05 AUGUST 2002: PINCHBECK
ON PSYCHEDELIC SHAMANISM

From Daniel Pinchbeck’s website
http://www.breakingopenthehead.com/

 

“One must explore deep and
believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an
ocean of insignificance.”

– Joseph Conrad

“The reader, the thinker,
the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the
dreamer, the ecstatic. ? Not to mention that most terrible drug – ourselves
– which we take in solitude.” – Walter Benjamin

Welcome to Breaking
Open the Head, a companion website for my book, which includes a cultural
history of psychedelic use, philosophical and critical perspectives on
shamanism, and my personal explorations, ranging from transcendent to terrifying.

While researching, I visited
shamans in West Africa, Mexico, and the Ecuadorean Amazon – not to mention
the fabulous neo-shamanic Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. In
Gabon, a small country on the Equator, I went through a Bwiti initiation,
eating iboga, a psychedelic rootbark inducing a trance that lasts for thirty
hours. The bark powder temporarily releases the soul from the body, allowing
the initiate entry into the African spiritual cosmos, where he is shown
the outline of his fate.

Some of the Bwiti call this
ceremony, “breaking open the head.” The book describes how my own head
was broken open, and how I have gingerly attempted to put the pieces back
together again.

This website includes material
from the book and some sections left out of the published text. It also
expands into subjects ranging from the socio-political (corporate globalization,
new technologies) to the mystical (Western esotericism, Buddhism, gnosticism,
alchemy, 2012) that I hope to explore in future works. My perspective is
that all of these subjects are inextricably related, and that the contemporary
situation drastically confirms Andre Malraux’s dictum, “The 21st Century
will be mystical, or it will not be.”

I hope that people will use
the discussion forums to explore any of the issues raised by the book or
my other material, and they should feel free to ask me any questions that
occur to them.