Rating: 
Summary: Stalking the sacred plants
Review: (Four and a half stars) Dreams are fascinating, and psychedelic experiences are fascinating, to the one who has them. And the rule of thumb is, that people's descriptions of their fascinating dreams and trips rate right up there on the boredom
meter with hole-by-hole narratives of your boss's last golf game.It's not coincidence, I think, that the two great, readable narratives to come out of the psychedelia's da-glo glory days in the sixties (Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) and its nightmarish decline and fall in the seventies (Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) came from two fellows whose primary love and loyalty was to journalism. Then the substances that Daniel Pinchbeck calls "entheogens" fell into cultural eclipse, the interminable pathology known as the War on Drugs took center stage, and little original or noteworthy has been published on the topic for quite a while. Terence McKenna, brilliant but sometimes barely in touch with the real world, has had the field pretty much to himself. Now we've got another entrant, not quite up to Wolfe or Thompson, but as wide ranging as McKenna, while staying more level-headed and instructive. The strengths of "Breaking Open the Head" are once again journalistic. Pinchbeck undertakes an odyssey in search of genuine shamans, who can properly initiate him into the authentic use of psychoactive plants. He takes us with us on his journey, sets us into scenes from West Africa, to the invisible perennial contemporary Woodstock in Nevada known as the Burning Man Festival, to the Amazon, to the peyote fields of Mexico, to labs in New York City where chemicals the plant kingdom never quite got around to inventing are concocted and consumed. We get Pinchbeck's trip reports, yes. We also get his personal spiritual journey, and a refreshingly objective picture of what remains of traditional shamanistic cultures, and what is emerging of Western shamanism (or pseudo-shamanism, as the case may be.) Best of all, we get his thought-provoking ruminations, goosed by his eclectic reading from Huxley to Eliade to Walter Benjamin to Rudolf Steiner, as to what this mysterious human drive to get high at almost any cost is all about. I don't think much of his answers, but his principal question is spang on: what is it about Western civilization? What gives us this chip on our shoulder about any and all forms of ecstatic consciousness, chemically assisted or not? Why is ours almost the only culture in the world to regard hallucinogenic plants with horror, rather than with reverence and
respect? In the final few chapters, Pinchbeck goes off the deep end, down a rabbit hole into which few of his readers will probably want to follow, convinced that there are objectively real "plant spirits" out there directing psychedelic experiences. But his reportorial instincts are so sound, that he doesn't let his ultimate views color his account of events along the way. And so we are free to ponder some of the questions he doesn't raise. Like: if these chemicals are so all-fired spiritual, why are half the traditional shamans he meets violent, or greedy, or vain? And: how is it that all the ingesters from traditional societies
take the drugs to get practical advice from the spirit world on how to live their ordinary lives, while all the westerners take them in order to find Ultimate Answers, and to step outside consensus reality? With goals so different, can the Westerners' quest really lay claim to the value these substances might have within traditional cultures? A lively, illuminating read, one of those books that is as fun to argue with as it is to learn from.
Rating: 
Summary: Wisdom From the Undercurrent
Review: Breaking Open the Head is at once a personal memoir of the visionary kind, as well as a much needed psycho-social, psycho-spiritual assessment of our society from the vantage point of alternative ways of knowing and potential problem solving. In the spirit of Terrence McKenna, in the same stream of transpersonal voyaging and open entheogenic exploration as Huston Smith and Ralph Metzner, Pinchbeck not only unfurls the topography of his own soul journey through psychedelic shamanism, but details multiple encounters with different plant spirit teachers in a truly gleaming example of multidisciplinary scholarship and informal ethnographic accounts. What is probably the most convincing aspect of Pinchbeck's writing and journey is precisely the fact that he openly admits to being--once upon a time--a cynical, Manhattan atheist who saw no validity to anything spiritual or metaphysical. As an experiment he takes the plunge into a domain that, rather than leading him farther and farther into the cancerously consumeristic and addictive society we find ourselves in, he is initiated--genuinely--into the world of holographic, shamanic perception. An adventurous, stunning, and thrilling ride, as well as a timely wake-up call regarding modernity's ill-fated relationship with psychedelics (as demonized and illegal substances rather than sentient intelligences with the capacity to heal and offer profound guidance and knowledge when worked with in a safe manner as has been done by humans for tens of thousands of years previous to industrialized society), Breaking Open the Head is sure to stand as a classic visionary account and a classic social commentary of our world. . . a world that is, from my perspective, gearing up for its own shamanic initiation.--Frank MacEowen, author of The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, & Seekers (New World Library)
Rating:
Summary: visionary
Review: comprehensive, informative, surprising and endlessly entertaining. Makes for a welcome addition to other like-minded works in my library. At first I was put off by the author's apparent condemnation of Timothy Leary; but he makes up for this flaw by delivering one of the most comprehensive and well-written works on psychedelia I have ever read (and I've read a few!) This work takes the reader on a wonderful journey filled with intrigue and enlightenment. The author boldly explores some very interesting realms and comes out of it all with some very delectable and addictive theories about how to save the planet and save this race. I'll recommend this one to many friends.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh, Come, My Dear, Is That Quite Accurate?
Review: Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head makes an earnest attempt to persuade its audience that a variety of natural hallucinogens provide users with a genuine glimpse into the vital world of spirits. Unfortunately, the key question this position raises -- whether the 'other - worldly journeys' experienced are merely hallucinations brought on by the ingested substances - hangs pendulously over the book like a perilously suspended lead brick. Pinchbeck clearly means well, but Breaking Open the Head is amateurish and misguided at almost every turn. Readers will find that Breaking Open the Head resembles nothing so much as the weighty tome that persistently haunts editor Nancy Hawkins in Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington (1988): "On every page, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Goethe, Ibsen, Freud, Jung, Huxley, Kierkegaard, and no grasp whatsoever of any of them." Likewise, Pinchbeck uses excerpts from the work of respectable authors Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Carlo Ginsburg, and Claude Levi - Strauss, but readers would be wiser consulting the original texts than quietly mulling through the mish - mash of their ideas presented here. Elsewhere, Breaking Open the Head is an undizzying brew of Artaud, Aleister Crowley, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Terence McKenna, Ken Kesey, and the discredited Carlos Castaneda. Even Dion Fortune gets a mention in the bibliography, which also lists Jeremy Narby's valueless Shamans Through Time as a source. Elsewhere, Pinchbeck refers to W. Y. Evans - Wentz's The Fairy Faith In Celtic Countries rather than to the far superior (but academically less esteemed) Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland by Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats. Things start off badly in the introduction when Pinchbeck reveals that one of his greatest inspirations is Walter Benjamin, a writer who spent his life overstating and complicating the obvious and more often than not simply embracing thin air. Pinchbeck, who is smart enough to reject Lacan, quotes Benjamin's comments on the Surrealists: "In the world's structure, dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the domain of intoxication." Pinchbeck interprets this to mean "altered states allowed thinkers to escape, temporarily, from the overwhelming, and intoxicating, dreamworld of capitalism." One chapter is titled "Great Robot Empires," but its second paragraph begins "When I returned to New York a few days later, I checked my email," suggesting that Pinchbeck is grossly unaware of how comfortably and thoroughly a utilizer of the great capitalist robot empire he is himself. Pinchbeck has a weakness for pretentious thinkers, including Jean - Francois Lyotard -- "Being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking." Apparently this tendency for embracing unnecessarily convoluted if not meaningless texts runs in Pinchbeck's family, as the reader is told that the author's tormented father, a failed abstract expressionist painter, "read constantly" of "Blanchot, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche." Sadly, picking up a Zane Grey or P. G. Wodehouse apparently never occurred to him. Pinchbeck's trials and tribulations while under the influence of a variety of hallucinogens in both familiar and isolated parts of the world are often unintentionally hilarious, even as they suggest a fatally careless tendency in his nature. During one session in the East Village "organized by a couple from California," the author and several others ingest yagé after being provided with "Adult Depends diapers" and "plastic buckets for vomiting." In fact, so many people vomit in Breaking Open the Head that readers will expect to find Vomiting listed in the index. In another encounter, Pinchbeck travels to Gabon without first practicing due diligence, and has just the kind of experience any mature adult would expect when putting one's life completely, naively, and foolishly in the hands of unknown citizens of a strange culture. Pinchbeck is clearly familiar the work of Paul Bowles, but nonetheless places himself in exactly the sort of position that Bowles' luckless, doomed protagonists find themselves in in tale after tale and novel after novel. Breaking Open the Head finds its author uncomfortably growing up in public; small but potent signs of deep insecurity, narcissism, and repressed hysteria (see his use of the word 'very' below) abound. Pinchbeck spends two paragraphs recounting the suffering that his "preposterous last name" and "spurious moniker" (pinchbeck means "false gold") has brought him, forgetting that "pinchbeck" is not exactly a word in common usage, and certainly not "goldbrick" in any case. The author's style also betrays itself, as Pinchbeck is fond of sentences like "it sounded like she was vomiting out her very being" and "the short - term greed and monotonous moral blindness -- increasingly threaten the very fabric of our being." Something of a grandchild of the Beat Generation (his mother was an important figure in the life of Jack Kerouac), readers might expect Pinchbeck would downplay (if mention at all) this unsubtle fact in the greater interest of his reputation, but he does not. In Daimonic Reality: Understanding Otherworld Encounters (1994), Patrick Harpur succeeded at creating a lucid, intelligent, and deeply felt book not unlike what Pinchbeck has attempted here. Harpur also continually referred to Jung, Yeats, Blake, and others, and built his arguments thoroughly and soundly around the work and the experiences of these distinguished visionaries. In addition, Harpur had a cornucopia of original ideas of his own and brilliant talent for assimilating diverse threads of Western culture. Pinchbeck, unfortunately, merely jumps from specious "dialectic" to specious "dialectic," propping up his text with passages taken from other authors that he believes support his very slight, watery theses. The final impression Breaking Open the Head makes is not one of heightened insight or wisdom, but of short - sidedness, tunnel - vision, and its author's own lack of acute perception concerning the world around him and what may or may not constitute the nature of reality.
Rating: 
Summary: interesting but not well written
Review: definately an interesting subject, however, i didn't enjoy it much. the author, a self described neurotic, seems to be empty and searching for something, and the book seems to be more of a justification for him doing psychotropic drugs than a look at the role of the drugs in modern shamanism. the book is quite well researched but is sluggish and at times overbearing or pretentious. at one point he turns into a green peace rain forest advocate, which i don't see as having anything to do with shaman practice. if the subject is of interest to you, and this isn't the first book you have on the subject, there probably isn't anything new here for you. if you want to hear about his personal experiences, then buy the book.
Rating:
Summary: interesting but not well written
Review: definately an interesting subject, however, i didn't enjoy it much. the author, a self described neurotic, seems to be empty and searching for something, and the book seems to be more of a justification for him doing psychotropic drugs than a look at the role of the drugs in modern shamanism. the book is quite well researched but is sluggish and at times overbearing or pretentious. at one point he turns into a green peace rain forest advocate, which i don't see as having anything to do with shaman practice. if the subject is of interest to you, and this isn't the first book you have on the subject, there probably isn't anything new here for you. if you want to hear about his personal experiences, then buy the book.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely essential reading on many levels.......
Review: If you've found the writing of Terence McKenna interesting and thought-provoking, then you should consider this book an immediate must-read. However, Pinchbeck's book deserves to be read (and hopefully WILL be read) by a much wider cross-section of society than McKenna's. One of the problems inherent to writing about psychedelic experiences is that the nature of the experience itself makes describing it through the written word extremely difficult. I think Pinchbeck has done an incredible job of bridging this gap (to the extent that is indeed possible) and relating his experiences in a way that even someone who has never touched a psychedelic substance can begin to understand. While that in itself is an important achievement, I think the real value of this book lies in the moral and ethical issues it ultimately poses for the reader...and this includes both those who've used these types of drugs, as well as those who've never even had a beer. The issues of corporate greed, ecosystem destruction, and blatant consumerism have never been more relevant to our society; the author addresses these issues with thought-provoking insight, and offers some extremely interesting and somewhat frightening ideas about the future of the human race....ideas that seem to have been catalyzed, but NOT created, by his use of psychedelics. In my opinion, that's where the real value of this book lies, and the reason it should be a rewarding and worthwhile read for anyone who considers himself a concerned, active, thinking member of society and the human race. It would be a tragedy if potential readers overlook this and skip the book based on a preconceived notion about the subject matter.
Rating:
Summary: Like a Good School Trip: Fun and Educational!
Review: Mr. Pinchbeck has written a book that is factual and well researched but at the same time is full of his own interesting insight and slant on things going on. I think this is a book that should be read by everyone. Perhaps then people could see how silly the war on things you choose to put into your OWN body really is. I didnt want the book to end. That to me is the best sign of a book well written. Kudos. michael stanton
Rating:
Summary: More Flapdoodle, Please!
Review: Okay, so he ain't Wittgenstien, but neither was Ludwig. Pinchbeck deserves a decicive clap on the back for his feverish, foolhardy romp into the unknown. To those who pooh pooh him, I ask--what have you done for me lately? This is Kapucinski meets Casteneda in a dread-laced Holographic Universe, and if you feel that intellectual rigor is lacking, or that the author relies too much on Benjamin's politics, I ask you when you last met the splinter-faced god of the forest? I feel that Pinchbeck is earnest and refuses to pose as a guide when he is in fact nothing but a balsy, intellectual Brooklinite who grew bored with chatter-mouthed literati and with himself--so he decided to cast the eternal dice and record his findings with talent and intelligece that may not be first rate, but are, nevertheless, uncharateristic of our time. In sum: a pip.
Rating:
Summary: It's a Jungle In Here
Review: Pinchbeck's journey into the unkown is one of the best adventure stories I've ever read. Our culture's disregard for the reality of unseen beings and dimensions, it's reductionistic polarization into secular vrs. theistic worldviews, and the hegemony of the rational among the educated are highlighted. But Pinchbeck's book is no polemic attack on these failings; instead he comes across in the best journalistic sense, thoughtfully open and humble- he reports simply where his journey has taken him, and what he has learned, however easily ridiculed or dismissed. I loved his blend of head and heart as he explores the jungles of Mind.
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