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Breaking Open the Head: A visionary journey from cynicism to shamanism

Breaking Open the Head: A visionary journey from cynicism to shamanism

by Daniel Pinchbeck (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2003

    $3.23
Synopsis

A guide to contemporary shamanism, this book takes an alternative view of an age-old subject, asking only that readers plunge in headfirst. There are many treats to be tempted by as Pinchbeck guides us forward in his always-plausible, always-sane, always-sceptical tour of the psychedelic horizon, from tribal rites in West Africa and Mexico, to other tribal rites in Brooklyn apartments and at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 336
 Publisher: Flamingo
Published: 03 Feb 2003
ISBN 10: 0007149603
ISBN 13: 9780007149605

Media Reviews
Continually enthralling. As gripping as a novel. Geoff Dyer, LA Weekly I much admire Breaking Open the Head for being the account of an authentic quest for enlightenment in jungles, up rivers, in deserts, and hardest of all to access, the human mind and heart via the one of the oldest thoroughfares on earth, mind-expanding drugs. This is a serious and illuminating journey. --- Paul Theroux As mind-expanding as the chemicals it chronicles, Breaking Open the Head is the most artful and provocative investigation of psychedelia since Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. --- Stephen Johnson, author of Emergence 'The author of this journey into the heart of contemporary shamanism is not some hippy-dippy hedonist staggering down the road of excess but rather a skeptical philosopher of consciousness seeking the enlightened path. In the late-90's, a spiritually exhausted Pinchbeck took a magazine assignment to gobble the African psychedelic iboga, launching an earnest exploration of himself, his self, and this world. Acid in Manhattan, mushrooms in Mexico, yage in Ecuador... He reports on his trips, travels, and travails in an unfailingly strong voice and analyzes a broad range of theorists with a light touch.' Entertainment Weekly This is a brave book. Brave because it accepts, as matters of fact, realities that cannot co-exist peacefully with the standard American Myth. That the discussion of these issues avoids both New Age glitter-speak and standard psychedelic hoo-ha makes it all the more provocative. It is also brave for its unflinching willingness to bare the less expanded parts of the author's psyche. And it is brave, as it is always brave, to attempt to speak clearly of that which can't be spoken. --- John Perry Barlow 'Breaking Open the Head is a thrilling, brave and intellectually engaging account of a visionary search. A sustained but sceptical contribution to the ongoing project of psychedelic exploration, Pinchbeck's book is mind-expanding and heart-felt. It is also, implicitly, a much-needed rebuke to a cocaine-fuelled culture of irony and cynical detachment. I warmly recommend it.' - Geoff Dyer
Author Bio
Daniel Pinchbeck is a founding editor of Open City, and he has written for many US publications such as Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.