Breaking Open the Head [Daniel Pinchbeck]

[Psychedelic] [Millennarian] [Classic]

Breaking Open the Head

Daniel Pinchbeck

Broadway Books, NY. 2002. First edition hardcover. Some scuffing and creasing to the dust jacket. Interior pristine. An excellent copy.

From the publisher:

"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."

This book rules. Absolute mind opener the first time I read it,so I was very stoked to stumble on this clean first edition. Timeless, excellent work. Highly recommended.