Gave up on this in the last third. There is some very intriguing science and para-science described, but the author's trust-fund kid personality blocks out any reasonable discussion about how the world might change in practical terms. One suspects little Daniel has never had to think about making a living a single day in his life -- and, the obnoxiousness of that aside -- it makes his analyses about transforming the human population stink of hippy-dippy fantasy thinking. Never once does he answer the simple question: Who will pay for all these wondrous changes? A very limited world view attempting to recreate the world -- that never works.

Breaking Open The Head was much much better. This one did have its moments, especially the crop circle stuff. I never thought I would be interested in crop circles but there were some things that I never knew!

You MUST read this book with an open mind. He often will mention that he might just be a raving lunatic. If you're reading this as a guide to life, you're an idiot. This is the story of a man on a quest. Don't read into the quest, don't even think that he himself believes all of it. It's just a book, not THE book.

Daniel Pinchbeck did an amazing job with this book. He combines all his knowledge and experience into one very interesting expression of his view on our world and beyond that. He speaks mainly off entheogens and their impact on his life and research, describing his experiences very articulately, in very vivid and a magical way. He talks alot about the different civilizations he has encountered and there spiritual cultures and tradition. One specifically is the well known Mayans. The book title refers to the ending of the Mayans calendar in the year 2012, ending the fifth, and 'final' periods mapped out by these very mysterious people. Some people translate this date too be the "apocalypse" but Pinchbeck does a good job of explaining the true elements behind this mystery and the false theories and views of it by the world. I definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting to explore something deeper than the physical, material world that surrounds us everyday, and also to anyone who truly respects other cultures and loves learning about them!

If you believe in the 12th planet and Dänikenesque Chariot of the Godsy pseudoscience that claims visitations from space aliens that built the pyramids and crop circles and other mumbo jumbo this book may be for you. Why did I fall for it?! >Hey the cover is really nice.

I wanted to like this book more because it touches on a lot of areas and phenomenon that are really fascinating in themselves - crop circles, ancient civilizations, psychedelics and shamanism, consciousness, the nature of time, the future of humanity - but it was just too all over the place. I felt like it started to be increasingly disjointed and more about the author's personal life falling apart. And honestly, it was hard to have much sympathy...he seemed self-absorbed and manic, and I started to wonder if he hadn't just fried his brains with all those psychedelics. I admire his willingness to go out on the edge and his candor in reporting his experiences, but ultimately I think some of it was TMI and makes it hard to take him seriously as a journalist/researcher.

sooo much going on here. we got off to a rocky start, then I got really into it for like 250 pages. then he blew it for a while by whining about wanting to bang some chick who wasn't his baby mamma. although I agree that clinging to archaic mores like monogamy may be holding us back,I think he needed a better editor becos he just came off as if he was trying to justify his wandering eye with metaphysics and it sorta cheapened the whole deal. a lot of strange things happened to me while I was reading this book, and it did actually help me to crystallize some ideas that I already had. one weird thing is that two books that he referenced came into the bookstore while I was reading this one, and they were both by authors that I specifically wanted to check out more of...so as a source book it's pretty great. if you are interested in psychedelics, nooetics, and or the evolution of human consciousness and you like your woo woo served up without a lot of new age twaddle I say go for it. but be forewarned this guy does lapse into douchiness. to his credit it was an extremely ambitious vision, so the final product was bound to be flawed. I do have to give props to anyone seriously discussing this subject matter and working to move us forward.

This book is nuts. There are a lot of interesting points, but it's definitely crazy. The author is not afraid of veering from the mainstream in his quest for spiritual enlightenment, and part of me gives him kudos for that and part of me just gets kind of weirded out. I have to admit that the most fascinating parts were about the crop circles and psychedelic drugs. I also thought the Mayan history was interesting, etc. The main trouble with the book was deciding whether or not to trust the author...and I never did quite make up my mind.

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This book changed my entire sense of time. It is easy to slip into our own bubble, but when reading this I was jarred out of my small reality, to consider that larger things might be afoot. Though I think its difficult to conclude what the future holds, I set this book down with a deep sense that this world will not be as it is now for the rest of my lifetime, and that the time we have in this moment is valuable. I also found myself wanting to do more research on global phenomena, and the thoughts of current scholars.

I need to write an essay on this book.

But my main thought is that while this book is supposedly about a lot of New Age mumbo, the central story of this book is a novel about a failing marriage due to a narrator obsessed with grasping the mystic at nearly any cost to his personal life. Read that way the book is fascinating.

But read as a prophetic guide to the coming 2012 "consciousness shift", it is garbage. Pinchbeck spends most of the book tenuously connecting various nodal points of the modern New Age movement in exotic locales before conveniently receiving the mission of spreading the gospel of "Quetzalcoatl" himself.

Pinchbeck is constantly presenting himself as the American intellectual skeptic, with the smattering of Frankfurt-style critical theory to prove it. But instead of investigating with any intensity the confrontations with the "gnosis" he has in the book, he lets out a weak defense before embracing some new ludicrous theory that occasionally even contradicts the one he was just exposing in the previous chapter. So what we're left with is a kind of Psychedelic Leninism that shouts from the mountaintop that mind-expanding drug use (for the few) are going to radically alter the course of the entire planet's history. Great, guys.

Where to begin...Pinchbeck is a fair writer, terribly self-involved and this book would be more appropriately labeled as a memoir. I received it as a gift and read the first 100 pages or so with extreme relish. However, the book failed to form a coherent process, it was more like a stream of thoughts which ran the gamut of Pinchbeck's background and personal experience. The details of the Maya were quite interesting, as were some other aspects, such as the heat influence on the stalks in crop circles. But the book doesn't really go anywhere, except suggesting in some vague, utopian way that we are experiencing an evolutionary leap in consciousness. Pinchbeck seems to think that this will be best achieved through changing our concept of time to better align ourselves with the astronomical and natural world. The book is essentially a collection of well-written thoughts, such as a conversation between undergrads sitting around a bong or getting wasted around an outdoor fire, discussing profound thoughts and being generally cynical or New Age-y. Pinchbeck criticizes these perspectives while espousing them under different names. A fun book that could use some more serious editing.

well-written, for starters.

likely, the product of a brilliant mind lost in its own labyrinthine capabilities, after having found glimpses of organic spirituality and a boatload of organic hallucinogens.
the philosophical underpinnings - ie. the idea that humanity´s evolution as a whole is one of consciousness, and that today essential and dramatic shifts are in the works - is fascinating and presents implications worth mulling over.

The fact that the author thinks he is a psychic vehicle for the trans-cosmic portentious speeches of one Mayan QueztalCoatl...well...let's just say he lost some points when I got to that bit...