"It is my thesis that the rapid development of technology and the destruction of the biosphere are material by-products of a psycho-spiritual process taking place on a planetary scale.  We have created this crisis to force our own accelerated transformation -- on an unconscious level, we have willed it into being.  Human consciousness, the sentient element of the Earth, is in the process of self-organizing to a more intensified state of being and knowing -- what the Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff called a "higher octave."  When the Hopi talk of a Fifth World, or the Aztecs anticipate a Sixth Sun, when St. John foresees the descent of the Heavenly City or New Jerusalem, they are describing the same thing:  a shift in the nature of consciousness."     

"According to Gebser, the threat of nuclear weapons depends upon the mental-rational misconception of time.  The attempt to incorporate "mental time" -- "itself divisive and disjunctive" -- as the fourth dimension, in Einstein's theories, led to a "consistent and obvious" dissolution or rupture in space-time.  He theorized that the cause-and-effect, deterministic logic of modern technology would no longer threaten those who had "coalesced with origin," realizing the underlying acausal reality -- attaining, through their own intensified (rather than expanded) awareness, the presence of time-freedom.  "The new world reality, which is at the same time also a world unreality, is to a great extent free of causality."  Someone who had attained this state would not exercise "a new kind of magic power" or "mental superiority," but their appearance would "effect new exfoliations and crystallizations which could be nowhere manifest without his or her presence."     

In relation to Gebser's notion of "time freedom" as humanity's next evolutionary breakthrough, Pinchbeck writes:


"[O]ne can only wonder how the seemingly subtle process of transforming the inner sphere of consciousness -- no longer squandering 'free time,' but using it to attain 'time freedom' -- could provide any defense from the catclysmic ravages and global meltdowns to be expected when our "superannuated spatial world" crashes and burns, "as everything that becomes lifeless and rigidified breaks apart," a collapse that appears to be approaching us at high speed.  Gebser's answer to this is similar to Sri Aurobindo's, Jung's, Goswami's, and Steiner's:  If "mind-stuff," rather than matter, is the fundamental ground of being, then a transformation of consciousness has, potentially, far-reaching effects -- not just in the psychic world, but in the one we perceive to be physical, as well."

" 'The Maya understood that whereas the 260-day sacred cycle is our period of individual gestation, the 26,000 year cycle is our collective gestation -- our collective unfolding as a species," Jenkins wrote in Maya Cosmogenesis 2012.  'Precession represents a 26,000-year cycle of biological unfolding -- a type of spiritual gestation and birth -- that Earth and its consciousness-endowed life forms undergo.' "
         

"Right now, we are being forced to witness the shadow of the psyche projected into material form through systemic misuse of technology, biospheric destruction, and corrupt geopolitics based on entrenched egotism and greed.  As predicted by McKenna, Arguelles, and Calleman, time itself seems to be changing form, accelerating and intensifying, as events follow each other at breakneck pace.  A cynical or nihilistic perspective on the imminent fate of our species is, of course, plausible, but unproductive.  In fact, if consciousness is intertwined with physical reality, then a nihilistic perspective actively helps to bring a nihilistic result into manifestation.  The alternate hypothesis of this book sees the destruction of the biosphere and the development of technology as by-products, nondual and integral aspects, of our psycho-spiritual evolution.  If the shadows appear to be growing darker, it is because the light that casts them is getting brighter."

"Clearly, the shift to a higher form of consciousness could not happen passively.  The transformation of consciousness requires not only personal work, but direct and surgically precise engagement with ecological, political, psychological, commercial, technological, and spiritual aspects of reality -- as Nietzsche noted, the deed creates the doer, "as an afterthought."  It is inconceivable that a movement to a state of higher consciousness could take place in a subconscious murk.  Such a shift could take place in only one way:  in the full light of consciousness.  To accomplish this would require the complete engagement of our will and our higher cognitive faculties.  We would have to decondition ourselves from negative programming, overcoming distractions and self-justifications and egocentric goals -- to "abandon abandonment" and "escape escapism," as I was once told in a dream -- in order to act for the greater good.  At the moment, it is unclear how much sacrifice will be necessary.  As futurist thinker Barbara Marx Hubbard writes in her book, Conscious Evolution:

If the positive innovations connect exponentially before the massive breakdowns reinforce one another, the system can repattern itself to a higher order of consciousness and freedom without the predicted economic, environmental, or social collapse....If the system could go either way, a slight intervention to assist the convergence of the positive can tip the scales of evolution in favor of the enhancement of life on Earth.

If our current civilization were to disintegrate -- a possibility that should not seem outlandish, considering the New Orleans flood, peak oil theories, and numerous ecological factors -- we might face an apocalyptic passage, forcing us to evolve at high speed.  Breakdown and breakthrough may happen simultaneously."

"I perceived my past impersonally, as if it belonged to somebody else, realizing how each small strand of it -- the deepest wounds, the most disolute and despairing aspects -- was a necessary part of the weaving, required to bring me to this place, to integrate what appeared to be prophetic knowledge, with the teacher as spiritual midwife.  Without her mediating influence, I would have been lost.  Late in the night, I seemed to commune with cosmic entities of pure thought, beaming a message at me.  Their words hovered in my mind, then scattered away.  I retrieved my notebook and scraled them down before they vanished from my memory:  'YOU GO DEEPER INTO THE PHYSICAL TO GET TO THE INFINITE.' "     

"Perhaps there is a law operating in the universe that the one who bends his mind to a paradox ends up insolubly meshed within that paradox?  Perhaps the universe purely operates on wit, and the best joke, inducing the longest fit of cosmic giggles, becomes the operative law at the next quantum mind-shift?  If, as the physicist Arthur March puts it, "the world is inseparable from the observing subject and is accordingly not objectifiable," then perhaps undertaking the quest for prophetic knowledge, in itself, causes reality to shiver and shift, as new possibilities open like the petals of an extravagant, multidimensional flower?  The message, as I apparently received it, that "a quest to understand prophecy has become the fulfillment of prophecy," suggested some such wild card hypothesis."     

"Although we do not know how the Classical Maya interpreted the prophetic culmination of their Long Count, Carl Johan Calleman has elaborated a meticulously exact fractal model of time from the Mayan calendar, in which human consciousness evolves through nine "Underworlds," each twenty times faster in linear time than the previous one.  Each underworld passes through a thirteen-stage process of alternating light and dark energy currents -- or seven "days" and six "nights" of creation -- culminating in a new level of realization.  According to Calleman's model, sometime around the year 2008 -- the "fifth night" of the current underworld, ruled by the energies of Tezcatlipoca, the jaguar god of night and black magic -- our current socioeconomic system will suffer a drastic and irrevocable collapse.  The primary catalyst for this collapse could be an approaching energy crisis.  A report recently issued by the U.S. Department of Energy states:  "Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary."  According to a 2005 feature in The New York Times Magazine:  "The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense."  As Peter Maass reported, "When a crisis comes -- whether in a year or two or ten -- it will be all the more painful because we will have done little or nothing to prepare for it."  

"I have proposed that this intensifying global crisis is the material expression of a psycho-spiritual process, forcing our transition to a new and more intensified state of awareness.  If Calleman's hypothesis is correct, this telescoping of time will mean a high-speed replay of aspects of past historical epochs -- echoes of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, and so on -- before consciousness reaches the next twist of the spiral.  As part of this transition, we will reintegrate the aboriginal and mythic worldviews, recognizing the essential importance of spiritual evolution, which understanding that this evolution is directly founded upon our relationship to material and physical aspects of reality.  The higher consciousness and conscience of our species will be forged through the process of putting the proken and intricate shards of our world back together, piece by piece."