Breaking Open the Head and the Psychedelic Renaissance: A Month-long Seminar

Nearly twenty years ago, I published Breaking Open the Head, my first book, on psychedelic shamanism. I began writing that book as a result of an existential crisis. I grew up in New York City where my parents and everyone I knew were committed believers in scientific materialism. According to the materialist paradigm, consciousness is entirely based in the brain. There is no soul, no spirit, no possibility for any continuity of our being after death. In my late twenties, I found this increasingly intolerable. It made life meaningless, a pointless joke. I realized that both myself and my culture were suffering from nihilism. The ecological crisis we had unleashed was an expression of underlying, inexpressible despair.

Photo credit: Abdiel Gutiérrez Granados for PapayaPlaya, Tulum

In my crisis, I recalled my psychedelic trips in college. These trips offered tantalizing suggestions that there might be “something else,” some inner region of psychic life, some dimension of consciousness, that could not be explained away by the reductive scientific worldview. I decided to explore this area for myself. At the time, it was an…