Psychedelics & Shamanism

Originally published on VICE US. Pinchbeck interviews Allan Badiner about his anthology Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, asking whether the two traditions conflict. Badiner recounts a grueling Sri Lankan meditation retreat, meeting the chemist Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna, and cites Huston Smith and Ken Wilber on the gap between altered states and altered traits.

Announces When Plants Dream, co-written with anthropologist Sophia Rokhlin of the Chaikuni Institute in Peru. Pinchbeck traces his route from Manhattan magazine journalism through Bwiti iboga initiation in Gabon and ayahuasca with the Secoya in Ecuador, then argues that the global ayahuasca boom carries real costs: scarcity of banisteriopsis caapi vines, destabilized indigenous communities, and shamans pulled onto the international circuit.

An introduction to Alan Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology, written in the early 1960s about LSD and psilocybin. Pinchbeck argues that Watts’s real claim is that the Western ego does not exist, and that the psychedelic revolution has barely begun. He cites Thomas B. Roberts’s view of entheogens as a second Reformation.