Guest
Daniel Pinchbeck (born June 15, 1966) is an author living in New York's East Village, where he is editorial director of Reality Sandwich (). He is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. He is the son of painter Peter Pinchbeck and writer Joyce Johnson. In Breaking Open the Head, Pinchbeck explored shamanism via ceremonies with tribal groups such as the Bwiti of Gabon, who eat iboga, and the Secoya people in the Ecuadorean Amazon, who take ayahuasca in their ceremonies. He also attended the Burning Man festival in Nevada, and looked at use of psychedelic substances in a de-sacralized modern context. Through his direct experiences and research, and philosophically influenced by the work of anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner[1] he became convinced that the shamanic and mystical view of reality had validity, and that the modern world had forfeited an understanding of intuitive aspects of
