Proteus
08-26-2003, 07:30 AM
Book Review of
BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism By Daniel Pinchbeck.
In CCLE Journal Volume 4, No. 1, 2003
What is it about the psychedelic experience that is so singular, so unique, that generation must be reminded of the Elysian Fields (and Circles of Hell) which await us through the gratuitous grace of some neurological alchemy? In the 19th century Baudelaire and De Quincey scandalized Europe with their tales of hashish and opium. In the 1950s Aldous Huxley took mescaline and wrote the enduring tract of psychedelic literature, The Doors of Perception. What followed, over the 1960s and early 1970s, was a bewildering array of trip reports, from the highs of Timothy Leary’s High Priest to the propagandistic warnings of Go Ask Alice. When it comes to the psychedelic experience, it’s almost as if word-of-mouth isn’t enough: we need written proof. Yet, in the era of DARE and zero tolerance, accurate information about psychedelics is almost as hard to come by as the substances themselves. Despite the heroic efforts of organizations like Erowid to disseminate accurate and up-to-date information about psychedelics, our culture has made a collective decision to treat psychedelics as dangerously destabilizing agents of change, untrustworthy and inherently damaging. The level of discourse about psychedelic drugs has been reduced to the Drug Czar’s "Because I Say So" ads linking drug use with terrorism. In this post-9/11 era, few individuals have the courage required to step forward and speak truth to power. Fewer still can speak about the psychedelic experience eloquently, passionately, and reasonably.
So it was like a breath of fresh air when I opened the pages of Daniel Pinchbeck’s stunning "tale of wonder" Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. Co-founder of the lauded Open City magazine-which showcases the rising talents of contemporary literature—Pinchbeck begins his narrative in a self-described "spiritual crisis" bored with the materialism of his peers and numbed by the "media smog" which drowns out the sight of anything not commodified. In Pinchbeck’s circle of downtown New York intellectuals, the drugs of choice were alcohol, heroin and cocaine—an unholy trinity for a human spirit weary of experience. These offered nothing to him, so he found himself turning to LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, feeling, all the while, as though he’d relapsed into some teenage behavior, dropping acid in Washington Park and watching the world melt away. These first psychedelic experiences opened Pinchbeck to another description of the world, outside the tidy, reductive, Freudian reasoning of his peers, and launched him on the journey that forms the backbone of the book.
Beginning in Gabon-home of the Bwiti, the African cult of iboga, Pinchbeck plunges headlong into a series of adventures that take him around the world. In a twelve-hour psychedelic trip, iboga rewinds and replays Pinchbeck's past-to-present, showing him how he came to be the man he was—a heavy drinker and womanizer, incapable of meaningful relationships—and offered him an opportunity to change his ways. lboga is known for its ability to treat people with chemical dependencies, such as heroin and alcohol—and although Pinchbeck does drink moderately today, his iboga experience helped him bring his problem drinking to an end.
From Gabon to Mexico, retracing the steps of R. Gordon Wasson, the New York banker who "rediscovered" the psilocybin mushroom, Pinchbeck meets up with the son of Maria Sabina, the sorceress who initiated Wasson into the mushroom mysteries. Mushrooms may represent humanity’s oldest connection to the psychedelic experience, and Pinchbeck uses his Mexican experience as a starting point for an intellectual argument on the cultural necessity of that experience. The foundation of Pinchbeck’s argument is built upon his reading of anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the first modern to study shamanism (Eliade rashly defined shamanic intoxication as a degenerate form of the tradition), and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who emphasized "the importance of intoxication for perception. Mourning the loss of the Dionysian rituals of ecstasy, Benjamin predicted that mankind might someday "experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." I The repressed ecstatic, Pinchbeck reminds us, inevitably returns as the chaotic catastrophic.
Pinchbeck never lingers anywhere too long; Breaking Open the Head is a psychedelic Cook’s Tour, each stop a little further from the consensus reality comfort of rationalist materialism. He lights next at that annual carnival in the deserts of northern Nevada, Burning Man. Here Pinchbeck encounters a modern psychedelic culture "more decadent than Warhol’s Factory, more glamorous than Berlin in the 1920s, more ludicrous than the most lavish Busby Berkeley musical ... more implausible than any mirage." But it’s not all fun and games at Burning Man. Although the event explores the possibilities of a post-consumer culture driven by creative, ecstatic values, "Burning Man also has a sorrowing streak. As they dance, the revelers also grieve ... for
everything spiritless and vacant—the hideous Medusa mask of our culture-that needs to be torn off and fed to the flames ... The greatest party in the world is also a wake for this world."
It’s this paired feeling of joy and loss that follows Pinchbeck into his final journey, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, where he meets up with Don Caesario, a Secoya Indian and shaman. Pinchbeck has come to drink yage, the "vine of souls" and experience the cleansing and the visions which have made this brew, ayahuasca, the de facto cure-all through South America. Though he drinks the brew, and has his visions, Pinchbeck really can’t take his mind off the geologists from Occidental Petroleum, just a few miles away, busily exploring for oil. The Secoya culture might soon be swept aside, as roads and pipelines and civilization come pouring in. The meaninglessness of modernity—which Pinchbeck is running away from on every page of Breaking Open the Head—would supplant the rich internal life which the Secoya maintain through their use of ayahuasca. Oil or no, the tradition teeters on the verge of extinction: Don Caesario’s son, converted to Christianity, will not follow in his father’s footsteps to become a shaman; the line, thousands of years long, may soon end. Yet, in the twilight of his tradition, Don Caesario treats Pinchbeck to one of the most profound moments related in the book, a suite of icaros, or ayahuasca songs:
Don Caesario drank another cup of the bitter brew, prepared for him by his assistant Tintin. Then he sang alone. His song seemed to be the wildest and most private ode, a psalm of solitude, unveiling the secret knowledge of his soul. He barely whispered. He breathed into the stars. Then the melody returned, his voice rose up. To my augmented ears, he seemed to be weaving a subtle discourse on reality, describing the victory of form over emptiness. As he sang, he seduced a spirit-creature that started to grow, spinning cotton candy filaments around itself. Then Tintin started to sing as well. But he seemed to challenge the shaman's metaphysical viewpoint, arguing that emptiness ultimately triumphs over form. Don Caesario sadly concurred, and the cotton candy creation was released to fall back into the void ... I had no more doubts that the Secoya engaged in extra-dimensional exploration, using ayahuasca as their psychic telescope and transport.
Pinchbeck returns to the US, and dabbles in a few other more exotic compounds—notably DMT and DPT (which, after a harrowing experience with extra-dimensional entities invading his apartment, he describes as "not for human consumption"). Traveling into the machine-elf world of DMT (nearly a carbon-copy of the experience first described by Terence McKenna), he hears a voice telling him, "This is it. Now you know." This is the final crack that breaks open Daniel Pinchbeck’s head, sending the stuttering edifice of modernity crashing down. How, he wonders, could an entire universe, apparently as real and solid as our own, exist just beyond our perceptions? Something isn't adding up, or rather, something isn’t being accounted for. If such a metaphysical fundamental has been overlooked, Pinchbeck asks, what does that say about the prejudices of a culture that rules these visions irrelevant, immaterial, and unimportant?
And now we see the complete arc. Pinchbeck performs his function as cultural Everyman perfectly. Within the confines of intellectual New York culture, he is archetypal, possessed with the same hopes and fears as his peers, and yet has found a way to a richer internal life, a mythology which includes the ineffable, the impossible, and the unfathomable. Why would anyone want to break open their head? Why, in the end, does Pinchbeck see his journey not as recreation, but as necessity? The horror of the situation, of "egocentric materialism and spiritual nihilism," and the imminent danger of "the transformation of the earth into a non-human wasteland" forces Pinchbeck to assert:
Unlikely as it seems, we have to become our own shamans, wizards and seers. As spiritual warriors, we must take responsibility for the plight of our species. To break the spell of our culture's death trap deceptions and hypnotic distractions, we need the courage to confront what lies behind the open doors of our own minds.
A psychedelic experience which "breaks open the head" is a way through the smog of lies, deception and distraction which separate us from an authentic experience of the world, an experience which, it must be admitted, would be as horrifying as it would be exhilarating. To deny the existence of these visions, positive and negative, is equivalent to driving a car down a highway, eyes closed, with a foot jammed on the accelerator petal. Eventually you’ll wreck. That is, unless you listen to Daniel Pinchbeck’s advice, open your eyes, and see the world as it really is: Infinite.
Review by Mark D. Pesce Mark. Pesce is a virtual reality developer and author of The Playful World. How Technology Transforms Our Imagination.
BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism By Daniel Pinchbeck.
In CCLE Journal Volume 4, No. 1, 2003
What is it about the psychedelic experience that is so singular, so unique, that generation must be reminded of the Elysian Fields (and Circles of Hell) which await us through the gratuitous grace of some neurological alchemy? In the 19th century Baudelaire and De Quincey scandalized Europe with their tales of hashish and opium. In the 1950s Aldous Huxley took mescaline and wrote the enduring tract of psychedelic literature, The Doors of Perception. What followed, over the 1960s and early 1970s, was a bewildering array of trip reports, from the highs of Timothy Leary’s High Priest to the propagandistic warnings of Go Ask Alice. When it comes to the psychedelic experience, it’s almost as if word-of-mouth isn’t enough: we need written proof. Yet, in the era of DARE and zero tolerance, accurate information about psychedelics is almost as hard to come by as the substances themselves. Despite the heroic efforts of organizations like Erowid to disseminate accurate and up-to-date information about psychedelics, our culture has made a collective decision to treat psychedelics as dangerously destabilizing agents of change, untrustworthy and inherently damaging. The level of discourse about psychedelic drugs has been reduced to the Drug Czar’s "Because I Say So" ads linking drug use with terrorism. In this post-9/11 era, few individuals have the courage required to step forward and speak truth to power. Fewer still can speak about the psychedelic experience eloquently, passionately, and reasonably.
So it was like a breath of fresh air when I opened the pages of Daniel Pinchbeck’s stunning "tale of wonder" Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. Co-founder of the lauded Open City magazine-which showcases the rising talents of contemporary literature—Pinchbeck begins his narrative in a self-described "spiritual crisis" bored with the materialism of his peers and numbed by the "media smog" which drowns out the sight of anything not commodified. In Pinchbeck’s circle of downtown New York intellectuals, the drugs of choice were alcohol, heroin and cocaine—an unholy trinity for a human spirit weary of experience. These offered nothing to him, so he found himself turning to LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, feeling, all the while, as though he’d relapsed into some teenage behavior, dropping acid in Washington Park and watching the world melt away. These first psychedelic experiences opened Pinchbeck to another description of the world, outside the tidy, reductive, Freudian reasoning of his peers, and launched him on the journey that forms the backbone of the book.
Beginning in Gabon-home of the Bwiti, the African cult of iboga, Pinchbeck plunges headlong into a series of adventures that take him around the world. In a twelve-hour psychedelic trip, iboga rewinds and replays Pinchbeck's past-to-present, showing him how he came to be the man he was—a heavy drinker and womanizer, incapable of meaningful relationships—and offered him an opportunity to change his ways. lboga is known for its ability to treat people with chemical dependencies, such as heroin and alcohol—and although Pinchbeck does drink moderately today, his iboga experience helped him bring his problem drinking to an end.
From Gabon to Mexico, retracing the steps of R. Gordon Wasson, the New York banker who "rediscovered" the psilocybin mushroom, Pinchbeck meets up with the son of Maria Sabina, the sorceress who initiated Wasson into the mushroom mysteries. Mushrooms may represent humanity’s oldest connection to the psychedelic experience, and Pinchbeck uses his Mexican experience as a starting point for an intellectual argument on the cultural necessity of that experience. The foundation of Pinchbeck’s argument is built upon his reading of anthropologist Mircea Eliade, the first modern to study shamanism (Eliade rashly defined shamanic intoxication as a degenerate form of the tradition), and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who emphasized "the importance of intoxication for perception. Mourning the loss of the Dionysian rituals of ecstasy, Benjamin predicted that mankind might someday "experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." I The repressed ecstatic, Pinchbeck reminds us, inevitably returns as the chaotic catastrophic.
Pinchbeck never lingers anywhere too long; Breaking Open the Head is a psychedelic Cook’s Tour, each stop a little further from the consensus reality comfort of rationalist materialism. He lights next at that annual carnival in the deserts of northern Nevada, Burning Man. Here Pinchbeck encounters a modern psychedelic culture "more decadent than Warhol’s Factory, more glamorous than Berlin in the 1920s, more ludicrous than the most lavish Busby Berkeley musical ... more implausible than any mirage." But it’s not all fun and games at Burning Man. Although the event explores the possibilities of a post-consumer culture driven by creative, ecstatic values, "Burning Man also has a sorrowing streak. As they dance, the revelers also grieve ... for
everything spiritless and vacant—the hideous Medusa mask of our culture-that needs to be torn off and fed to the flames ... The greatest party in the world is also a wake for this world."
It’s this paired feeling of joy and loss that follows Pinchbeck into his final journey, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, where he meets up with Don Caesario, a Secoya Indian and shaman. Pinchbeck has come to drink yage, the "vine of souls" and experience the cleansing and the visions which have made this brew, ayahuasca, the de facto cure-all through South America. Though he drinks the brew, and has his visions, Pinchbeck really can’t take his mind off the geologists from Occidental Petroleum, just a few miles away, busily exploring for oil. The Secoya culture might soon be swept aside, as roads and pipelines and civilization come pouring in. The meaninglessness of modernity—which Pinchbeck is running away from on every page of Breaking Open the Head—would supplant the rich internal life which the Secoya maintain through their use of ayahuasca. Oil or no, the tradition teeters on the verge of extinction: Don Caesario’s son, converted to Christianity, will not follow in his father’s footsteps to become a shaman; the line, thousands of years long, may soon end. Yet, in the twilight of his tradition, Don Caesario treats Pinchbeck to one of the most profound moments related in the book, a suite of icaros, or ayahuasca songs:
Don Caesario drank another cup of the bitter brew, prepared for him by his assistant Tintin. Then he sang alone. His song seemed to be the wildest and most private ode, a psalm of solitude, unveiling the secret knowledge of his soul. He barely whispered. He breathed into the stars. Then the melody returned, his voice rose up. To my augmented ears, he seemed to be weaving a subtle discourse on reality, describing the victory of form over emptiness. As he sang, he seduced a spirit-creature that started to grow, spinning cotton candy filaments around itself. Then Tintin started to sing as well. But he seemed to challenge the shaman's metaphysical viewpoint, arguing that emptiness ultimately triumphs over form. Don Caesario sadly concurred, and the cotton candy creation was released to fall back into the void ... I had no more doubts that the Secoya engaged in extra-dimensional exploration, using ayahuasca as their psychic telescope and transport.
Pinchbeck returns to the US, and dabbles in a few other more exotic compounds—notably DMT and DPT (which, after a harrowing experience with extra-dimensional entities invading his apartment, he describes as "not for human consumption"). Traveling into the machine-elf world of DMT (nearly a carbon-copy of the experience first described by Terence McKenna), he hears a voice telling him, "This is it. Now you know." This is the final crack that breaks open Daniel Pinchbeck’s head, sending the stuttering edifice of modernity crashing down. How, he wonders, could an entire universe, apparently as real and solid as our own, exist just beyond our perceptions? Something isn't adding up, or rather, something isn’t being accounted for. If such a metaphysical fundamental has been overlooked, Pinchbeck asks, what does that say about the prejudices of a culture that rules these visions irrelevant, immaterial, and unimportant?
And now we see the complete arc. Pinchbeck performs his function as cultural Everyman perfectly. Within the confines of intellectual New York culture, he is archetypal, possessed with the same hopes and fears as his peers, and yet has found a way to a richer internal life, a mythology which includes the ineffable, the impossible, and the unfathomable. Why would anyone want to break open their head? Why, in the end, does Pinchbeck see his journey not as recreation, but as necessity? The horror of the situation, of "egocentric materialism and spiritual nihilism," and the imminent danger of "the transformation of the earth into a non-human wasteland" forces Pinchbeck to assert:
Unlikely as it seems, we have to become our own shamans, wizards and seers. As spiritual warriors, we must take responsibility for the plight of our species. To break the spell of our culture's death trap deceptions and hypnotic distractions, we need the courage to confront what lies behind the open doors of our own minds.
A psychedelic experience which "breaks open the head" is a way through the smog of lies, deception and distraction which separate us from an authentic experience of the world, an experience which, it must be admitted, would be as horrifying as it would be exhilarating. To deny the existence of these visions, positive and negative, is equivalent to driving a car down a highway, eyes closed, with a foot jammed on the accelerator petal. Eventually you’ll wreck. That is, unless you listen to Daniel Pinchbeck’s advice, open your eyes, and see the world as it really is: Infinite.
Review by Mark D. Pesce Mark. Pesce is a virtual reality developer and author of The Playful World. How Technology Transforms Our Imagination.