Breaking Open the Head

This is a savvy, well-written piece of work that gives the autobiographical account in 38 short, sharp chapters of a cynical New Yorker's journey from a jaded materialistic worldview to an otherworldview. Riven with existential angst, the young Pinchbeck seeks escape from the "self-enclosed logic of secular materialism" and is "mad to be saved" from his personal spiritual crisis which he describes as being in "a worse place than Woody Allen". The method he chooses is the use of mind-changing drugs. But this is not some sorry tale of drug dependency, but, to the contrary, the highly articulate account of a perceptive and intelligent person seeking his soul's salvation. So spiritually sluggish and intellectually ossified have we become as a culture many people find the juxtaposition of "soul" and "drugs" to be antipathetic due to the appallingly ignorant and abusive situation surrounding the whole matter of drugs in our Western societies, but, as Pinchbeck demonstrates in this book, that attitude is simply pathetic. Pinchbeck goes on to seek his psychedelic ("entheogenic") salvation not only in his own urban, Western environment but also in those non-Western, traditional tribal contexts where some of the mind-altering plants have been used from time immemorial as sacraments. So already by Chapter 1 we find him in a Gabon village negotiating an ibogain session with a tricky, somewhat belligerent priest of the Bwiti (ancestor) cult. Tabernanthe iboga is the root bark of a shrub; essentially, it takes those who ingest it back down their DNA memory chain. Many entheogens have specific properties that anyone studying consciousness and spirituality should at least be aware of if not familiar with, yet, instead, we have wasteful slogans such as "Just say no" produced by a mindset that cannot distinguish between, say, dangerous crack cocaine and potentially valuable, indeed sacramental, mind-altering plant substances. (Ironically, the therapeutic use of ibogaine has been found to be beneficial in some cases of drug addiction among Westerners!) So in our culture such substances get used too often in ignorance and in inappropriate situations with results that all too frequently validate those who wish to close the mind down to a very narrow, materialistic compass. Older and wiser cultures long ago identified those plants that can have visionary and spiritual value, and used them in highly organised and socially supportive ways in their religions. So it is that those African tribes belonging to the Bwiti cult seek contact with the ancestors using a drug that allows them to slip into their cellular memory. The wisdom and knowledge this technology of consciousness displays puts our own academic "consciousness studies" to shame. Bwiti novices are given a huge dose of ibogaine in order to "break open" their heads forcing them to see through material reality into the otherworld. So Pinchbeck was off and running in his quest for greater meaning. Later in his adventures, Pinchbeck travels to a remote village in Mexico famous for being where, decades ago, an ancient "magic mushroom" religion was discovered by Western scholars to be still active, and visits an Amazonian tribe whose shaman guides foreigners on sessions using the powerful visionary brew, ayahuasca. This is part of what has been called "drug tourism" which is frowned upon by many people, including some anthropologists, but which Pinchbeck defends. The shaman he visited with other "drug tourists" was a member of the Secoya tribe, which has been reduced to a rump population and had its territory eroded due to the acquisitive actions of the capitalist West seeking the material resources of the rainforest, and in this case that includes oil. Pinchbeck notes that Occidental were drilling for oil on land the Secoya had been pressured by the oil company and the Ecuadorean government to lease out. "Over twenty years," Pinchbeck observes, "the wells will produce enough oil to sate U.S. demand for, at the most, two weeks." (This reinforces the obvious fact that the simple expedient of putting a dollar or two on the current giveaway price of a gallon of petrol in the United States would at a stroke curb both the environmental and foreign policy attitudes of that country. Sadly it would require political courage that is not in evidence in America.) Add to this the problems of drug trafficking in the region (a situation created by the drug policies of the West, never forget), guerrillas, and herbicidal spraying of the forest for clearance, and it is easy to see why the Secoya, like other Amazon tribes, are struggling to survive. Pinchbeck points out that so-called "drug tourism" at least enables the shaman to continue in his work; however unsatisfactory it may be, it shores up an ancient "spiritual science of the Amazon" (as someone described it to Pinchbeck), a technology of consciousness we would do well to understand before it flickers out like a candle in a wind on a dark night. Pinchbeck found ayahuasca to seemingly "convey particular messages about the biological world" and more than other psychedelics to "dissolve rigid categories that modern culture has erected between poetry and science, medicine and magic". It also took Pinchbeck into mental spaces he did not understand, and to encounters with strange, protean beings that the shaman and the elders in the session seemed to be communicating with by their special chanting and whistling songs. "I had no doubts that the Secoya engaged in extradimensional exploration," Pinchbeck concluded. This theme is explored further in the climax to the book in which Pinchbeck describes his experiences with DMT (dimethyltryptamine), supposedly the most powerful of psychedelic compounds and the most active constituent of ayahuasca brews. In this part of the book this reviewer felt that Pinchbeck reached some true if disturbing insights. In this book the author's drug visions do not float around in a disconnected state as is so often the case in "I blew my mind" types of confession. Pinchbeck ties in his drug-generated initiations closely with his life and deepening perceptions, and it really is a story of a changing mindset and a growing understanding of who he is, of the true nature of his personal relationships, and of the problems with the capitalist culture he is part of. Woven throughout is what Pinchbeck calls "a cultural history of psychedelic compounds in the modern West". He ends with a preliminary treatise on magical thinking.

This book is an achievement, and there is little in it to criticise. Perhaps its weakest point is Pinchbeck's infatuation with the Burning Man event, which while interesting takes up too many pages of the book, and becomes a bit forced. Burning Man is an extraordinary festival held in the Nevada desert where techno-heads, IT freaks, rock and rollers, psychonauts and others party for several days and nights. Bizarre structures are built, fantastic vehicles driven, and people wear extraordinary costumes or paint themselves with body paints. Burning Man is where the Lord of Misrule rules. This reviewer felt that Pinchbeck invested it with too much psycho-social significance – it is but a brief mirage in a desert wasteland, after all. Indeed, one wishes Pinchbeck could have experienced the Sixties (he was born in 1966, the year this grumpy old reviewer had his first LSD experience) and maybe he would then have been able to temper his idealism a bit and be less hungry for some sort of sweeping social manifestation of the visionary wisdom he has been accumulating. But perhaps that would be a bad thing – there is enough time in a life for disillusionment. In the meantime, Pinchbeck has produced a worthy piece of writing that speaks to our spiritual and cultural crises and should be read.