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In her “Wildflower” album Sheryl Crow has a song “Chances Are.” The lyrics to the last verse are:
“Terrence McKenna said
It is better to explore within
We were apes before we spoke of sin
The Kosmos sits on the tip of a pin”
Now these are NOT the words written on the liner notes but they are the words she sings and they capture much of the energy of Pinchbeck's latest book. I even speculate that Pinchbeck may have helped Sheryl connect with one of the sacred plants he writes about to inspire those lyrics - just a guess on my part.
Pinchbeck dives headfirst into topics taboo for skeptics but that call for a hearing. He taps into the heart (Big Heart) in a way that really touched me. I imagine this would be a tough read for someone who has not experienced psychedelics or sacred plants. From an Integral perspective sometimes he comes off a little “green” or Individualist but he calls himself on it and tries to make his own skepticism and enthusiasm an object of awareness.
There are some careless references to quantum theory and the role of the transcendent is never quite clear in Pinchbeck's wild ride in the passing lane of the manifest realm. BUT… there is amazing stuff here. Pinchbeck “calls a spade a spade” in condemning our consumer culture and stating the obvious that most Americans try to ignore - things ain't going so well and a major shift in consciousness could really help us out! And, according to Pinchbeck we need help cause change is truckin' down the pike in our direction.
The apolcalyptic tone of 2012 leads me into temptation. Incorrect as it is to say, I sometimes deal with my frustration with human affairs by entertaining a desire that (me and my loved ones excepted - of course!) the whole damn society gets decimated. I wonder how many people who really want or believe that his book will attract? This is why we are drawn to things like Stephen King's The Stand or dispensationalist and millennial Christians to the ”Left Behind” series. The desire to see society destroyed is rooted in a shadow of anger fueled by a pervasive sense of helplessness. If Satan or Quetzacoatl want to do away with the problem - fine since I can't even get my congressman on the phone!
Oddly enough this book led me to Tarnas's “Cosmos and Psyche” and many of the dynamics Pinchbeck suggests we are moving into correlate with Tarnas's archetypal astrological transits. Probably like Tarnas's book, the best response to 2012 is to examine your own role in the dynamics he discusses and consider what type of vision questing may be right for you (not all vision questing requires sacred plants).
Bottom line - Pinchbeck's books are important contributions particularly in light of the irrational criminalization of sacred plants.
If you want to know more about Daniel Pinchbeck and his latest book, check out this interview and question & answer session with The Arlington Institute.
With a positive review from Sting on back, Daniel Pinchbeck pulls off an unlikely synthesis of views and visionaries relating to the approaching enigma of 2012. Setting the likes of William Irwin Thompson alongside Terence McKenna and Ken Wilber; Jose Arguelles and Carl Johan Calleman alongside John Major Jenkins; Rudolph Steiner and Julius Evola alongside Jean Gebser – and discussing everything from crop circles to alien abductions to contemporary psychedelics, Pinchbeck reveals a range that is at once playful, daring and instructive.
This book is a must for anyone wondering how to bring up this ungainly topic in public without being labeled another New Age casualty. Pinchbeck is at once erudite, passionate, and marvelously calm in his examination of what it means to live in the shadow of the possibility of time as we know it giving way to its cosmic renewal.
Perhaps most exciting to me is Pinchbeck's call to a collective rush of moral responsibility as we approach this potential threshold of our collective cosmic transformation, in order to help usher it in with a shared and growing conscious intentionality that can meet the future head on. In this regard, check out The Evolver Project and this snappy caption for its magazine, “Evolver”:
“I’s no longer about knowing what’s wrong. It’s about becoming what’s right. It’s about integrating logic and heart, vision and will. It’s about making life juicier by making good ideas real. A new world is springing up around us – of visionary politics and liberating hackers, earthly communities and galactic highs. Evolver magazine & media and the EVO membership are portals into this world.
Evolver media will spread the “new news” of what’s possible, focusing on active solutions, helpful products, new social movements, and do-it-yourself designs. At once open-source group-mind and creative meta-media, the Evolver Project is designed to creatively and quickly respond to our rapidly changing times. Through our partnerships, cultural mixology, and creatively engaged membership, the Evolver Project will also serve as a model for a passionate planetary culture: one jacked up on collaboration, connection, and exuberant renewal.”
Did you check out that last sentence??? Hell Yeah!With this uniquely energizing strain of self-organizing funk-flavored visionary cosmic stewardship hitting the ground running, I'm starting to feel less like an isolated freak in my own musings of the near future and more like an early guest to perhaps the greatest party of all time.
Of course, it's not a perfect read – as Pinchbeck doesn't flinch from taking on way more than any author could chew in one book. In particular, his examination of our contemporary impoverished gender roles and superficial sexual trends is as daring as it is incomplete. Similarly, his analysis of what Kali actually signifies in this fabled time of Kali Yuga similary seems less than fully thought through. Nevertheless, he goes there – and takes a hard, clear look based on his personal experience and his gut sense of truth – at both himself and the collective, in light of the even larger epic subject his book bravely confronts.
So what are you doing December 21, 2012? Made any big plans?
The date just a little bit more than five years away, gives one pause for thought. Especially, when one considers the hypothesis put forth in the book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck. Pinchbeck, a writer and founding editor of literary journal Open City, would on the surface definitely fit into your stereotypical role of member of the East Coast intelligentsia. But that description would probably fit a Pinchbeck from an earlier paradigm.
In Pinchbeck’s first book, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism we explore one writer’s journey into the world of psychedelic substances and the mysticism and ceremony which accompany them. This is the story of his personal experiences and the realms opened to him while undergoing rituals surrounding such psychedelic plant essences from the Iboga tree and the Ayahuasca vine brew.
Following this, in The Return of Quetzalcoatl, we are given not only deeper insight into his experiences with these substances and their accompanying shamanic rituals, but also a work of scholarship pulling inspiration from knowledge gleaned on the journey.
What if there were physical evidence in the world that suggested our days of living in this plane of existence were strictly limited? What if there were voices around us that told us we were at a true crossroads in our human history and planetary evolution?
I know that many of my fellow Zaadzsters who read these words can almost instinctively taste these ideas without a directed notion from the outside world. After all, it is a commitment that each of us have made to being a part of the change in the world that brought us here.
In Pinchbeck’s book we are treated to a work of scholarship based on a solid editorial background, personal experience, and perhaps most importantly, a record based upon inspired perception.
I came to this book like so many other subjects in my life, based upon the inspiration of fear. I can recall a long line of subjects, people and ideas which societal thinking, mass media and popular opinion told me I should fear. In 1980, when hostages were taken in the country of Iran , I was given the American cultural mandate that all Middle Easterners were savages with aspirations toward killing every American in the name righteousness and riches in the afterworld. As a teenager, I would hear the stories of Tupac Amaru Shakur, a young Rapper who spoke of hatred toward women, whites and the noble American establishment. In each case, curiosity would lead me to removing the mask from the beast, to better understand just what it was that I was supposed to be afraid of. Usually, not only would I come to a place of deeper and more balanced understanding, but a place of great respect and fondness.
And then there’s the biggest fear: The idea that you and I are living in humanity’s end times.
It has been not only a need to remove the beast’s mask, but an instinct that my own perceptions were sensing something deeper at work that led me to pick up the book in an effort to better understand what could be happening.
Pinchbeck postulates that what is going on is a global consciousness transformation that has been pointed to for thousands of years from cultures and records as diverse as the Vedas, Mayan cosmology, Tibetan Buddhism, Mystic Christianity, Kaballah and Native American spirituality. Not only have the recent and near recent voices of Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoken of these ideas, but science has gone on to reflect the truths in ideas put forth by these vast and seemingly divergent voices. Why, what we have come to learn from Quantum Physics in the past twenty years and it’s support of spiritual ideas is enough to give one pause for thought.
My experience of reading this book was powerful. I found myself not only amazed and challenged by the ideas put forth in the book, but literally facing a series of shattered assumptions. Despite my desire to read the book in as few sittings as possible, I found myself needing to put the book down so as to give myself an opportunity not only to assimilate the ideas proposed, but to redefine my framework of understanding.
Central to the book is the concept of the idea of callendrical time, and humanity’s seemingly intrinsic need to wield control over the uncontrollable. The book quite rightly asks why in a global culture so fixated on technology and innovation, do we base our daily lives around the Gregorian calendar dating back to 1582, and before that, the Sumerian culture which shifted paradigms of timekeeping from a lunar methodology to a solar model?
The book is full of questions and possible answers to the understanding of the human experience. It also asks us why we operate at such a discord from our own possible true natures and that of the universe we inhabit.
In reading this book, I was not left with some limited idea of the way things may be, should be, or could be, nor some construct based upon a particular “medicinally inspired” contingent’s way of thinking, but more and more pulled away from a reductive way of thinking.
I have for sometime tried to think in expansive ways, frame my behavior and work my processes in ways that allowed for greater possibility in function and understanding, even before I knew beyond an instinctual level what that meant. At a certain level, this way of being and thinking is still at a highly instinctual and nascent level. But I feel as if the learning now taking place within this particular time in my life is tearing out faulty wiring. Destroying false constructs. Confronting paradox and contradiction. Taking greater leaps of faith every time I sit down to create something or consider a challenge. And with all of this I am left with a single core question:
If humanity has less than six years in which it can choose to take part in a positive manner in a coming global shift of consciousness, then what should I be doing with my time?
This question certainly begets other valid questions, but my sense is that the time of debate has past us. The idea of “who is right” is an ideal of humanity set in an adolescent mindset, the idea of being “right” further shackled to an even more childish mindset.
In my childhood, I remember through the specters of nuclear supremacy, terrorism, the cult of Nostradamus and fatalistic Christian end-time ideas, feeling as if I was inheriting a world preparing to flicker out due to it’s own lack of wisdom, and God’s desire to have “his” way with us all. Now in my own adulthood, I get the sense that the wisdom of humanity is here with us in ever-greater mass, and that the God we imagine is but a pale shadow of the true nature of what we think “him” to be. Instead, I now believe that we are about to inherit a world in a New Era in humanity and a coming expansive nature, infinite in possibility, unlimited in nature.
But still the big question that one is left pondering is if there are just a bit more than five years to prepare, what should I be doing with my time?