A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe. Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival. Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism

Politics & Social Sciences

Pinchbeck, Daniel

Social Sciences

Broadway

Reference

Broadway Books

Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism

The most recent body of work by the popular American artist to focus on his highly inventive interpretation of space travel, published for the first time.\nPublished to accompany exhibitions simultaneously in New York and Palm Beach, the book follows the interdisciplinary show that centers around the theme of spaceships by the artist Tom Sachs (b. 1966), both with representations of spaceships and rockets in sculptural and painted forms, and more indirect references that relate either formally or conceptually to the idea of the spaceship in our society. A sculpture of a Hoover vacuum suggests the vacuum of space; a bricolage rendition of Sachs’ favorite record player recalls the form of a spaceship; and a work relating to the Titanic suggests the idea of transporting between realms. Other works more directly represent spaceships and relate to Sachs’ space program, which has been of central importance to his work over the past decade and a half.\nThe book follows Sachs’ immersive, participatory installations on the theme of space, most recently at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. Last August, Sachs launched his Rocket Factory, a genre-defying project that brought NFTs into the physical realm by launching fully assembled replicas of NFT rockets (one of which took place at LACMA in 2021) and then making paintings after component and assembled rockets.

Tom Sachs: Spaceships

Arts & Photography

Crow, Thomas E.

History & Criticism

Rizzoli

Are we being observed and visited by alien beings from another world or perhaps another space-time dimension? Thousands upon thousands of accounts of UFOs and alien abductions suggest that something is happening that we do not yet understand. Recently, even mainstream media organ like The New York Times and The Washington Post have started to report on the bizarre sightings made by military pilots around the world. Are we moving toward a deeper level of Disclosure? And if so, what will be disclosed? How can we best understand this phenomenon? Considered one of the foremost authors on esoteric, occult, and shamanic topics, Daniel Pinchbeck (Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, How Soon Is Now) turns his attention to the question of aliens in The Occult Control System. Following thinkers like Patrick Harpur, Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, John Lamb Lash, and Laura Knight-Jadczyk, he proposes that the unfolding alien narrative is part of an occult or hyper-dimensional control system designed to keep humanity locked into a certain frequency of consciousness and being. As we awaken to our situation, we can find the tools to break out of this intricately designed prison and access our true potential.

The Occult Control System: UFOs, aliens, other dimensions, and future timelines

Philosophy

Independently published

Deep Zero: A Play in Five Acts

Literature & Fiction

Read Daniel Pinchbeck's posts on the Penguin Blog Cross James Merrill, H. P. Lovecraft, and Carlos Castaneda -each imbued with a twenty-first-century aptitude for quantum theory and existential psychology-and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for the lucidity, rationale, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms. Throughout the 1990s, Pinchbeck had been a member of New York's literary select. He wrote for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Harper's Bazaar. His first book, Breaking Open the Head, was heralded as the most significant on psychedelic experimentation since the work of Terence McKenna. But slowly something happened: Rather than writing from a journalistic remove, Pinchbeck-his literary powers at their peak-began to participate in the shamanic and metaphysical belief systems he was encountering. As his psyche and body opened to new experience, disparate threads and occurrences made sense like never before: Humanity, every sign pointed, is precariously balanced between greater self-potential and environmental disaster. The Mayan calendar's "end date" of 2012 seems to define our present age: It heralds the end of one way of existence and the return of another, in which the serpent god Quetzalcoatl reigns anew, bringing with him an unimaginably ancient-yet, to us, wholly new-way of living. A result not just of study but also of participation, 2012 tells the tale of a single man in whose trials we ultimately recognize our own hopes and anxieties about modern life.

2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

Business & Money

Business Development & Entrepreneurship

Tarcher/Penguin

TarcherPerigee

An informed, challenging, and engaging collection of essays on the new choices in lifestyles and community as we begin the countdown toward the year 2012. This fresh and thought-provoking anthology draws together some of today’s most celebrated visionaries, thinkers, and pioneers in the field of evolving consciousness— exploring topics from shamanism to urban homesteading, the legacy of Carlos Castaneda to Mayan predictions for the year 2012, and new paths in direct political action and human sexuality. Toward 2012 highlights some of the most challenging, intelligent pieces published on the acclaimed website Reality Sandwich. It is coedited by Daniel Pinchbeck, the preeminent voice on 2012, and online pioneer Ken Jordan, and features original works from Stanislav Grof, John Major Jenkins, and Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky); interviews with Abbie Hoffman and artist Alex Grey; and a new introduction by Pinchbeck. Here are ideas that trace the arc of our evolution in consciousness, lifestyles, and communities as we draw closer to a moment in time that portends ways of living that are different from anything we have expected or experienced.

Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age

History

Jordan, Ken

Ancient Civilizations

Tarcher

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Pinchbeck, Daniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Pinchbeck, Daniel