Daniel Pinchbeck Quotes

The drive to Black Rock City from San Francisco leads through the Nevada flatlands, past the jittering neon sadness of Reno.

I realized that most thoughts are impersonal happenings, like self-assembling machines. Unless we train ourselves, the thoughts passing through our mind have little involvement with our will. It is st...

About Author

Daniel Pinchbeck is an American author and journalist. His books include Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, the New York Times best seller 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Notes from the Edge Times, How Soon is Now, and When Plants Dream. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Art Forum, The Village Voice, and Esquire. He is a co-founder of the web magazine Reality Sandwich and of the website Evolver.net, and he edited the North Atlantic Books publishing imprint Evolver Editions. He was featured in the 2010 documentary 2012: Time for Change, directed by Joao Amorim and produced by Mangusta Films. He is the founder of the think tank Center for Planetary Culture, which produced the Regenerative Society Wiki.

The plants that produce visions can function- for those of us who have inherited the New World Order of barren materialism, cut off from our spiritual heritage by a spiteful culture that gives us noth...

In shamanic cultures, sychronicities are recognized as signs that you are on the right path.

We live in a world of media overload and data smog, where everything distracts us from everything else. Yet underlying this noisy assault, our culture offers us nothing transcendent. No deeper meaning...

As I wandered the streets in a desolate funk, I would ask myself the impossible, the embarrassing, the ultimate childish question of Why? - Why this city? Why this life? Why anything? Of course I knew...

Deep down, nobody wants a job to occupy his or her time. We want a mission that inspires us.

On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior concentrating to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm . . . To live in these interiors was to ha...

The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long term consequence. If there is stil...

Corporations took our innate impulse toward dissent and our desire for meaningful change, and transmuted them into effective sales tools for their products.

From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path -...

Three hundred and fifty years ago, Shulgin notes, the Church proclaimed, The earth is the center of the universe, and anyone who says otherwise is a heretic. Today, the government proclaims, All drugs...