Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite

"Wandering the streets of the East Village, I spent so much time contemplating the meaninglessness of existence that I sometimes felt like a ghost," he writes in Breaking Open the Head. "Perhaps I am already dead, I thought to myself. The world seemed to be wrapped in a cocoon I could not tear open, and I was suffocating in it. I did not want what other people wanted, but I didn't know how to find what I needed. I wanted truth — my own truth, whatever bleak fragment of whatever hellish totality it might turn out to be."

Now over thirty years old, he was little more than a cynical, angry, poor and usually drunk midlevel writer — at one party in Tribeca, he was thrown out after a pretty book editor resisted his advances, all the while protesting the iniquity of Manhattan women who only desired rich men. There had to be more. With a friend, he started experimenting with mushrooms before going out to hipster bars, where he perceived his friends as wounded medieval knights with their wenches. After reading a book about the rare African root-bark iboga and its use as a heroin cure, he secured a magazine assignment to travel to the West African country of Gabon to eat it with the Bwiti tribe, who a botanist had told him initiated Westerners into the cosmic secrets of iboga to show them the "essence of love." In Gabon, the shrieking king of the Bwitis shoved Pinchbeck naked into a stream, covering him in red paste and clothing him in tanned animal skins, with a red feather for his hair. Served in a plantain, iboga tasted like sawdust mixed with battery acid, and the trip lasted thirty terrifying hours. The upside: The Bwiti shaman told him the spirit of his grandmother, a sadistic woman who had administered unwanted enemas to him as a child, had been banished from his life. It was she who had been stopping him from accessing the etheric plane that exists beyond our four dimensions.

For the next ten years, while having a daughter with a European art-world heiress whose parents were painted by Andy Warhol, Pinchbeck embarked on a worldwide odyssey that took him to visit shamans in the Mexican mountains of Oaxaca, the Hopis on Navajo reservations and to the small tribal villages of the Ecuadorian rain forest. In the netherworlds of psychedelic domains, he claims to have met elves and goblins and eventually aliens, who assured him that they were not figments of his imagination but part of an "entire sentient system" in the "self-weaving cosmological firmament." He snorted DPT, the lab-created cousin of DMT, with a twenty-four-year-old fire dancer and stripper named Charity, who hitchhiked from Mexico to meet him with her cat, Prometheus. On DPT he glimpsed pure evil and became convinced that the drug could provide access to the devil — an area also inhabited by corporations that control us through their slogans and logos.

Meeting the devil — a lounge lizard with a white mohawk in a mirrored bar — is a risk Pinchbeck believes was worth taking. "I'm generally a humble person, but I do feel I'm surfing the edge of consciousness on this planet," he says. "A shaman risks their ass to get knowledge that the tribe needs to continue. In this case, the tribe is potentially the whole fucking world."