Broke Open
April 06, 2005

I’ve finished book number 13 in my year-long quest to read nearly a book a week. This one, you’ll be pleased to hear, had a profound impact on my perception of self. It’s been a long time, almost 20 years, since I could say that about a book. I’m speaking of Breaking Open The Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into The Heart Of Contemporary Shamanism, by Daniel Pinchbeck. Oh, great, you think. Now Pollack is going to start babbling about drugs. Exactly. But first, let me praise the book.

The book concerns Daniel Pinchbeck’s “spiritual journey,” his gradual transformation from New York hipster intellectual to transcendent psychedelic guru. Yet somehow it still isn’t annoying. That’s because, much to my great surprise, Breaking Open The Head is a lucid, funny, and deeply weird work of literary journalism, one of the best examples of nonfiction prose that I’ve read in years. It’s as though John McPhee, instead of writing about oranges, decided to drink yage instead. I really believe that, while on a DMT trip, Pinchbeck had an encounter with a white-mohawked lizard being at an intercelestial bar. That’s a sign of gifted writing.

I found the book so convincing, I went on a drug trip myself. A couple of years ago, I ordered some herbs from a website that sells “marijuana alternatives”. One of those herbs was a sizable bag of >salvia divinorum, a visionary plant that Pinchbeck talks about often in his book. I tried salvia once after I bought it, smoking a small bowl at, pathetically, a Flaming Lips show, but no visions emerged. I didn’t even get a headache. This time, I decided, I’d be a little more systematic.

One midnight last week, I took a pinch of salvia from my bag. I rolled it into a ball and stuck it under my tongue. It tasted bitter, but not much worse than, say, collard greens. I gave it a chew, and then placed it under my tongue for another 30 seconds. I repeated this process a few times until I’d created a slightly acrid green brew in my mouth. I sloshed it around, and kept chewing. By degrees, I felt nauseated, but my stomach held. After 20 minutes, I spit the whole megilla into the toilet, put on some trippy music, lay down on my guest bed, and closed my eyes.

Almost immediately, I had visions. Great, thick green vines, ancient beyond measure, stretched out into infinite space. A being that looked like an Aztec God flew above them, spewing fire. I saw my head splitting open. Red goo poured out and melded into what appeared to be the cosmos. I had another vision, of me dancing with my son, that was a bit more pleasant. A large hole opened in the universe. I flew toward it. A beautiful woman in a white robe took my hand and guided me through. I opened my eyes, and the trip was over. Ten minutes had passed. I fell asleep, waking to my wife shaking me and telling me that it was time to go get my cholesterol tested. Cognitive dissonance had triumphed again.

The next night, I repeated the dose, and saw the woman again, but the main result was the sensation that my body was stretching out beyond its boundaries, getting sucked into infinite space. From reading Pinchbeck’s book, this seems like a pretty common starting point for psychedelic exploration. The strange thing is that all other salvia users describe seeing the same woman. A shaman in the book describes her as the “salvia spirit”.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a supremely secular, unspiritual person. I wouldn’t report seeing a mystical spirit, let alone positively, unless I felt that I really had. In that way, I feel like I’m following Pinchbeck’s path, a little, though I’m not nearly as lost or alienated as he describes himself in the book. Last night, I did a third salvia chew. Nothing came of it, and around 1 AM, I fell asleep. Approximately two hours later, I snapped awake, aware that the room had become flooded with otherworldly light. Then it was dark, but, with my eyes open, I could distinctly see a stone warrior standing in the middle of the room. Then I closed my eyes, and saw the woman again. I seem to recall begging her to show me the secrets of the universe. The sensation of travelling through space returned, and then I fell asleep. This morning, when I woke up, I wrote my next Bad Sex column for Nerve.

I guess I say that last thing because I’m not crazy. I’ve just had a few plant-induced visions, and feel both confused and enlightened. The world has an odd twinge that it didn’t before.