2010/20

Daniel Pinchbeck: Breaking Open the Head (297p.)

Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head (subtitle: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism) is an account of Pinchbeck’s experiences with various psychedelics while travelling to remote places like Gabon and the Amazon pursuing them (and Burning Man!). These personal experiences then serve as a launching pad for Pinchbeck’s discourse on the socio-cultural context of psychedelics in the West, especially in the decades since the 1960s. Almost inevitably, Pinchbeck is a cultural pessimist, advocating the use of psychedelics to break through the capitalist stranglehold.

Break Open the Head is well-written, well-researched, fun to read, and probably as good a book (or even better) as any other on this topic, which is a niche topic on the fringe, hence my interest in it. Pinchbeck promotes his cause with style, and in the latter chapters steers his book away from becoming the umpteenth (and uninspired) counterculture anti-capitalist rant.

A trip!

(Daniel Pinchbeck is the son of painter Peter Pinchbeck and writer Joyce Johnson.)

I took in one more deep plasticky breath and held it, and I started to go. John took the pipe from my hand. I fell back on the mattress as I shot out of myself like a rocket. How to explain the rush, the terrifying and ecstatic trauma, of leaving your body, and your brain, and everything that is you, except some infinitesimal tendril that has no existence in space or duration in time, which is an astral probe spiraling out into the infinite, far beyond the shell you left behind? I seemed to be projecting forward at an incredible speed. At the periphery of my vision I saw twisting white columns like high-tech swizzle sticks, as if I was following a ladder or lattice up, or in or out or all of the above, to hyperspace. I had the sense of floating through a fractal tapestry, a curving and infolding plane of synthetic, plastic, fantastic whiteness and gleaming colors in endless vibrant hues. This extradimensional realm I had pitched into was made, I felt certain, of data, of quantum equations, visible shamanic harmonics, and the self-weaving fabric of extradimensional superconsciousness. It was science fiction made fact. A dimension devoid of natural things, of plants and human need, of our weak and imprecise symbol systems. DMT land was an interweave of tantric mandalas, virtual reality fantasias, stained-glass aureolae; a ten-dimensional Walt Disney World projected into some far-fetched and far-flung future. There was, in that place, rushing toward me, an overwhelming force of knowledge and sentience. I knew it was impossible that my mind, on any level, had created what I was seeing. This was no mental projection. This was not a structure within the brain that the drug had somehow tapped into. It was a non-human reality existing at a deeper level than the physical world.