Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
by Daniel Pinchbeck
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Book Summary Information
Author: Daniel PinchbeckEdition: Paperback
Published: 2003-08-12
ISBN: 0767907434
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
Book Review: fascinating reporting
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Pinchbeck's 2012 last Fall, and found his writing on contemporary shamanism fascinating. Where 2012 discussed a lot of other seemingly random, somewhat interconnected phenomena, the underlying narrative was his discussion of psychedelic drugs. Having never tried psychedelics, I found his study interesting, and 20122 was hard to put down...so I had to pick up Breaking Open the Head.
Breaking Open the Head is just as good as 2012. The focus was more on the drugs, less on Pinchbeck's life. Pinchbeck presents a convincing case for the decriminalization of psychedelics. He provides vivid depictions of his trips...both physical and psychedelic, making this a fast, entertaining read.
Summary of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience.While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe.
Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival.
Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.
From the Hardcover edition.
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