It's a fun book. I enjoyed some of the commentary on his ventures into shamanic rituals and mind altering substances. He's well read on the pop-literature surrounding these drugs. His arrogance and unskeptical embrace of any and all spiritual practices got tiring, though. He makes comparisons between cultures that highlight a few similarities and brush a myriad of differences under the rug. The author also makes haphazard claims. No, Daniel, shamanism isn't a human universal. How could it be when none of the major religions of the world are shamanic in the classic sense? It's a ridiculous book, and impossible to take seriously.

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

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.

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.

Dream a dream, and what you'll see will be
In einer der letzten Folgen der US-Fernsehserie "Homeland" soll ein Drogenabhängiger "auf die schnelle" vom Heroin befreit werden - und ein CIA-Agent hat die Idee, ein hochgefährliches, tödliches Mittel auszuprobieren, das die CIA früher für solche Zwecke einsetzte: Ibogain. Alle schauen den Vorschlagenden entsetzt an - waterboarding, Foltern, Morden, ja gut - aber Ibogain? Dann lieber Heroinabhängigkeit, scheint das Fazit. Ein schönes Beispiel, wie die Medien grundsätzlich entheogene Substanzen behandeln, die ja schon fast so gefährlich scheinen wie eine Runde D&D oder Rockmusik. Gleichzeitig wird im Fernsehen gesoffen, dass sich die Balken biegen - und keiner hat ein Problem damit, die staatlich sanktionierte Droge Alkohol, die gefährlicher und schädlicher ist als alle Halluzinogene zusammen, frei im Supermarkt kaufen zu können (vgl. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/po...).

Pinchbeck beschreibt seinen Weg vom ziellosen Sinnsuchenden hin zum klarsichtigen modernen Schamanen, den er mittels Iboga, Peyote, Zauberpilzen, Ayahuasca, LSD, DMT und schließlich DPT gegangen ist. Sein Erzählstil ist zu Beginn stark an anthropologischen Reise- und Erfahrungsberichten orientiert, bei denen er seine Eindrücke und die anderer Reisebegleiter schildert - hier ist das Buch großartig, spannend und mitreißend. Mit fortschreitender Seitenzahl und Steigerung der Drogenpotenz wird das Buch politisch, eine Anklage an den Kapitalismus und dessen weltzerstörendes und zukunftsloses Tun. In einem dritten Part wendet sich Pinchbeck dann einem schamanistischen Mystizismus zu - hier verliert er mich als Leser etwas.

Vielleicht muss man selbst schon entsprechende Erfahrungen gemacht haben, um diesem Teil wirklich folgen zu können. Über Shrooms und Papers bin ich nicht hinausgekommen, daher kann ich das schwer beurteilen (nach den Berichten Pinchbecks strebe ich das auch nicht mehr wirklich an) - und diejenigen, die Halluzinogenen sowieso ablehnend gegenüberstehen, werden Pinchbeck eh schon viel früher als spinnerten Acidhead abtun. Dabei hat er viel zu sagen, und er tut dies in einem wunderbar lesbaren Ton. Pinchbeck sieht unsere Generation in Gefahr, sich vollends vom Spirituellen zu lösen. Psychotrope Mittel scheinen, verantwortungsvoll und in Maßen genutzt (also nicht zur Unterhaltung und zum "Kicken"), ein Weg zu sein, sich mit dem Sakralen auseinanderzusetzen - und der Bedarf ist zweifellos da, wenn man sich ansieht, was Leute heutzutage alles tun, um sich nicht mit dem Materialismus unserer Konsensgesellschaft abfinden zu müssen; das aktuelle Beispiel sind deutsche Jihadisten.

Ein sehr spannendes Buch über ein Thema, das heutzutage nur noch ein Nischendasein fristet, und dabei man muss eigentlich kein Konsument irgendwelcher Kakteen, Baumrinden oder Pilzen sein, um manche der Ideen in diesem Buch auf sein eigenes Leben zu übertragen. Manchmal brauchen wir nur einen Schubs, der uns den Kopf aufbricht.

Daniel Pinchbeck is a lot of fun and tells wild tales of his explorations. More importantly, he is well read and thoughtful on his subject. Good psychedelic reading.

could not finish. some interesting information but do we really need to hear it coming from another self-important white man

Part biography, part history of the major psychedelic compounds.
What's remarkable is the author's story arc as his head breaks progressively wider open. I wonder if I'll also get to the later stages, using crystals and tarots to rid my house of evil spirits.

Highlights:

Laid out for me was the entire, intricate process of my self-development. The process was complex yet ultimately organic. The extension of the self was, I realized, a natural process, akin to the blossoming of a plant. While a plant extends toward the sun throughout its life, human beings evolve internally. We rise up and flourish, or become stunted, involuted, as we react to the forces that press against us. Our growth takes place in the invisible realm of our mental space, and the unreachable sun we rise toward is knowledge—of the self and the universe.
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We have sacrificed perceptual capabilities for other mental abilities—to concentrate on a computer screen while sitting in a cubicle for many hours at a stretch (something those Indians would find “utterly impossible and incredible”), or to shut off multiple levels of awareness as we drive a car in heavy traffic. In other words, we are brought up within a system that teaches us to postpone, defer, and eliminate most incoming sense data in favor of a future reward. We live in a feedback loop of perpetual postponement. For the most part, we are not even aware of what we have lost.
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he anticipated the development of culturally sanctioned mood-lifting drugs such as Prozac and Ritalin, which would be mass-prescribed: “They may help the psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the dictator in his battle against freedom,” he wrote. “More probably (since science is divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and at the same time destroy.” Huxley died in 1963.
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This vision was a small revelation. I realized that most thoughts are impersonal happenings, like self-assembling machines. Unless we train ourselves, the thoughts passing through our mind have little involvement with our will. It is strange to realize that even our own thoughts pass by like scenery out the window of a bus, a bus we took by accident while trying to get somewhere else. Most of the time, thinking is an autonomous process, something that happens outside of our control. This perception of the machinelike quality of the self is something many people discover, then try to overcome, through meditation.
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Bergson suggested the universe “was a machine to create Gods.”
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“My assumption about psychedelics has always been that the reason they are not legal is not because it troubles anyone that you have visions, but that there is something about them that casts doubts on the validity of reality,” he wrote. “They are inevitably deconditioning agents simply by demonstrating the existence of a nearby reality running on a different dynamic. I think they are inherently catalysts of intellectual dissent.”
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I am ambivalent about this book. Experimenting with drugs is not my thing, however Pinchbeck's insights and posed questions do have a merit. It is clear that the author is a well read erudite, a man who travels a lot (which I admire) and is either brave or crazy enough to put his sanity and life on line in order to try and dig deeper under surface of reality, which makes the book a fun and educative read.

I do not know what to make of that. I am certainly not compelled to try out psychedelic drugs, but have a feeling that after reading this book, some people could be. Which I am not sure whether is a good thing. However, Pinchbeck does open a Pandora's box of archetypes, images shared with other (living and extinct) cultures, speculations on the 'real' world and conclusions which he personally experienced (provided he was telling the truth), but which have an eerie, universal streak to them.

Honestly, I do not know what to do with experiences he shared or how to answer questioned he posed about future and nature of human beings, the world, our sense of self, etc. since I do not plan to go on empiric expedition of my own. It was a fun book to read, nevertheless, somewhat mixed-up, unbalanced and memoir-like, but worth the effort.

In the end, however, I must conclude that after all that talk about drugs being good for opening your mind and, thus, the 'Establishment's' methodical efforts to keep the drugs on the other side of the law for easier manipulation of the masses, I still do not see how tall this tripping has made the author a better person.

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 felt that reading Pinchbeck's book really broke open my head to the world of psychedelics. I have always felt a spiritual connection to the mushrooms I took when I was younger and reading this book about his experiences and references of others who have taken the drug as well, I felt a connection with what he was saying and describing. while the book is informative and intriguing I felt that sometimes it was a little over my head. The plant based hallucinogenic trips he went on really intrigued me and something I might want to dabble in if i ever come across them in the future. Interesting book.

What a wild journey it was