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Article "Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite" full aticle from Rolling Stone
"Rolling Stone: Douglas Rushkoff & Richard Metzger On Daniel Pinchbeck"
Boing Boing posted about the Pichbeck article on September 12th here
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Commentary about the article in PopOcculture Blog (where I found out about the article)
In Yiddish, there is a word that is accurately descriptive of of the contemporary enthogen crowd — meshugana. I won’t try for an exact translation for the word but approximately it implies a whacked out craziness.
This is not to say that this is a new phenomenon. The Sixties had their noted meshunganas. In the Nineties, the psychedelic movement was dominated by the rants and ramblings of the late and lauded Terence Mckenna. Seeing McKenna’s success, new mehsungana candidates are always running for the top spot on the entheogenic ticket. The latest is the topic of the links at the top of the post.
This is not to say that I am entirely free of the meshungana syndrome. In fact my Jewish mother is fond of using the term to describe my hippie youth. Having been through all the craziness and transcendence that the counterculture could throw at me, I appreciate the islands of sanity that poke out of the sea of silliness.
can you point out any of those islands of sanity for me among these people, because i’m always looking for them but they tend to be few and far between in my experience!
I have mixed feelings about all of it. When I first became initiated into psychedelic culture, the sixties had already happened along with the great diaspora of the hippie culture. By the early 1980′s as I came into the picture, I had the fortune of receiving a tremendous amount of grace, love and spiritual wisdom of people who had already been there, and matured, learned, evolved and refined themselves into ways of being far surpassing the heyday of the summer of love. I was also fortunate enough to tap into, by then, fairly large and extensive library of books, texts and wisdom collected from thousands of trip experiences, and ancient and sacred texts from around the world. Those texts that survived the the times managed to live on and make it into my ever so grateful hands.
Now fast-forward to today, and there is a kind of re-surgence of this neopsychedelic movement, I think in large part to the new y-generation, burning man, and the plethora of exotic substances now out there. From their perspective its all new, and for us, old hat.
Having gotten to know Daniel on a personal level; he is a kind and gentle fellow, and I’m quite certain, having read the Rolling Stone piece is a distortion of his life and philosophy. For example, I know he does NOT believe that only a certain elite will make it. He very much wants everyone to make it through “2012″.
On the other hand, I find Daniel’s taking the “limelight” to be a bit of a huckster, being that any number of “us”, including myself, could just have easily done so, but chose not to. And that is my point, most of us in the entheogen community have learned from the days of old, we take a rather dim view of “celebrity”, especially when its of the very culture we belong. However, in Daniel’s case I think he genuinely believes he is some kind of profit and needs to spread the word as fast as possible. Hell, why not? It’s kind of cool to see these ideas, even the crazy ones, make mainstream press. Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to do the real work, as we have always done.
In answer to Paul’s comments, Pinchbeck in his book Breaking Open the Head said that my long time friend Timothy Leary was “the central villain in the psychedelic saga…naïve, charismatic, sloppy, self-promotional and out of control.” In an interview he called Leary “egoistic and self-aggrandizing.”
After reading this stuff, I mostly lost interest in finding out much about Pinchbeck until some friends of mine started telling me that Pinchbeck had become somewhat meglomanical in his current book. I have to admit I never read either of his books but when someone slanders a friend who is no longer around to defend himself, that usually is a good reason to steer clear of them.
I listed to a lecture that Pinchbeck gave at Burning Man. As I am not a great speaker myself, I am tolerant of this defect in others. However, I have to admit that after listening him to rambling on a bit, I turned off the interview and decided that I would have no more.
Hi Bruce,
Leary has a very fond place in my heart. Regarding Daniel, I was merely trying to provide some counter-balance to the Rolling Stones piece, which was definitely distorted, like so many in our community our. Yet, I also agree with you about Daniel’s meglomania and his tendecy to ramble on. I also don’t like how he’s positioned himself as the new guru, as if all of this stuff he’s talking about is somehoe new. His trashing of Leary, shows me that he’s deliberately trying to erase our elder’s contributions. And perhaps, had he listened to them, he would present a more respectful, and much needed sane voice that we are missing. And that is the crux of what I’m saying – can such a thing, fame, limelight and celebrity, along with sane, balanced and wise go hand-in-hand at this point?
I was not happy either of Pinchbeck’s thrashing of Leary. For it was Leary that turned me on in the first place.
To echo what I said earlier, the real work continues. Like you, I have no desire to read his latest book.
Pinchbeck trashed Leary in his first book based on what DP had heard or read about TL in The Media, not by studying what Leary had said or wrote. Massive hearsay. Now he has received the same treatment by the same Media! The RS story on DP uses the same tried & tested template The Media uses and has used since A. Weil pulled the same stunt on Leary way back in 1962! Look up at the Harvard Crimson newspaper for the details. This is a weird form of schizophrenia where these supposed psychedeliacs complain about Leary turning on the World, and then brag about their own high dose Acid trips! “Leary is a bad man, but I sure love my LSD!” Where is Pinchbeck’s General Theory of Tripping? There is little mention in his books of the work of Huxley, Masters & Houston, J. Lilly, Leary, S. Grof, etc. It’s like the Psychedelic World only started the day he started trippin’. If DP had read Leary’s books like Psychedelic Prayers based on the Tao te Ching, High Priest, Politics of Ecstasy, neurologic, Exo-Psychology, etc. he may have avoided this Media nightmare! The RS article is par for the same course–avoid mentioning any new Ideas and drill in on the Ad Hominem attack. DP’s third book should be on Leary’s hundreds of new ideas that everyone is so good at avoiding.