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
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08-12
ISBN: 0767907434
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Broadway Books
Book Reviews of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
Book Review: A Humpty Dumpty Story
Summary: 5 Stars
My initial thought upon starting this book was that Daniel Pinchbeck's personal odyssey to find the source of Truth and Knowledge arose from his need to experience the creative forces that formed the artistic life of his mother, a talented Beat Generation writer, and his father, an accomplished abstract painter. I wondered if this would be just another middle-class "drug tale".
Fortunately, for the reader, his metier is a deft and sparkling prose style that enriches the telling of his story and induces us to follow him on his journey.
Throughout this book, I felt a kinship with Pinchbeck in that I, too, have felt compelled to find meaning beyond the insanity that stands in for culture in America; an insanity, I might add, that is increasingly propelling us towards a questionable existence that is impossible for a thinking person to ignore any longer.
My seduction, however, was tempered by fear and my journeys stayed in the intellectual area rather than the experiential. Like many in my generation (the 60's, hippies), half-hearted attempts at searching for "enlightenment" eventually gave way to being co-opted by the very culture I tried to abjure.
Pinchbeck, on the other hand, finally reached a point in his life where his own dysfunction forced him to reach towards the things that appealed to him in his youth. He wanted to return to a kind of naivete and hope in psychedelic drugs; a time before media, politics and capitalism ended the real quantitative advancements (especially in psychological healing) that psychedelics were just starting to reveal. Instead, what resulted from those times was a sterile and superficial marketing-driven world that has spawned the self-absorbed, drug culture we see today; a culture where there's a medication for every physical, social and psychological disorder and where the culture itself is the intoxicant of choice to mask the divisiveness, hatred, injustice, dangers and lies we must face every day in our society.
"Breaking Open the Head" is an apt title for the audacious--some would say foolhardy--attitude Pinchbeck proceeds with in his "spirit quest". Yet, as a foundation for his psychedelic journeys, there is an intellectual framework that ranges from Plato to Rudolph Steiner and from neolithic cave paintings to the Burning Man Festival.
In fact, besides this being superbly-written story of one man's exploration of the "subtler realms", "Breaking Open the Head" is an invaluable survey of historical and current ideas as to the nature of mind and reality.
What becomes clear as one reads the book is that for a hundred millenia, mankind had existed in an often mysterious and dangerous world with the help of some kind of knowledge available to just a few. Yet it is apparent that for any group of people to survive, these few individuals would have to have been part of that society.
Only in the last 300-400 years has science been around to create the surety in today's world that "everything can be explained" if only science has enough time and resources to explain it.
Daniel Pinchbeck's record of his journey is vital for a society that is so isolated from nature that even with great numbers of scientists, scholars and thinkers shouting at the top of their lungs about the imminent dangers we are creating in our environment, the collective public response is a shrug of the shoulders.
I've just begun reading "2012", Pinchbeck's latest book. It will be fascinating to see how his journey continues. The inherent dangers of his exploration that he describes at the end of "Breaking Open the Head", probably would have been enough to end my own "trip". But without "psychonauts"--explorers of the mind--like Pinchbeck to guide man down through the ages, we might not have evolved any farther than have our more hirsute cousins; the apes.
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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.
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