One of my favorite images is an illustration on a postcard of a broken light bulb, blue on the inside, out of which a fried egg oozes, in shades of orange. It brings to mind ideas run amok and "your brain on drugs" (from those TV commercials years ago). I always get a chuckle out of it, so you might imagine my delight when assigned to review a book called Breaking Open the Head. I believe, as William Blake wrote, that "The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom."
Part diligent researcher, part raconteur, part Captain Trips, Daniel Pinchbeck -- writer par excellence and son of Joyce Johnson, writer and Beat Generation alumna -- takes readers on a wild ride that is inspiring, informative, amusing, and at times, terrifying. He asks, "If we don't explore the nature of our minds as deeply as possible, using whatever tools available to us, what kind of world can we hope to create?. . . What kind of world are we creating now?" Pinchbeck's main motive for writing Breaking Open the Head was a feeling of existential emptiness, and an attempt to rectify this by delving into "traditional and well-known visionary catalysts including psilocybin-containing mushrooms, peyote, the Amazonian potion ayahuasca, LSD, iboga and dimethyltriptamine (DMT)." For brevity's sake, he did not cover drugs like marijuana and ecstasy.
