Rolling Stone has an interesting profile of Daniel Pinchbeck, son of an abstract painter and a beatnik book editor. Pinchbeck writes books about and turns people on to ayahuasca, "an Amazonian jungle brew that carries the DMT compound, usually combining the leaves of a plant containing DMT with a vine found snaking around rain-forest trees, whose beta-carbolines make the DMT orally active."
[Pinchbeck] took it for the first time about ten years ago in downtown Manhattan with a California shaman introduced to him by the poet Michael Brownstein; Pinchbeck wore Depends and a blindfold, and kept a plastic vomit bucket by his head.
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Vocal proponents of alternate realities, like Sting and Oliver Stone, have been open about their experiments with ayahuasca, and in the hipster circles where ayahuasca has taken root, many people are making weeklong trips to Peru, which cost about $600 without airfare and include about four ayahuasca ceremonies. It's a kind of Merry Tripster scene, with guided shamanic journeys to Peru, Colombia and Hawaii available nearly monthly with shamans like a white-turbaned, middle-aged female guru from L.A. who channels a spirit called "the Mother," and with whom Pinchbeck has a close relationship. Bimonthly ceremonies are offered in upstate New York under the auspices of a Catholic-spiritist church. Participants must wear white; men and women sit on either side of the room, banned from interacting. In his role as a "wizard in the realm of ideas," as he calls himself, Pinchbeck has also provided the stuff to visitors in his apartment. "Daniel hovered over me on the couch, asking, 'Have you seen the face of God yet?' " says one who has partaken.
Update:
Daniel Pinchbeck has written a couple of responses to the profile (here and here):
The article, despite its five-page length, is impressively shallow, almost ignoring the ideas in my new book entirely, to concentrate on semi-salacious details of my personal life. I learnt, to my surprise, that I have "buck teeth," and some undefined similarity to Austin Powers. The article has that seamy tabloid vibe of scandal, sin, and shadowy disgrace. Perhaps the best thing about it is the Matt Mahurin illustration of me facing myself as forked-tongue serpent [shown here].
The most frustrating aspect of the piece is the impression I get, while reading it, that most of my ideas (as well as salient details of my life) were carefully, almost meticulously, distorted or disconnected from each other so that they would seem unfounded and insignificant. There were crucial aspects of my thesis in "2012" that Vanessa seemed unable to understand – for instance, I explained to her over and over again the Calleman model which reveals the Mayan Calendar as a precision timing device for the development of consciousness on Earth, from more than 16 billion years ago to 2012, in a nine-stage process that accelerates by factors of twenty in relation to linear time. Clearly, she was too busy seeking out quotes from disaffected former lovers to follow such an argument.
