Ebook: 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. From the Hardcover edition.;My initiation: The king of the Bwiti -- Mad to be saved -- You want to cheat me? -- Touchers teach too -- I am the one you seek -- I see your grandmother -- Strange growths: Treacherous excrescences -- Profane illuminations -- Fun with fungi -- Night travelers -- Shamanism and the world tree -- Leave no trace: A cybernetic pulse engine -- Doctor Megavolt -- Great robot empires -- The temple of tears -- Shamanism and modernism: Walking in mysteries -- I am not here -- An orgy of vision -- A sea of spiritual protoplasm -- A handful of ashes -- The medicine: The purge -- My shamanic vacation -- Meet the snake -- All the energy in the universe -- LSD and the 1960s: The multiple million-eyed monster -- A pathetic clown act -- The light at the end of the tunnel -- Entheobotany: White blossoms -- The quality of revealing -- The fairy folk -- Why did you eat us? -- Thrown-away knowledge -- I smoked DMT -- Direct mystical transmission -- Do you take responsibility? -- Inconceivable new worlds: Not for human consumption -- New sensations -- Magical thinking -- Epilogue: The angel of history.