October 2003
It’s a common enough revelation: tasting, for the first time, the existential clarity of psychedelic experience. We spiritually impoverished and numbed Americans just don’t know what to make of it. As the scales fall from our third eyes for a brief, glorious look at the world as it seems like it always really was, we have two choices: ignore it or embrace it.
Ignoring it, of course, is what our dominator culture would like us to do. It’s an illusion, a hallucination. Forget about it and keep shopping. And that’s what most of us do. By consigning the psychedelic experience to “recreation” — as a trip to a pretty but ultimately meaningless land inside our heads — we are complicit in keeping our own willful metaphysical blinders in place.
Daniel Pinchbeck’s early psychedelic experiences were unremarkable in this regard. Eating mushrooms and wandering around a college campus is, by now, a pedestrian experience; an iconic rite as much a part of growing up as the French class we were blowing off to take that little detour. But just like that French class, the magical lessons are all too soon forgotten in the press of the “real” world.
Revisiting psychedelics (now more respectable as entheogens) later in life, Pinchbeck has embarked on a revisioning of these powerful tools of consciousness exploration, but this time in the timeless context of shamanism. In the process, he discovers himself and rediscovers the rest of the universe. Here is the essence of this marvelous book: through the experience of seeking and receiving instruction from shamans learned in the entheogenic traditions, Pinchbeck is proposing the outlines of a syncretic shamanism native to the globalized metaculture of hypercapitalism. He believes he has identified none other than the means to reconnect our insane, violent, and material civilization with the timeless wisdom of the living cosmos.
It’s the kind of thing you come back to your dorm room ranting and raving about, but with a difference. Pinchbeck’s explorations are carefully conceived and are diligently undertaken, embarking from a posture of gently detached skepticism. “Breaking Open the Head,” his account of these journeys, charts a personal spiritual flowering in all its confused, contradictory, and lovable detail.
Quite to his surprise, he becomes a mystic; a postmodern shaman’s apprentice and a very serious psychonaut. And his brilliance lies in presenting this journey in a well-wrought, thoughtful way. He takes baby steps from the naus’of the material world all the way into a whacked-out super-reality populated by hyperdimensional entities. It’s easy to walk by his side, and he brings along some of the widely acknowledged giants of human thought. Chief among them is Pinchbeck’s favorite philosopher, Walter Benjamin, whose work serves as an intellectual foundation that leads us to explorations of the ideas of fascinating philosopher-mystics like Georges Gurdijieff and the inheritors of ancient tradition like the shaman Maria Sabina. We start in familiar territory, and one step at a time he takes us into the invisible word that’s all around us.
That’s his genius. This is no Terence McKenna-style dive off the deep end, into waters sensible only to the initiate. Pinchbeck writes with an innocence and h