels can provide a deeper exploration into the phenomenology of consciousness than any other popular art form. A psychedelic trip can contain elements of each of these archetypal plots, pointing to a fundamental similarity between the way we create our reality through stories and how we travel through our own psyches. In a Psy-Fi novel you can watch a character change as a result of their mystical experience and see what is happening in their inner space as they do. To take this experience of the Sublime and reconcile it with language, story-telling and poetry requires a unique, boundary-dissolving approach to form.
Traditionally, this sort of experimentation is classified as ‘postmodern’. Postmodernity is defined by the fragmentation of ‘grand narratives’ that attempt to explain all of reality. These include religion, nationalism and culture itself. It is a perspective that sees the individual as a pawn in a web of language games, external influence and categorisation. In the postmodern world nothing is certain, everything is contingent on something else and there is no firm truth to fall back on. Unlike modernist art, postmodern art revels in this somewhat hopeless situation, playing with form, genre and language in a sort of half-hearted celebration of the inevitable fragmentation of the individual.
The resulting worldview is somewhat bleak as the individual is powerless to a large extent, crushed by external forces. And yet the Sublime, an experience that should by all accounts not feature in the postmodern worldview, still has a place in postmodern art. The philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, one of the founders of the movement, himself declared that the Sublime is “the ultimate explanation” of postmodernism. Without the experience of the ecstatic and the translinguistic, the postmodern individual is doomed to wonder forever through a closed web of language and culture. The Sublime alone provides an avenue for escape.
With this in mind, psychedelic drugs become the holy grail of postmodernism. In fact, if used correctly, they completely shatter the postmodern worldview. The psychedelic experience reveals that the individual is trapped only by themselves, only their acceptance of cultural influence. Nothing is inevitable, everything is created; these substances provide direct personal experience of the creator within.
The world of culture becomes nothing more than a game, where meaning creates meaning and each individual is manifesting, either consciously or unconsciously, a consensus reality with everyone else.  But unlike the traditional postmodern worldview, the players of this game have the power to change the rules.
Psy-Fi takes postmodernism and infuses it with the spirituality it so desperately needs. Mystical states provide the basis for this genre and allow for a deep exploration of human consciousness. Much like the Ammassalik, if we want to make sense of these experiences, we have to tell stories based around them. In doing so, we will begin to create a paradigm that sees ecstasy as a human birthright and recognises the infinite power within the individual.

Alexander Beiner is the author of the new novel  ‘Beyond the Basin’

To read a synopsis and hear a short reading, visit Beyond the Basin