Far Out, Man

One of my favorite books last year was Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head, which is to shamanic drug ingestion what Paper Lion to professional football--that is to say, a remarkable work of participatory journalism. (To strain the parallel even further, it's worth noting Pinchbeck's status as a founding editor of Open City.) So I was pleased to stumble onto an interview Pinchbeck gave to New World Disorder. Mind you, his first answer starts off "I think Gurdjieff has the right idea," and gets deeper into High Weirdness from there, so about half of you who follow this link are going to think I'm a kook for recommending it--just don't say I didn't warn you. Heck, even I think some of his ideas are a little flaky, but others are pretty darn insightful, and the book itself displays a healthy sense of skepticism, though not quite as much as John Horgan's Rational Mysticism, which I recommend even more highly.