I LOVE this book! Reading this book was like having mental masturbation for me. It breaks open your head. For psychedelic lovers.

this is one of the few books I've ever thrown across a room

Pinchbeck is the type of person that gives psychedelics a bad image. While the book starts off with a rational Pinchbeck, one can already tell his rationality is more of a misplaced materialism. By the end of the book Pinchbeck appears to have lost all rational inquiry as he comes to believe he is a modern day shaman. Highly disappointed...first time I've ever really disliked a book.

Just awful! Pinchbeck,s ego just screams out from almost every page. I wonder who wants to be the next Terence Mckenna? hmmm not a chance Daniel.

Daniel Pinchbeck is a complete fucking idiot. And a tool. However, this book *does* contain some very interesting material on psychedelics in contemporary society. Too bad it's filtered through the POV of a complete and utter idiot.

Actually, the Hebraic-Babylonian concept of God is very premature. They imagine God as an object, a person, and not as a quality. And that's why Jews claim God's official name is Yahuha and Muslims claim God's official name is Allah. They describe God as a mighty emperor.

Whereas in the Eastern religious traditions, God is a quality, not an object. They believe God is within the universe and the universe is within God. God is not God but godliness - and godliness has to be found first within ourselves. Unless we have a taste of it in our own being we will not be able to see it anywhere else. Once we have tasted it, once we have become drunk on the divine, then we will see it in the trees — in the green of the trees, in the red of the trees, in the gold of the trees. We will see it in the sun, in the moon, in the stars. We will be able to see it in the animals, birds, people, rivers, mountains. The whole existence will reflect our understanding, will become a mirror to us. We will be able to see our own face everywhere. We can see only that which we are, we cannot see that which we are not.

Now, remember why ancient Eastern Shamanic religious traditions (such as Mithraism, Vedic religion, Tengrism, Shamanism, Taoism, Shintoism etc.) consider the sky, the moon, the fire, the sun, the stars, trees, animals, rocks, rivers, etc as divine, as God?! :)

The least insulting thing I can say about this book is maybe that Pinchbeck was too young to write this when he did. It's a complicated topic and he deserves some credit for addressing its intrigue. In general, I got the feeling he wrote this to enhance his hip, New York bachelor, image. Pinchbeck's background is in journalism, and that style is expressed pretty grossly here. He travels around being the witness, relaying different accounts of psychedelic or shamanistic encounters without expounding on differentiations between the terms. His personal anecdotes all seem too recent, and too egotistical. he doesn't create the isolation of self that could make one trust that he has the foresight enough to qualify these experiences.

I didn't finish this book, I probably should have read the conclusion but I think it ended somewhere on the playa and I've always respected the solitude of the desert too much to get in to spaces like that.

I came across this randomly in a bookstore and was intrigued, partly by the hallucinatory cover. But I'm glad I did. I've always had a fascination with altered consciousness, particularly with a more spiritual slant to it, as though the hallucinations represent a different world altogether. I appreciate books that change the way I think to a degree, and this book did in the fact that I do look at plant life differently. At times his tone seems like it pushing too hard to open one's mind to a psychadelic journey, but in the end, most people that open and read a book on contemporary shamanism are probably already open to it. But I believe the book started as a series of articles, so perhaps there is where the didactic tone comes from. In the end, I very much enjoyed the book as it fed into an interest of mine with not only a highly detailed personal account but a thorough anthropological examination of its tribal history.

That moment when you finish a book and your entire conception of what it means to be a human being changes. The kind of book that leads you to a fantasmical realm as you hold hands with reality.

An accidentally brilliant experience - a tome of spastic babbles, laden with unintentional sexism and xenophobia, which manages to say nothing about the world and everything about its author.

Homeboy is so self absorbed. He, a wise white boy, spends half the book critiquing western society for its ignorance and condescension towards other cultures, while consistently displaying the same carelessness in his writings. He visits Huatla in Mexico, describing the town as a "Third World backwater," "rough, functional, and ugly," "the smell of cheap gasoline hung in the air," his hotel was "plain, concrete-walled, with a septic smell."

Instead of charting various shamanic practices, as the title of the book suggests, Pinchbeck decides to spend the book tripping balls on whatever he can find, cobbling together images and puddle-deep insights from his journeys to bestow upon the reader. Across the 300-ish pages of the book, we witness his writings grow more disconnected, arrogant, self-righteous, irrational - and entertaining.

There's no knowledge to be found here. But, if you want to watch a man zap the shit out of his mind and see the effect this has on his prose and ability to structure a book - you're in for a trip.

Excellent. The author tends to philosophize a bit, but overall if you want a quick but solid introduction to psychedelics this is the book for you. Definitely a re-read.

Very well written and researched book but only deals with the Sacramental portion of shamanism and not some of the more philosophical aspects like stories