Contemporary Authors

• Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism Broadway Books (New York, NY), 2002
• 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin (New York, NY), 2006
• Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin (New York, NY), 2009
• Notes from the Edge Times Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin (New York, NY), 2010
• Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960s San Antonio Museum of Art (San Antonio, TX), 2010
• What Comes after Money?: Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming Currency & Community Evolver Editions (Berkeley, CA), 2011
• Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness: Liminal Zones, Psychic Science, and the Hidden Dimensions of the Mind Evolver Editions (Berkeley, CA), 2012
• Doom: Scarydarkfast ( videogame) University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2013

1. Doom : scarydarkfast LCCN 2012042610 Type of material Book Personal name Pinchbeck, Daniel. Main title Doom : scarydarkfast / Dan Pinchbeck. Published/Created Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2013. Description viii, 189 p. : illustrations ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780472071913 (cloth : alk. paper) 9780472051915 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9780472028931 (e-book) CALL NUMBER GV1469.35.D68 P56 2013 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2014 033143 CALL NUMBER GV1469.35.D68 P56 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 2. Exploring the edge realms of consciousness : liminal zones, psychic science, and the hidden dimensions of the mind LCCN 2012013290 Type of material Book Main title Exploring the edge realms of consciousness : liminal zones, psychic science, and the hidden dimensions of the mind / edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan with Stephen Hershey & Mitch Mignano. Published/Created Berkeley, Calif. : Evolver Editions, c2012. Description xiii, 364 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781583944882 CALL NUMBER BF1040 .E97 2012 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. What comes after money? : essays from Reality sandwich on transforming currency & community LCCN 2011012690 Type of material Book Main title What comes after money? : essays from Reality sandwich on transforming currency & community / edited by Daniel Pinchbeck & Ken Jordan. Published/Created Berkeley, Calif. : Evolver Editions, c2011. Description 267 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781583943496 1583943498 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1209/2011012690-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1209/2011012690-d.html Shelf Location FLM2016 113181 CALL NUMBER HG221 .W347 2011 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 4. Psychedelic : optical and visionary art since the 1960s LCCN 2009045556 Type of material Book Personal name Rubin, David S., 1949- Main title Psychedelic : optical and visionary art since the 1960s / David S. Rubin ; with contributions from Robert C. Morgan and Daniel Pinchbeck. Published/Created San Antonio, TX : San Antonio Museum of Art ; Cambridge, Mass. : In association with the MIT Press, c2010. Description 139 p. : col. ill. ; 32 cm. ISBN 9780262014045 (hardcover) 0262014041 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER N6494.P79 R83 2010 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. Notes from the edge times LCCN 2010023995 Type of material Book Personal name Pinchbeck, Daniel. Main title Notes from the edge times / Daniel Pinchbeck. Published/Created New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2010. Description 193 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9781585428373 CALL NUMBER BF1791 .P56 2010 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER BF1791 .P56 2010 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. Toward 2012 : perspectives on the next age LCCN 2008040675 Type of material Book Main title Toward 2012 : perspectives on the next age / edited by Daniel Pinchbeck & Ken Jordan. Published/Created New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009. Description xiii, 351 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781585427000 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER BF1791 .T69 2009 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER BF1791 .T69 2009 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 7. 2012 : the return of Quetzalcoatl LCCN 2005055545 Type of material Book Personal name Pinchbeck, Daniel. Main title 2012 : the return of Quetzalcoatl / Daniel Pinchbeck. Published/Created New York : Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin, c2006. Description 408 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 1585424838 9781585424832 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0720/2005055545-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0720/2005055545-d.html CALL NUMBER BP605.N48 P56 2006 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 8. Breaking open the head : a psychedelic journey into the heart of contemporary shamanism LCCN 2003266652 Type of material Book Personal name Pinchbeck, Daniel. Main title Breaking open the head : a psychedelic journey into the heart of contemporary shamanism / Daniel Pinchbeck. Edition 1st ed. Published/Created New York : Broadway Books, 2002. Description 322 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 0767907426 Links Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bios/random055/2003266652.html Sample text http://www.loc.gov/catdir/samples/random051/2003266652.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/random0413/2003266652.html CALL NUMBER BF1621 .P56 2002 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• How Soon is Now?: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation - 2017 Watkins, London, United Kingdom
• A Psychonaut's Guide to the Invisible Landscape: The Topography of the Psychedelic Experience - 2006 Park Street Press, Rochester, Vermont
• 2012: The Year of the Mayan Prophecy - 2006 Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin, New York, NY
• Burning Man: Art in the Desert - 2007 Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY

• Rolling Stone - http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/daniel-pinchbeck-on-ecological-disaster-and-how-to-fix-it-w478413

  Daniel Pinchbeck on How to Save Earth from Ecological Disaster
  "If we don't address what we're doing with energy...we're probably not going to be here in this present form for much longer," says author
  By Lilly Dancyger
  April 24, 2017
  Daniel Pinchbeck
  "I do think there's hope in the possibility of rapid self-organizing through the Internet,"says Daniel Pinchbeck. Courtesy of Watkins Publishing
  Fifteen years ago, author and journalist Daniel Pinchbeck gave us one of the defining texts of cultural psychedelics use – Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism – in which he traced his own experiences with ayahuasca and iboga, and made a strong case for deeper and higher levels of human consciousness. Now Pinchbeck is back to implore humanity to wake up and realize how close we are to making this planet uninhabitable, and the fact that reform is still within reach.

  RELATED

  What Psychedelics Really Do to Your Brain
  Inside how ayahuasca, MDMA, DMT and psilocybin mushrooms affect the body – and how researchers are using them to help people with mental illness
  In How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation, Pinchbeck outlines in painstaking detail exactly how the human race is careening toward extinction: we continue to pump CO2 into the air even though we know it’s heating up the ozone and melting ice caps; we clear forests that are full of trees that could potentially help clean that CO2 out of the air; we throw away plastic water bottles; and worst of all, we feed into the corporate systems that keep this destruction going. He also, thankfully, outlines plans and hopes, both lofty and practical, for what we could still do to save the planet, and ourselves – things as simple as ride-sharing and investing in solar energy, and as complex and exacting as rethinking our relationship to the planet we live on, down to a deep, spiritual level.

  Pinchbeck spoke with Rolling Stone to give us a little taste of the bracing wake-up call contained in his new book. Here, he explains how the Internet might save humanity, how science and religion could (and should) be allies and how he thinks Donald Trump's presidency might actually be a good thing, in the long run.

  In your book, you talk about a fundamental shift that needs to happen in people’s mentality. Can you give us a kind of overview of what that shift is?
  We are in an ecological emergency and the future existence of our species is in jeopardy. So, we're at a choice point as a species. We can either continue going on this way and we'll have a few more years, maybe a decade or two of being able to our thing. Then we're going to hit serious constraints in every area. Or we can try to wake up sooner and figure out what we do together to get out of this mess.

  For instance, we need to shift to renewable energies not in 50 or 70 or 100 years but much faster than that, in 15 to 20 years. We know we can do that physically. There's nothing that's stopping us from making that transition except that we have an entrenched financial system that is not oriented towards that kind of rapid change.

  We've seen in the past society is able to make rapid changes when they need to, when they faced a common foe, in a war for instance. During the second World War, after the Pearl Harbor attacks, the U.S. was able to redirect all of its factory production in three months, they started to tax the wealthiest of the population at more than 90 percent, and they used all of that resource to create a war machine and defeat a common foe. That's kind of where we're at now on a planetary scale. If we don't address what we're doing with energy, with farming, with industry, we're probably not going to be here in this present form for much longer.

  Do you think we have a chance of making this rapid change voluntarily, before we no longer have a choice, or do you see it being more of a reactionary thing, where the system falls apart and we have to find new ways to operate?
  The dynamics of system change are little bit mysterious. There are tipping points that can often be invisible or unexpected, that then lead to a collective shift or awakening. An example of that was the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. You go back to the Seventies and Eighties, and nobody was saying 'the wall is just going to be taken down by people and it will be done peacefully and there won't be military conflict.'

  I think a lot of people are beginning to understand, for instance, that the financial system is rigged against them. In fact, there is something deeply wrong with the political system that is only able to put forward very compromised, very deficient, very corrupt leaders. If you then do the thinking about it, you recognize that we're not going to be able to reform our way out of this. It's going to require some type of deeper system change.

  So, yes, at the moment the cultural infrastructure or the civil society movements that would be necessary to make that change doesn't really exist, so it seems like there is a huge gap between what really has to happen and what seems conceivable at this point.

  I do think there's hope in the possibility of rapid self-organizing through the Internet. At the moment 1.5 billion people are connected on Facebook, which didn't even exist 13 years ago. So, a tool like Facebook or Google could potentially be used to awaken people to what's happening to the planet, why it's so urgent that we come together as a human family to address this crisis. And also, what people could do in their areas from conserving resources and ride sharing, car sharing, sharing tools, working with alternative forms of money and other ways to exchange value, downscaling, stuff like that. It could be that the internet could be a highly efficient machine that could be used to help us make all these changes.

  Plus, there are a lot of young intelligent people who have now made fortunes, and some of them could become really like guides and stewards for this new planetary culture, and recognize it's not going to matter how many billions you have if the biosphere isn't functioning. If the temperature spikes and the plankton stop producing oxygen we're all going asphyxiate here.

  Daniel Pinchbeck on 'Ecological Emergency' and How to Fix It
  One thing you advocated for is a return to spirituality. Science and religion have become politicized opposites, but you talk about seeing them as going hand in hand. Can you talk about that a little bit?
  If we are going to make the shifts in the time that we have, it's going to require surprising new alliances, breaking out of conventional mindsets around the prejudices that scientists have about religion and so on.

  Potentially, the religious systems and structures that we have could be creatively used or repurposed for to help with this ecological crisis. Pope Francis wrote this book, On Care for Our Common Home, where he looks at all the Catholic doctrine that supports our shared responsibility for the earth – particularly those who have wealth and resources – to take care of the poor, to take care of the planet, take care of nature. And you know, that could be made into something that could be doctrinal for the billions of people who are Catholics.

  It's interesting that you bring up alliances, because that would clearly be wonderful, but it also feels like we’re getting more and more polarized. You obviously started writing this book before the presidential election – has the current political climate impacted your thinking at all?
  Honestly, it hasn't really changed my thinking very much, except that I think that it's an accelerator. It's accelerating a lot of people waking up to realize that something is profoundly wrong with our society that it could allow this to happen. It's also potentially accelerating a breakdown that's probably necessary. For instance, if we had another crash of the financial system like 2008, maybe even a worse one, I know that would be very hard for many people and many people would suffer, which is terrible, but on the one hand, they would slow down the speed of industrialization and economic growth, which would also be good for the planet.

  It might be a threshold that would force people to think about what we're doing. In a sense, what we really need is a sort of timeout for humanity. We need people to wake up and be like, alright, we're in the inertia of all these systems, and we have this idea that money and progress are the goals and so on, but how do we really know that? How do we go forward from here considering everything we know and what's happening ecologically? And then we need to redirect, redesign, reinvent, you know, move in a different direction. So, I don't know what's going to bring that about, but I actually do feel that Trump and his repercussions is much more likely to bring that about than a continuation of neoliberalism.

  A lot of this is pretty theoretical, so if someone is reading this and feeling fired up and wants to make some small changes in their lives today to make a difference, what is the one thing you would advise them to do?
  One easy thing that people could do is to become as vegetarian as possible or totally vegetarian. Because we do know that meat eating has a very negative impact on many levels in terms of what it's doing in terms of deforestation, CO2 emissions, and so on. So that's a good one.

  But beyond that, it's really understanding comprehensively where we're at, which requires breaking through distraction haze and actually doing some intellectual work. And it’s going to require building community. Like people are going to have to come together in groups, whether in town halls or small groups and admit there's a problem and then work together to make changes. For some people that might be creating off-the-grid communities. For other people, it might be using social technologies to create boycotts and pressure corporations and so on. You know, a lot of stuff is happening already.

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Daniel-Pinchbeck/e/B001IXQ94E

  I grew up in the New York counterculture of the 1970s and '80s. My father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract painter, and my mother, Joyce Johnson, is a writer who participated in the Beat Generation. She was dating Jack Kerouac when On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957 (chronicled in her book, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir). As a journalist, I have written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, etcetera. I am currently the editorial director of the Evolver Project (www.evolver.net).

  In my late twenties, I fell into a deep spiritual crisis that led me to the study of shamanism and psychedelic susbtances. My first book, Breaking Open the Head, recounted my initiation into several tribal cultures that use hallucinogens in their rituals. Over time, I became convinced of the legitimacy of the shamanic and mystical worldview held by indigenous peoples around the world. This led me to my most recent book, 2012, a study of prophecy.

• Daniel Pinchbeck Home Page - http://www.pinchbeck.io/about/

  ABOUT DANIEL

  I am the author of Breaking Open the Head (Broadway Books, 2002), 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), and Notes from the Edge Times (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010). My new book, How Soon Is Now, comes out in Februrary, 2017. Featuring a preface from Sting and an introduction from Russell Brand, How Soon Is Now? looks at the ecological crisis as a rite of passage or initiation for humanity and proposes a "blueprint for the future" - how we must redesign our technical and social systems to avert the worst consequences of ecological collapse.

  According to author John Perkins, "Daniel Pinchbeck’s life is the hero’s journey. Like Homer’s Odyssey, How Soon Is Now is a song of redemption for a world torn apart by the monsters of our own creation. We’ve dreamed a world that is consuming itself into extinction. Pinchbeck offers us a new dream and in doing so takes us on a powerful, magical voyage into balance and sanity." Please join the HyLo forum to discuss the ideas presented in this book, and take action around them.

  I was executive director of the think tank, Center for Planetary Culture, which produced the Regenerative Society Wiki. My essays and articles have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, ArtForum, The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice and many other publications. I have written columns for Conscious Living and Dazed & Confused.

  My life and work were featured in the 2010 documentary, 2012: Time for Change, directed by Joao Amorim and produced by Mangusta Films. Amorim and I also produced a series of short animated films, PostModernTimes.

  In 2007, I launched the web magazine Reality Sandwich and co-founded Evolver.net with Ken Jordan, Michael Robinson, and Talat Phillips. Evolver includes Evolver Learning Labs, our webinar platform, and The Alchemist's Kitchen, a retail and event space in downtown Manhattan. I edited the publishing imprint, Evolver Editions, with North Atlantic Books, publishing Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics and Jose Arguelles' Manifesto for the Noosphere, among other books.

  I have been a speaker at conferences around the world. These have included DazedFest in London, Horizons in New York, Breaking Convention in London, Distortion in Copenhagen, La Callaca TedX in San Miguel del Allende, the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, and Summit Series in Utah. I also give talks at many festivals, such as Burning Man, Boom in Portugal, Ozora in Hungary, Rainbow Serpent in Australia, and Lightning in a Bottle in California. I have been interviewed by The Colbert Report, Coast to Coast AM, The History Channel, Whitley Strieber’s Unknown Country, BrandX with Russell Brand, Interview Magazine, Purple, and many other places.

  I have written introductions for books including The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts, and Rainforest Medicine by Jonathan Miller Weisberger and Kathy Glass. I have written catalogs for art exhibitions including a show of Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.

  I hosted a talk show, Mind Shift, on GaiamTV, exploring the evolution of technology and spirituality, and our potential for the future. I have co-hosted retreats to Costa Rica, with the Secoya, tribal people from the Amazon in Ecuador, and Colombia, with the Kogi and Aruak people. Please email me or join the mailing list for information on this, and other events.

  Interview in Ever Manifesto

  The Bigger Picture: Daniel Pinchbeck

  by Xerxes Cook

  An American philosopher and author who believes the economic systems humanity has created have the potential to act as remedies to the environmental chaos our planet is witnessing today, here, Daniel Pinchbeck discusses ideas of corporate alchemy and whether the ecological crisis is an initiatory process that will lead to the next stage of human evolution.
  It’s been seven years since you wrote 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, in which you concluded that the end of the Mayan calendar would mark a period of transition from “ego-based materialism, alienation and individuation” towards the next stage of human evolution which recognises the inter-connected nature of life… Please could you tell us how these ideas have developed in the book you are working on now?

  In my new book Metamorphosis: A New Operating System for Human Society, I am thinking about the process of how we move from our current civilization, based on hierarchy and ecological decimation, to a new social operating system based on mutual aid, with an integrated world view. One of the big inspirations is Buckminster Fuller’s work. In Utopia or Oblivion, Fuller argued that humanity has a choice: either we construct a situation where we maximize our efficient use of resources, and redesign our socio-technical industrial systems to support and educate everybody to become comprehensively successful as a species. Or we will fail together and annihilate ourselves. And I think if we look at what’s happening with the ecological crisis, Fuller’s ideas make sense. My view is that the ecological crisis is potentially an initiatory process for humanity, that’s going to force us to awake to our inherent solidarity as a species, and shift from our sense of separate identities to being aware of ourselves as constituting a planetary super organism that is in a symbiotic relationship with the planetary ecology as a whole.

  My question is, can you do alchemy on the Corporations to turn them from poisons into medicines?

  If cash rules everything around us, how can we redesign the financial systems we’ve created?

  Corporate alchemy. It is this idea drawn from the alchemical principle that poisons can be medicines if taken at the right dose, and that the more powerful a poison is, the stronger a medicine it might be. So if corporations at the moment are extremely disruptive and often have a negative impact on the planet, it is because they are so powerful, because they are such incredible machines for taking ideas, energy and information and manifesting them. So my question is, can you do alchemy on the corporations to turn them from poisons into medicines?

  My view is that the ecological crisis is potentially an initiatory process for humanity, that’s going to force us to awake to our inherent solidarity as a species, and shift from our sense of separate identities to being aware of ourselves as constituting a planetary super organism that is in a symbiotic relationship with the planetary ecology as a whole.

  So it’s not the fault of corporations, but that they have been geared towards operating in a system which rewards the maximum return of profits above all else?

  Exactly. That’s the problem — as much as we see efforts from corporations to become more sustainable and more mindful, if they’re publicly traded, they’re still locked into the system where they ultimately have to maximise shareholder value. We can look at the corporation as an artificial life form, that we have constructed out of legal code, ideas, brand logos and so on; and we have injected that artificial life form into a game, the stock market.
  And the problem with the game of the stock market is that it has only one way to win, which is to maximize pure monetary profit for shareholders. Ultimately we require a fundamental restructuring of the financial system to launch a regenerative planetary culture.

  Can we consider the emergence of the sharing economy as capitalism at its finest — a group of people exercising their free will to do what they think is best for them, which is to collectively share their resources?

  I think, with the sharing economy you’re seeing the beginning of this transformation, where you can utilize the tools of the system we’ve constructed and build a new system from within it, that rewards different behavior patterns and values. The trend away from ownership is a big piece of that.

  What does conscious consumerism mean to you — is self-sacrifice inherent to conscious consumerism?

  I believe that people must understand that we’re in a planetary emergency, and there is an alternative — it’s just a fairly radical one. They’re going to want to commit themselves to bringing about the level of transformation that’s necessary. In the interim, we can think about things like conscious consumerism. Ultimately, we can transition to Cradle to Cradle practices, redesigning the industrial manufacturing system so that everything we make is powered by renewables, and feeds back productively and beneficially to the ecosystem. If we reach that point, everybody could consume all they want.

  Can we consider businesses to be natural creations of Gaia — the idea that all living and non-living components on Earth work together to promote life?

  If we take this idea that humanity constitutes a planetary super-organism in a symbiotic relationship with the whole Earth as a system, then we can consider this organism to have a body, and ask, what are the organs of that body? If you think about it, the organs of that body are corporations. For instance, energy companies are like the blood, sanitation companies are the liver and kidneys, the media companies are like the perceptual mechanisms and cognitive functions and so on.

  If Walmart became cooperatively owned by its workers and stakeholders, grew organic food on its rooftop gardens, developed on-site manufacturing using non-destructive materials powered by renewable energy, offered continuing education and childcare for all of its workers, I might buy stock.

  GAIA THEORY
  Much of Daniel Pinchbeck’s philosophy of the ecological crisis being an initiatory process for humanity — a rite of passage we must endure in order to “awaken our inherent solidarity as a species” — is based on James Lovelock and Lynn Margolis’ Gaia hypothesis. First posited in the late 1960s, the theory proposes that living organisms and their inorganic surroundings have evolved together as a single living system that greatly affects the chemistry and conditions of the Earth’s surface, ranging from global temperature and atmospheric content to ocean salinity, in a quasi-automatic, self-regulating manner as if the Earth were a living organism itself. gaiatheory.org
  Now if you look at the process of evolution, it goes through stages; immature ecosystems are characterized by aggression and competition. But as ecosystems mature, they are much more marked by symbiosis, cooperation and mutual aid. An example of this is our own bodies, which are made of trillions and trillions of cells and micro-organisms, that were once competing for resources, that somehow through a series of crises figured out how to work together and create organs, blood, bones and so on, and weave themselves into a body to enhance their own potential for success.

  But obviously, to get from competition to cooperation will require a fundamental redesign of our economic system. And I think that’s going to be necessary at some point. In the near term, if we look at a process that’s been going on for quite a while now, there’s a counterculture which constructs narratives, images, means of revolution, transformation, sexual liberation, magic and so on. The energy of the counterculture often gets co-opted, corrupted, and used by the corporate system to sell stuff. In the future I believe we will see a creative synthesis, where the counterculture that seeks human liberation melds with the corporate infrastructure to bring about a transformation of our world from within.

  In the future I believe we will see a creative synthesis, where the counterculture that seeks human liberation melds with the corporate infrastructure to bring about a transformation of our world from within.

  So is it a situation where to be simply against something is not useful — that you need to be able to state your desired alternative?

  Rather than boycotting companies you disagree with, to work in collaboration with them to show the ways forward? We have to think in terms of transitional strategies and ultimate goals. I think that corporations are going to be hamstrung, if they are publicly traded, by the need to increase shareholder value. Still, in the interim, if a Coke or a Walmart transitions to a certain level of sustainability, it has a big impact on the planet. Down the line, if Walmart became cooperatively owned by its workers and stakeholders, grew organic food on its rooftop gardens, developed on-site manufacturing using non-destructive materials powered by renewable energy, offered continuing education and childcare for all of its workers, I might buy stock.
  Writing on Daniel

  Interview in Ever Manifesto, 2014
  Waiting for Something Big, The New York Times, 2010
  The End Is Near! Now the Good News: It Could Be Groovy, The New York Times, Feb 2009
  The Final Days, The New York Times, 2007
  The End is High, The New York Times, 2006
  BAD SEEDS, Artforum, 2009
  Evolutionary Operating Instructions, Metroland, 2009
  The Naked Self Unseen: Daniel Pinchbeck & the Politics of Psychic Evolution, Fifth Estate, 2007
  Apocalypse’s Eternal Return, Reason, 2006
  Holy Smoke, The Guardian, 2003
  Author’s mind-bending trip transformative, Vancouver Courier, 2003
  Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, The Booklist, 2002
  Shamanic Verses, Artforum, 2002
  BREAKING OPEN THE HEAD: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, Kirkus Reviews, 2002

• Daniel Pinchbeck Home Page - http://www.pinchbeck.io/consult/

  CONSULT

  Daniel Pinchbeck offers private consultations with individuals and organizations. Please email him - - for rates and other details.

  Daniel also collaborates with futurist Schuyler Brown and their team, Evo Leap, creating innovation summits for corporations, organizations, and municipalities seeking to explore new pathways toward building a regenerative society. Schuyler and Daniel recently co-wrote an essay, The World in a State of Extreme Transition, explaining their concept of a "regenerative culture."

  Evo Leap recently organized a 3-day summit at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, working with a number of Facebook executives and representatives of many NGOS including Sierra Club, 350.org, The Solutions Project, World Wildlife Fund, and Rainforest Action Network. The goal of this meeting was to explore ways to unify the climate movement, and how Facebook might assist in that process. Out of it, a new project emerged, seeking to develop a communications strategy for the climate movement as a whole, and exploring ways that Facebook data could be used by environmental NGOs. Please email Daniel for further information on this initiative.

  Daniel currently consults with Nomade Tulum, a hotel in Mexico which is developing the Personal to Planetary Initiation Program, a series of retreats and workshops that connect the individual's process of self-development to the larger social and ecological crises we face as a species. He is also consulting with Puertas, a project to build an ecologically resilient community in Tulum, working with the architect Bjarke Ingels. He is also an advisor to HyLo, a new social network, and TimeRepublik, a time-bank platform.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pinchbeck

  Daniel Pinchbeck
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  This article is about the writer. For the game designer, see The Chinese Room.
  Daniel Pinchbeck
  Born 15 June 1966 (age 51)
  Occupation Author, Journalist
  Nationality American
  Subject Entheogens, Mayanism, New-age philosophy, ecology, technology
  Notable works Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
  2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
  Relatives Joyce Johnson (mother)
  Peter Pinchbeck (father)
  Website
  www.pinchbeck.io
  Daniel Pinchbeck (born 15 June 1966) is an American author living in New York's East Village. He is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway Books, 2002), 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), and Notes from the Edge Times (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010). He is a co-founder of the web magazine, Reality Sandwich, and Evolver.net, and edited the publishing imprint, Evolver Editions, with North Atlantic Books. 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. His new book How Soon Is Now?[1] was published in February 2017 by Watkins Press.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Family and background
  2 Works and activities
  3 Appearances and interviews
  4 Books and publications
  5 References
  6 External links
  Family and background[edit]
  Pinchbeck has deep personal roots in the New York counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. His father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract painter, and his mother, the writer Joyce Johnson, was a member of the Beat Generation and dated Jack Kerouac as On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957 (chronicled in Johnson's bestselling book, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir).[2] His family history is traced back to Christopher Pinchbeck, a London clockmaker who invented the family's eponymous alloy, a cheap substitute for gold.

  Works and activities[edit]
  Pinchbeck was a founder of the 1990s literary magazine Open City with fellow writers Thomas Beller and Robert Bingham. He has written for many publications, including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine,[3] The Village Voice,[4] and Rolling Stone. In 1994 he was chosen by The New York Times Magazine as one of "Thirty Under Thirty" destined to change our culture through his work with Open City.[5] He has been a regular columnist for a number of magazines, including Dazed & Confused.

  In Breaking Open the Head, Pinchbeck explored shamanism via ceremonies with tribal groups such as the Bwiti of Gabon, who eat iboga, and the Secoya people in the Ecuadorean Amazon, who take the psychedelic tryptamine brew ayahuasca in their ceremonies.[6] He also attended the Burning Man festival in Nevada,[7] and looked at use of psychedelic substances in a de-sacralized modern context. Philosophically influenced by the work of anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner,[8][9] through his direct experience and research Pinchbeck developed the hypothesis that shamanic and mystical views of reality have validity, and that the modern world had forfeited an understanding of intuitive aspects of being in its pursuit of rational materialism.

  Drawing heavily, and somewhat controversially, from material shared on the Breaking Open the Head forums, Pinchbeck's second volume, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, chronicles Mayan and Hopi prophecies,[10] and follows Pinchbeck's travels and travails as he responds to leads, both physical and intellectual, he receives via this forum. Examining the nature of prophecy, Pinchbeck investigates the New Age hypothesis of Terence McKenna that humanity is experiencing an accelerated process of global consciousness transformation, leading to a new understanding of time and space during this period. The book details the psi or extra-sensory perception research of Dean Radin, the theories of Terence McKenna, the phenomena of crop circles, and a visit to calendar reform advocate José Argüelles. Pinchbeck concludes with an account of receiving a transmission of prophetic material by the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl,.[10] This claim was enough to get the book dropped by its planned publisher, delaying its release for the greater part of a year. While acknowledging the validity of such an experience is unknown, Pinchbeck describes how a voice identifying itself as Quetzalcoatl began speaking to him during a 2004 trip to the Amazon in Brazil. At the time, he was in the Amazon, participating in ceremonies of the Santo Daime, a Brazilian religion that uses ayahuasca as its sacrament. Through its references to 2012 and the Maya calendar in the context of New Age beliefs, Pinchbeck's book has contributed to Mayanism.

  In May 2007, Pinchbeck launched Reality Sandwich. He is the executive producer of Postmodern Times, a series of web videos presented on the iClips Network, and co-founder of Evolver.net, an online social network.[11][12] His life and work are featured in the documentary 2012: Time for Change, featuring interviews with Sting, David Lynch, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and others.

  In August 2013, Pinchbeck became the host of Mind Shift, a new talk show, filmed in New York City, produced by Gaiam TV.

  In February 2017, Watkins Press published his new book, How Soon Is Now? [1] in the US and UK. The book's thesis is that the ecological crisis is a rite of passage or initiation for humanity collectively, forcing us to reach the next level of our consciousness as a species. The book outlines the changes to our technical infrastructure - agriculture, energy, industry - and our social, political, and economic system that Pinchbeck deems necessary to avoid the worst consequences of global warming, species extinction, and so on.

  Appearances and interviews[edit]
  On 14 December 2006, Pinchbeck appeared on the television program The Colbert Report to discuss his book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.[13]

  Pinchbeck was featured in the 2006 video Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, a documentary about rediscovering an enchanted cosmos in the modern world.[14]

  Pinchbeck was also featured in the 2008 video 2012: Science or Superstition, a documentary describing how much of what we are hearing is science and how much is superstition.[15]

  He interviewed Alejandro Jodorowsky for the German/French art television network Arte in a very personal discussion, spending a night together in France, continuing the interview in different locations like in a park and in a hotel.[16]

  Pinchbeck appears in the documentary film 2012: Time for Change, directed by João G. Amorim, which was released in October 2010.[17] He also appeared in the documentary film Electronic Awakening, directed by AC Johner, released in 2011.[18]

  Pinchbeck appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, recorded on 8 September 2011.[19]

  Books and publications[edit]
  Pinchbeck, Daniel (2002). Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (1st ed.). New York: Broadway Books. ISBN 978-0-767-90742-2.
  —— (2002). Jeff Koons Andy Warhol: Flowers. Essay by Daniel Pinchbeck. New York: Gagosian Gallery. ISBN 978-1-880-15485-4.
  —— (2006). 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. ISBN 978-1-585-42592-1.
  Pinchbeck, Daniel; Jordan, Ken, eds. (2009). Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. ISBN 978-1-585-42700-0.
  —— (2010). Notes from the Edge Times. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin. ISBN 978-1-585-42837-3.

• Interview Magazine Online - https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/daniel-pinchbeck

  QUOTE:
  Pinchbeck is an oft-quoted authority on all things 21st-century-radical, from free love and urban homesteading to the use of psychedelics (of which he is an outspoken advocate). But Pinchbeck’s relationship with the counterculture is more than just spiritual: His father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract expressionist painter; and his mother, Joyce Johnson, authored a memoir about the women of the Beat Generation titled Minor Characters.
  I had a really good friend die of a heroin overdose . . . I got really depressed and felt increasingly alienated and just went on this inner search. I began to ask myself what would constitute proof that there wasn’t any other dimension to being, and that led me to remember my psychedelic experiences in college.

  DANIEL PINCHBECK
  By Stephen Mooallem
  Photography Herwig Maurer

  Published May 22, 2009

  It’s an exciting time to be a doomsayer. The environment is ravaged, the world economy has collapsed, and every passing day seems to spin us toward a great, dark inevitable. Of course, we’ve seen this movie before (many times, in fact)—and here we are, still around to act it out again. But it does explain the recent resurgence of some of the doomsaying classics, including a grim forecast that dates back to theancient Mayan civilizations of Mesoamerica:the 2012 prediction.

  The Mayans viewed time and history in terms of cycles, and according to their most expansive measuring stick, the Long Count calendar, the current cycle ends on December 21, 2012, with what is believed to be a particular alignment of the Earth, the sun, and the center of the Milky Way. (Many astronomers dispute this.) The Mayans didn’t elaborate except to say that the date would represent the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, which has resulted in theories about the date as a sort of fulcrum in the process of human evolution to others foreseeing all-out extinction.

  It’s difficult to find a commentary on the 2012 phenomenon that doesn’t have some connection to Daniel Pinchbeck. The author of two books and numerous articles on the subject, Pinchbeck is an oft-quoted authority on all things 21st-century-radical, from free love and urban homesteading to the use of psychedelics (of which he is an outspoken advocate). But Pinchbeck’s relationship with the counterculture is more than just spiritual: His father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract expressionist painter; and his mother, Joyce Johnson, authored a memoir about the women of the Beat Generation titled Minor Characters.

  Growing up in New York City, Pinchbeck wanted to become a poet or a novelist. After dropping out of university at Wesleyan in Connecticut, he moved back to Manhattan, where he began working as a writer and founded the literary journal Open City with Thomas Beller and Robert Bingham. For a while, everything was going according to plan. But it all began to unravel one day in late 1999 when Bingham was found dead of a heroin overdose. Something began to change in Pinchbeck. He quit Open City and began a long—and, he says, very hermetic—process of retreating from the life he once sought so desperately to live.

  On a trip to Africa prior to Bingham’s death, Pinchbeck had taken iboga—a root bark with hallucinatory properties. After that, his interest in psychedelics deepened beyond the LSD and mushrooms he had taken recreationally in college. He began to travel the world, experimenting with trip-inducing substances like ayahuasca (what the Beats called yagé), and immersing himself in the ancient tribal cultures that surrounded them—an experience he chronicled in his first book, Breaking Open the Head—which led to his interest in 2012.

  The popular view of the 2012 prediction—that the end of the world is nigh—has spawned a cult cottage industry and even a big-budget feature film directed by Roland Emmerich, 2012, which is due out later this year. (The film’s tagline: “How would the governments of our planet prepare six billion people for the end of the world? They wouldn’t.”) But it is another interpretation—that the date represents aninitiation of sorts for humanity which is directly linked to our mistreatment of the environment and the current economic implosion—that interests Pinchbeck, even if it does include some of the fire and brimstone.

  Pinchbeck recently co-edited an anthology titled Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age, with Ken Jordan, composed of essays culled from their website, Reality Sandwich. He also authored another book on the subject, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and is involved in an upcoming documentary on 2012 directed by João Amorim.

  On a recent Monday, in the café of a Jivamukti yoga studio, the 42-year-old Pinchbeck calmly explained why life—at least as we know it—is about to end.

  STEPHEN MOOALLEM: You come from a family that has strong roots in the postwar counterculture. How did you feel about that growing up?

  DANIEL PINCHBECK: I grew up in a very artistic, cultured home, but without any kind of spirituality. My parents were secular materialists, so I saw art as having this alternate value. I always wanted to be a poet or a novelist, so I definitely associated with countercultural ideas. Allen Ginsberg was somebody I knew a bit when I was young—I really had a lot of respect for him.MOOALLEM: So you were living in New York and you were getting published; you started a literary journal . . .

  PINCHBECK: When it came time to make a living, I worked in magazines, but ultimately I hit this kind of spiritual crisis . . . It was in the late ’90s. I was like 31 or 32, and I wasn’t doing terribly, in financial terms. I had written a piece for Esquire about the decline of sperm counts due to things like estrogen-mimicking hormones in chemicals. After doing that story, I really wanted to write more about those kinds of subjects, but I found it almost impossible to get those kinds of messages out into the mainstream media. So I just began to feel that the things that were most important to talk about were blocked off. I even began to feel that contemporary literature and art were these amazing distraction mechanisms, that they didn’t really deal with any kind of spiritual dimension of the human existence or even the dangers we were facing as a species. Then I had a really good friend die of a heroin overdose . . . I got really depressed and felt increasingly alienated and just went on this inner search. I began to ask myself what would constitute proof that there wasn’t any other dimension to being, and that led me to remember my psychedelic experiences in college.

  MOOALLEM: What was it like for you, having worked in the Manhattan media world and then sort of going off in this other direction?

  PINCHBECK: In many respects it was brutally difficult. For a while, I felt very lonely. But then I began to find new playmates and friends who shared my interests. It was some kind of initiatory death-and-rebirth process in terms of my New York life and my priorities. I had gone to West Africa where I went through this tribal initiation, taking iboga . . . After that, there was no looking back because the experience was so incredibly fascinating, the insights and the visions and the shaman . . . This whole subject area had a magnetic attraction.

  MOOALLEM: So how did you come around to this 2012 stuff? For the uninitiated—no pun intended—can you briefly explain what is supposed to happen?

  PINCHBECK: The interest in 2012 has to do with the Classic Mayan civilizations that developed in the Yucatán. Before they mysteriously vanished, it seems they spent hundreds of years trying to establish a knowledge system around time and astronomical cycles, and they arrived at this December 21, 2012 date as the end of their Long Count calendar, which is a 5,125-year cycle. Now, different people have different ideas about what this date means. Some people believe it represents a kind of changeover, like an odometer clicking back to zero. But there’s also thought that the Mayans saw it as the end of a world cycle. What’s thought to be happening astronomically is an alignment on the winter solstice where the sun rises in the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way. Again, there are different ideas that people have about this—that maybe, on a galactic level, we’ll cross the plane of the equator and there will be forces that switch polarity, so maybe we’ll move from biological and physical life to a more psychic phase of evolution. There’s a Russian scientist, Alexey Dmitriev, who has been looking at changes in the solar system . . . The entire galaxy might be transitioning into a higher energy state—I mean, NASA talks about the heliosphere, the energy changing. The earth’s electromagnetic field is changing. So there seems to be a lot of physical evidence that might correlate to some kind of profound shift in the earthly planetary reality . . .

  MOOALLEM: So what do you believe is going to happen on December 21, 2012?

  PINCHBECK: I don’t pretend to know what’s going to happen. I mean, at the moment, our civilization is very unsustainable. We’re quickly reaching the end of our resources. There’s a species-extinction crisis. Climate change is accelerating. By many accounts, we’ve hit peak oil. We’ve had this huge financial meltdown. So I guess one way I’ve seen it is as a window of opportunity for us to change the direction of planetary civilization . . . If we don’t do that, then we may end up in a situation that’s kind of like The Road Warrior [1981] . . . without the fun.

  MOOALLEM: So do you envision a Noah’s Ark–type situation, where a select few make it through to the other side?

  PINCHBECK: Well, again, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but my hope is that everybody comes through this experience safe and happy. It seems almost like an initiation process for the human species. If you look at shamanic initiation, it’s a kind of death-and-rebirth process where people can, in visionary states, go through the experiences of those things and then reintegrate when they’ve gotten over their fears because they recognize that there are other dimensions to being, that the soul goes further along even when the body is not here. So I think that the more people go through their own personal initiations, the less collective destruction may be unleashed on the planet.

  MOOALLEM: And this is where the idea of taking psychedelics comes in . . .

  PINCHBECK: Yeah, pretty much. Obviously, psychedelics were viewed as a big catalyst in the 1960s, but then they were not only suppressed legally but also repressed culturally, including through ridicule and dismissal. But I think that the psychedelic experience has a lot of value in the transformation process. If you take ayahuasca or mushrooms, it’s almost like you get this plant’s-eye view of reality. You see parts of our social system that we think are natural but are actually very artificial and could potentially be re-created in totally different ways.

  MOOALLEM: But one of the lessons of the ’60s was that while psychedelics can open doors, it depends which doors they open, because what’s behind them all is not necessarily good . . .

  PINCHBECK: Well, people explored psychedelics in the ’60s, but they had no really good map or model for how to use them, and so many people experienced things like ego loss and anxiety. But a lot has been learned since then.

  I think that doing psychedelics shamanically is very different from just doing them randomly—it has an intention and a ceremony around it where you’re bringing people together to heal and to look for visionary knowledge.

  MOOALLEM: In Toward 2012, you propose that in the current state of the world, “we might be looking at situations in which unappeased demons and aggrieved ancestor spirits are overtaking people, entering their psyches in states of detachment and disconnection,” and that we might need to employ “shamanic techniques such as soul retrieval and banishment” to deal with them. Are you saying that what’s going on right now with the environment or the economy might be a case of unattended-to spirits exacting a kind of revenge on humanity?

  PINCHBECK: Well, shamanism is a kind of universal spiritual practice with indigenous cultures around the world, and one important element of it is taking care of spirits. You could use the words energies or archetypes, but I feel comfortable using the word spirits. A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don’t deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we’ve denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways. A lot of our behavior, which is so unconscious, may in a way be due to energies or entities that we haven’t somehow put to rest properly.MOOALLEM: I think one of the things about this 2012 moment that’s difficult for people to reconcile is that it’s so, well, soon.

  PINCHBECK: First of all, I’m not a fundamentalist about the date. I think it might have more to do with us entering a period where we arrive at a different social paradigm or understanding of the nature of psychic reality. However, having said that, I have had a number of bizarre, almost synchronistic, experiences around that 2012 date, which indicates to me that it might be something more legitimate, like maybe we’ll be transitioning from a biological phase in evolution to a psychic phase of evolution, and maybe that date is like the hinge point where that suddenly takes off. There’s a lot of different material out there where people talk about mass congenial or spiritual awakenings happening as we approach that time—none of which I take seriously on its own, but, together, it’s almost like data that’s coming through the collective unconscious . . . I totally think we have a future on the planet. I just think that we have to get away from Western thinking, which is very much founded on dualisms.

  MOOALLEM: So if there is a future, what does it look like? Is what we’re talking about here a sort of retreat from modernity? Does the future look like the past?

  PINCHBECK: Now that question might involve taking seriously the ideas of someone like Buckminster Fuller, who was a design scientist. He created the geodesic dome and all of these other great patents, but he basically had this idea that you could look at all of society’s problems as design flaws, and that you could eliminate those flaws by redesigning society. Or it could involve looking at someone like Bernard Lietaer, the Belgian currency specialist who was one of the architects of the Euro. He suggested that you could have a global trading currency that would actually have a negative interest or a demurrage charge, so that the longer you held on to it, the more value it would lose. Then, instead of wanting to hoard it, you would want to share it and get it back into circulation, which might lead to more community-based values. And then the evolution of technology has had a profound effect on what it means to be a person. The fact that we’re all so constantly connected is a new thing, but it’s also an old thing, because tribes were like that, so now we’ve kind of created a new techno-tribalism on a global scale. And then I’m also interested in UFOs, extraterrestrials, and crop circles. If those things have legitimacy, then it means that there are levels of technology far beyond what we have now. You know, if UFOs are coming across the galaxy to get here, then they’re not burning coal to do it . . .

  MOOALLEM: There’s this Roland Emmerich film, 2012, coming out. Were you involved with that?

  PINCHBECK: Not really. But I’ve seen the preview.

  MOOALLEM: How do you feel about those sorts of Armageddon-like interpretations?

  PINCHBECK: I think they’re totally natural, and it reveals where most people are in their thinking. In a way, it’s almost easier to hallucinate Armageddon or apocalypse because then it’s like, “Oh, everybody is going to die anyway, so I don’t have to change anything.” Whereas if you can say goodbye to your old self and come out with a new self, then you can change everything. Maybe. I don’t know . . . Maybe I’m wrong.

  MOOALLEM: I mean, this is a well-traveled road we’re standing on—one that people like Albert Hofmann and Timothy Leary and Terence Mc-Kenna all went down.

  PINCHBECK: Well, individuals who are really inspirational are always what changes history. Gandhi had a bunch of good ideas, and he led a nonâ??violent revolution that transformed India. And so maybe what’s really radical now is not being ironic and not being distracted and not assuming that everything is a bunch of bullshit . . . So, you know, I have no idea whether it’s possible to be part of a process of global transformation, but I am amazed at how much I’ve been able to accomplish, and how much fun it’s getting to be.

  MOOALLEM: Fun? What’s the most fun part for you?

  PINCHBECK: I think it’s fun to change people’s ideas. It’s a process where at first there’s all this resistance and dismissiveness. But then, over time, I see people change and often their ideas tend to align more with mine. And then the parties get better . . . [laughs] But it’s always fun to be vindicated. You know, I suggested in 2006 [in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl] that we might experience an economic meltdown in 2008 . . .

  MOOALLEM: Was that about mystical vision? Or correctly reading the credit markets?

  PINCHBECK: It was a combination. I was inspired by some interpretations of the Mayan calendar and I was also studying a lot about peak oil and the financial system and the case against the global economy. We have a totally unsustainable system built on massive amounts of debt . . .

  MOOALLEM: So what are you doing on December 21, 2012? Do you have any special plans?

  PINCHBECK: I have no idea. I mean, I would love to be maybe having tea with extraterrestrials. Friendly ones.

  Photo above: Daniel Pinchbeck in Los Angeles, March 2008. Photo: Herwig Maurer.

  Stephen Mooallem is Interview’s executive editor.

  Read more about 2012 at Daniel Pinchbeck’s blog.

QUOTE:
which would make him, in ordinary circumstances, no more than your typical psychedelic tourist.
But he's no enthusiast, no simple-minded convert to mind expansion. This is a man who sprinkles irony on his cereal every morning. That's what makes the book so interesting. He has taken real risks, gone to dangerous places; he brings a tough, critical intelligence to the psychedelic experience. The result is truly compelling.
The psychedelic tourist: New Yorker Daniel Pinchbeck has traveled the world on a quest for mind-altering experiences
Anthony Brandt
National Geographic Adventure. 4.8 (Oct. 2002): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 National Geographic Society
http://www.ngadventure.com
Listen
Full Text:
Breaking Open the Head By Daniel Pinchbeck (Broadway Books, $25)

Daniel Pinchbeck has been to the jungles of Gabon to eat iboga, the sacred psychedelic of the Bwiti culture. He has been to Amazonian Ecuador to drink ayahuasca with a shaman, has ingested mushrooms in Huautla in the Mexican highlands, has been several times to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, and has taken LSD under New York's George Washington Bridge. He has even concocted his own ayahuasca at home, on his stove. All of which would make him, in ordinary circumstances, no more than your typical psychedelic tourist.

But Pinchbeck is anything but typical. He's the son of Joyce Johnson, well-known for her affair with Jack Kerouac and for Minor Characters, a memoir of her time with the Beats, and Peter Pinchbeck, a New York artist who painted in the abstract-expressionist style. Daniel grew up in Manhattan in the hippest of atmospheres; he is a founder of the hip literary journal Open City; he's Mr. Cool--or could be, if that were his ambition.

Well, it's not. Pinchbeck is something more--he's a troubled man on a genuine quest, wandering beyond the desert of cool, of attitude, into unknown territory, not just in the jungles of Gabon but inside his own head and out there, really out there, in the world of the spirits. The man can think outside the categories. That's unusual. Tourists, by definition, don't do that. His book is unusual, too, an uneven affair that alternates between stock footage of the history of psychedelic drugs, brilliant descriptions of his own psychedelic voyaging, and solid reporting. He has done a great deal of research and knows the literature--which is extensive--quite well.

The book has its share of odd and interesting facts. The ones that stick with me are that DNA emits photons (living things, in other words, give off light); that certain scientists take drugs to gain insight into scientific problems they're facing; that William James tried peyote but wound up with only a stomachache. It's that kind of book, all over the lot, not well organized, but acutely insightful. Pinchbeck is smart enough to see the LSD tripping of the sixties for what it was: a bunch of spoiled suburban brats sitting in a kiddie pool, calling it the ocean. He has no patience with the large absurdities of U.S. drug policy and can be a little boring on the subject. But he's no enthusiast, no simple-minded convert to mind expansion. This is a man who sprinkles irony on his cereal every morning. That's what makes the book so interesting. He has taken real risks, gone to dangerous places; he brings a tough, critical intelligence to the psychedelic experience. The result is truly compelling.

Ninety Degrees North By Fergus Fleming (Grove Press, $26)

It's impossible not to like a book that begins with the speculations of John Symmes, a onetime U.S. Army officer who believed that there were, at both geographic Poles, large holes in the Earth that gave access to inner worlds, seven of them, layered like a cake with enough space in between and enough light shining in to support life. Symmes lectured to large audiences and was enormously popular. He died in 1829, his theories untested; nobody had yet been to either Pole. Nobody could tell him what forms of life inhabited his inner worlds. Norwegian ice trolls, perhaps.

Fergus Fleming doesn't tell us how far John Symmes's speculations went, but he makes it plain that a kind of lunacy attended the quest for the North Pole: expedition after expedition, for the most part badly equipped, wearing wool instead of fur; suffering scurvy, frostbite, starvation; drifting on the ice, which is in constant motion, two or three or four miles south for every mile or two they walked north. One after another they threw themselves at the ice, only to return (if they did return) as ghosts of themselves, forever damaged--and for what? They had gotten a few degrees north. Named another nameless headland or island after one of their sponsors.

It was lunacy, all right. But lunacy can make for entertaining reading, and this book has a patent on mad, driven explorers and their heroic follies. My choice for sheer chutzpah is Salomon Andree, a Swede who tried to reach the Pole in a gondola hung below a hydrogen-filled balloon. Andree and two companions took off on July 11, 1897. No one ever saw them again. In 1930, men who ventured ashore from their ship onto a remote island near Spitsbergen found three skeletons. They also found Andree's journal: Ice had formed on the balloon canopy, forcing it downward. The Arctic does not forgive foolish men.

Fleming is an accomplished historian, and he writes very well. You will find all the main players here: Peary, Amundsen, Nansen, De Long, and the infamous Dr. Frederick Cook, among others. And the author isn't afraid to take sides in the various disputes about who got where first. There's something inherently appealing about the odd braid of heroism and folly that runs through the history of the North Pole, where so much life was expended to gain so little. Fleming catches the oddness nicely and has written a fine book about it.

Brandt, Anthony

QUOTE:
pushes the boundaries of radical thinking and, in the process, provides potential openings, both epistemological and ontological, for utopianism.
Daniel Pinchbeck. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
For Pinchbeck and all others harboring utopian desires that consciously directed action must have radical thinking and alternative or oppositional consciousness at its core. 2012 helps us attempt to locate potential components of that core of radical thinking and alternative and oppositional consciousness.
Fran Shor
Utopian Studies. 19.2 (Spring 2008): p340.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Pennsylvania State University Press
http://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_utopian_studies.html
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Full Text:
Daniel Pinchbeck. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007. 411 pp. $14.95

In his first book, Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck employs an epistemological insight of Jean-Francois Lyotard concerning radical thinking: "Being prepared to think what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking." Such thinking is also an essential component of the thought experiments informing utopianism. Allowing for the constraints and contradictions embedded in utopian thought (especially elucidated in the works of Fredric Jameson), Pinchbecks new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, pushes the boundaries of radical thinking and, in the process, provides potential openings, both epistemological and ontological, for utopianism.

Pinchbeck frames his thought experiments against the backdrop of Mayan myths, such as the return of Quetzalcoatl and the "completion of the Great Cycle" in 2012. Viewing these myths as "archetypes," Pinchbeck contends they augur a psychic shift wherein "the transformation of our consciousness will lead to the rapid creation, development and dissemination of new institutions and social structures.... From the limits of our current chaotic and uneasy circumstances, this process may well resemble an advance toward a harmonic, perhaps even utopian, situation on the Earth" (2).

On the other hand, Pinchbeck realizes that our present condition, tending towards dystopia, offers compelling choices, much like the choice that Connie Ramos faced in Woman on the Edge of Time, that is, to challenge dominant paradigms and power structures. For Pinchbeck, however, as opposed to Piercy, the willed transformation necessary to realize utopia is primarily that of a psycho-spiritual awakening. "It is my thesis," argues Pinchbeck, "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" (13-14).

Pinchbeck offers a further elaboration of this critical transformation, albeit with a more pessimistic sense of the utopian possibilities, in an interview in the Fall 2007 edition of the Fifth Estate:

Unless there is a massive ecological U-turn
and a parallel transformation of human
consciousness and human practices within the
next few years, it is quite possible that we will
not continue on this planet. At the moment,
humanity is like a person in a locked room who
has a limited amount of oxygen left--all of our
psychic energy should be going to make a few
air holes! (27)
The exploration of transformative human consciousness and practices found throughout 2012 runs the gamut from the contemporary phenomenon of crop circles in England to the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert and to the psychedelic and spiritual rituals of Santo Daime in the Brazilian Amazon. While not abandoning his skepticism towards what realities these rituals and phenomena illuminate, Pinchbeck is more willing to suspend his disbelief about the repressive aspects of ancient practices and their spiritual apologists who erected pyramids of sacrifice as part of the cementing of past empires. On the other hand, he is particularly attuned to what he calls a "psychic blockade" embedded in the modern state and its cultural apparatus which encourages "individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology" (76).

In order to break through that psychic blockage, Pinchbeck synthesizes a vast array of radical thinkers from the Catholic mystic (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) to the creator of Waldorf Schools (Rudolf Steiner) to a guru of psychedelics (Terrence McKenna). Their critiques of rationalism and search for alternative consciousness become a touchstone for Pinchbecks thought experiments. In addition, Pinchbecks search for the lost modalities of consciousness leads him to the work of numerous scholars of Mayan myth, the most far-out being Jose Arguelles with his speculations about the "Galactic Maya" (221-237). Identifying the prophetic and transformative cycle of Mayan time as a potential euchronia, Arguelles posits the return of Quetzalcoatl as the emergence of a new "Golden Age" (230). The utopian significance of the next Mayan cycle in 2012, according to Pinchbecks interpretation, is that "the carapace of modern technology will crumble as new support systems self-organize, causing a momentous polar shift in human thought and human values--from alienation to integration, from deformed and spatialized time to synchronic harmony, from either patriarchal or matriarchal dominance to true partnership, from ego-based delusions to global telepathy" (242).

Certainly, in the history of utopian thought such projections for future transformations based on the renewal of past wisdom and spirituality are exceedingly prominent. In highlighting the utopian resonances of the psychic-spirituality of indigenous cultures, Pinchbeck points towards the return to a lost consciousness, a psychic home, if you will, which utopian thinkers and writers from Bloch to Le Guin have also explored. While Pinchbeck is wary of "New Age" faux formulations of a utopian harmonic convergence in the near future, he does believe in the "transition to a new and more intensified state of awareness" (392). Whether this awareness will be a mere eupsychia available only to the true illuminati or a truly transformative planetary consciousness depends on the willed transformation endemic to utopianism. Pinchbeck concludes in his dismissal of one New Age remedy: "Prayers and jangling amulets would not bring a new world into being, only consciously directed action could have that effect" (349). For Pinchbeck and all others harboring utopian desires that consciously directed action must have radical thinking and alternative or oppositional consciousness at its core. 2012 helps us attempt to locate potential components of that core of radical thinking and alternative and oppositional consciousness.

Reviewed by Fran Shor, Wayne State University

Shor, Fran

QUOTE:
Any reader interested in the
processes and possibilities of global transformation must consider the arguments and approaches in this book.
How soon is now?
Daniel Pinchbeck
The Bookwatch.
(Apr. 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
How Soon is Now?
Daniel Pinchbeck
Watkins Publishing
Angel Business Club
9781780289724, $24.95, www.watkinspublishing.com
How Soon is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation comes from a radical philosopher who considers
the state of humanity today, and its future, and blends research in numerous disciplines to consider the spiritual,
political, and social changes on the horizon and why change is needed on a global scale. From the technology that has
allowed the human race to make leaping transitions to issues of industrial development, climate change, philosophical
and ethical revolutions in morals and values, and more, Daniel Pinchbeck analyzes the roots of transformation,
advocates a more ecological awareness about the interconnectedness of the planet and its inhabitants, and proposes a
number of changes that are sweeping in nature yet logical and necessary in content. Any reader interested in the
processes and possibilities of global transformation must consider the arguments and approaches in this book.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Pinchbeck, Daniel. "How soon is now?" The Bookwatch, Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491583244&it=r&asid=3d469ae0a04a9f2854a48aff1fc6678f.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491583244
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to
Global Transformation
Publishers Weekly.
263.51 (Dec. 12, 2016): p144.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:

QUOTE:
radical call to consciousness,
Though the book succeeds in presenting the imperiled state of
humankind, Pinchbeck's proposed future collapses to incoherence amid his alarming conviction of his own correctness.
How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation
Daniel Pinchbeck. Watkins, $24.95 (300p)
ISBN 978-1-78028-972-4
In this radical call to consciousness, Pinchbeck (2012: The Return of Quezalcoatl) claims that Western culture is
rushing towards global catastrophe and human extinction because we no longer have the experience of rites of passage.
He lays out in detail how our quest to continuously acquire has led to the dire realities of climate change, and asserts
that rapid, fundamental change to human culture is not only possible but essential. While acknowledging the benefits of
computer technology and reduction of environmental impact, he also makes reference to various futurists, philosophers,
and his own experience with psychedelic drugs, arguing that we need a deeper change to our nature that honors Eastern
wisdom, local production, the reality of occult forces, and radical democracy. At times, Pinchbeck's urgency devolves
into rambling, and he often concludes with prophetic and universal assertions plucked from his very particular
experiences. A brief conclusion suggests some concrete actions, but the whole work remains Utopian and frustratingly
vague on how to implement the leaps he calls for. Though the book succeeds in presenting the imperiled state of
humankind, Pinchbeck's proposed future collapses to incoherence amid his alarming conviction of his own correctness.
Agent: Bill Gladstone, Waterside Productions. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 144.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225121&it=r&asid=699fb3d75d9c05567436dcb1688c9695.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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Nash, A. Leo. Burning Man: Art in the Desert
Raymond Bial
Library Journal.
132.13 (Aug. 1, 2007): p85.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Nash, A. Leo. Burning Man: Art in the Desert. Abrams. 2007. 160p. photogs. ISBN 978-08109-9290-0. $29.95.
PHOTOG
Every August people gather for one week in Nevada's Black Rock Desert to create and view curious, often fascinating
artworks at the Burning Man Festival. For more than ten years, Californian photographer Nash (2010: The Return of
Quetzalcoatl) has participated as an artist in this highly original event held in an otherwise bleak landscape and has
documented its varied creations. His black-and-white images, especially the panoramic views against a backdrop of
parched sand, capture the whimsy and imagination both of the artwork and the artists themselves. Daniel Pinchbeck
(Breaking Open the Head) contributes an introduction that vividly sets the scene and explains the nature of the Burning
Man. The photographs are then loosely organized into chapters that include "The Beginning," "Inspiration," "Road
Trip," "Desert Rhythms," and "Exodus." Through each of these chapters, Nash provides a running commentary that
helps to capture the spirit of the festival. At the very least, this is a fun book; at its best, it is a tribute to the liberating
spirit of American art. Well designed and printed, it is highly recommended for all photography and art collections in
public and academic libraries.--Raymond Bial, First Light Photography, Urbana, IL
Bial, Raymond
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Bial, Raymond. "Nash, A. Leo. Burning Man: Art in the Desert." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2007, p. 85. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA168088819&it=r&asid=7b775aa35b50ca909ffffd087b3aefea.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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QUOTE:
he book is not an extended diatribe, however. The author offers various
viewpoints on how certain drugs should be used and on whether a modern, Western shamanism is possible.

Pinchbeck, Daniel. Breaking Open the Head: a
Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of
Contemporary Shamanism
Stephen Joseph
Library Journal.
127.14 (Sept. 1, 2002): p199.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Broadway. Sept. 2002. c.336p. bibliog. index. ISBN 0-7679-0742-6. $24.95. SOC SCI
In this firsthand account of the world of psychedelic substances today, Village Voice and Rolling Stone writer
Pinchbeck weaves elements of his personal life, including vivid descriptions of his reactions to the substances he takes,
with larger topics, such as the history of psychedelic substances in the modern world and the foundations of
shamanism. To aid his inquiry, he participates in visionary rituals around the world, e.g., taking iboga as part of a tribal
initiation in Gabon. He also discusses key figures such as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Terence McKenna.
Pinchbeck repeatedly decries the rationalism and destructiveness of Western culture and the shortsightedness of
completely outlawing psychedelic substances. The book is not an extended diatribe, however. The author offers various
viewpoints on how certain drugs should be used and on whether a modern, Western shamanism is possible. Pinchbeck
posits a universe that may be difficult to accept, but his book will be of interest for public and academic libraries.--
Stephen Joseph, Butler Cty. Community Coll. Lib., PA
Joseph, Stephen
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Joseph, Stephen. "Pinchbeck, Daniel. Breaking Open the Head: a Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary
Shamanism." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2002, p. 199. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA91474330&it=r&asid=c0708899d2971c6c75b5d2d6a2625515.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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QUOTE:
Grippingly
dramatic, powerfully moving, this is a classic of the literature of ecstasy.
* Pinchbeck, Daniel. Breaking Open the Head: a
Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of
Contemporary Shamanism
Patricia Monaghan
Booklist.
98.22 (Aug. 2002): p1894.
COPYRIGHT 2002 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Oct. 2002. 336p. index. Broadway, $24.95 (0-7679-0742-6). 291.
Stop the eye-rolling--now! The words psychedelic and contemporary can be used in the same subtitle, as can
contemporary and shamanism without referring to American consumer shamanism ("I took a weekend workshop") but
to the real thing, practiced by the Bwiti of Africa and by Amazon brujos. Pinchbeck's startling and absorbing book
flashes from German philosopher Walter Benjamin and British mind-explorer Aldous Huxley to the literature of
anthropology to the politics of drug use, all while touring Gabon's outback, the lush South American jungle (six miles
and several worldviews away from industrialization), and the wild, evanescent culture of Burning Man in the Nevada
desert. What keeps the book from being just another apologia pro wasted vita sua is the depth of Pinchbeck's personal
searching. An agnostic with yearnings toward mysticism at the book's beginning, he underwent, and he documents, a
genuine experience of the divine that resulted from "breaking open" the rational mind. He achieved a sophisticated
vision, but one not without unease, for he encountered demons as well as gods in the otherworlds. But nothing is more
demonic, he concludes, than a society whose relentless commodification blasts a short route to addiction. Grippingly
dramatic, powerfully moving, this is a classic of the literature of ecstasy.
Monaghan, Patricia
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Monaghan, Patricia. "* Pinchbeck, Daniel. Breaking Open the Head: a Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of
Contemporary Shamanism." Booklist, Aug. 2002, p. 1894. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA90796200&it=r&asid=d42a3b154c0c47340b73ce623d5582ed.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
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QUOTE:
Pinchbeck's earnest, engaged and winning manner carry the book.
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey
into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism.
(Nonfiction)
Publishers Weekly.
249.25 (June 24, 2002): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2002 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
DANIEL PINCHBECK. Broadway, $24.95 (336p) ISBN 0-7679-0742-6
Open City editor Pinchbeck's book debut is a polemic that picks up the threads that Huxley's The Doors of Perception,
Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and counterculture idealism left in the culture. Charting his gradual transformation from
a cynical New York litterateur to psychedelic acolyte, Pinchbeck uses elements of travelogue, memoir, "entheobotany"
("the study of god-containing plants") and historical research to ask why these "doorways of the mind" have been
unceremoniously sealed, sharing Walter Benjamin's melancholy about the exasperating nature of consumerism: "We
live in a culture where everything tastes good but nothing satisfies." Pinchbeck travels the earth in search of spiritual
awakening through tripping, from Gabon to the Nevada desert. At happenings like the Burning Man festival or a plant
conference in the Ecuadorean jungle, Pinchbeck meets "modern shamans" and tells their stories as they intersect with
his. In his reporting, he manages to walk a difficult tonal tightrope, balancing his skepti cism with a desire to be
transformed. He thoughtfully surveys the literature about psychedelic drugs, but the most exhilarating and illuminating
sections are the descriptions of drug taking: he calls this visiting the "spirit world," which is "like a cosmic bureaucracy
employing its own PR department, its own off-kilter sense of dream-logic and humor... constantly playing with human
limitations, dangling possibilities before our puny grasps at knowledge." There's little new drug lore here, but
Pinchbeck's earnest, engaged and winning manner carry the book. (On sale Sept. 17)
Forecast: Pinchbeck is a founding editor, along with Thomas Beller, of Open City, a kind of Paris Review for the '90s,
and the son of artist Peter Pinchbeck and Beat memoirist Joyce Johnson. Portions of the book previously appeared in
the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, where Pinchbeck is a contributor. Look for a few strong national reviews and solid
sales, particularly among younger readers, who will turn out for the four-city tour.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. (Nonfiction)."
Publishers Weekly, 24 June 2002, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA89159933&it=r&asid=5503d9985b1f01e55880bf8e1c7c5aec.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A89159933
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506832325710 7/7

QUOE:
compelling for its insistence that there are more games in town than the Western cultural moment.
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey
into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism.
(Nonfiction)
Kirkus Reviews.
70.12 (June 15, 2002): p864.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pinchbeck, Daniel
Broadway (336 pp.)
$24.95
Sep. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0742-6
A quest after the possibilities of psychedelics and a case history of one man's forays into the hands of these supernatural
emissaries, from journalist and Open City founder Pinchbeck.
Plagued by existential questions ("Why this life? Why anything?"), the author tries after deep meanings, abiding hopes,
or, better yet, transcendence, through the agency of chemical self-discovery via those visionary catalysts psilocybin,
LSD, DMT (and its evil twin DPT), iboga, and ayahuasca. Pinchbeck is appalled by our culture's faith in materialism
and rationalism at the expense of intuition and ritual. He wants to tap the vestigial awareness of magical realms, the
archaic beliefs embodied in the works of Shakespeare, Artaud, Walter Benjamin--the psychedelic avatars. But he is not
content with someone else's experience with transcendence; he wants his own relation to the universe. Thus, he turns to
the shamanic cultures for revelation of the nonordianry world beyond the tug of Western gravity. The stories Pinchbeck
relates of his experiences in Gabon, Mexico, and Ecuador, worked in and around the extensive literary research he has
done into psychedelia, have both an awkward comedy and the focus of a pilg rim. You can't help but smile when he
tells of the Gabonese shaman trying to squirrel more money out of him, and you can't help but be impressed by the
compacted memory theater of an iboga-fueled Bwiti initiation. For the DMT experience, which Pinchbeck showcases
as "instant proof, beyond any doubt, of the existence of esoteric realities of a nonmaterialist Mystery worth exploring,"
you surely had to be there: his imagery of the trip doesn't support the fervor of his conclusions. Still, who is prepared to
fault or stanch the "yearning for meaning and spiritual truth in a world that seemed devoid of both" that prompted
Pinchbeck's quest?
Arguable, but compelling for its insistence that there are more games in town than the Western cultural moment.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. (Nonfiction)." Kirkus
Reviews, 15 June 2002, p. 864. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA87857390&it=r&asid=9b7f4bac388f8b53265b20c442104ec5.
Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A87857390

Brandt, Anthony. "The psychedelic tourist: New Yorker Daniel Pinchbeck has traveled the world on a quest for mind-altering experiences." National Geographic Adventure, Oct. 2002, p. 44+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA92690306&it=r&asid=d286c6241ad5943b6a4ee6567b6e8d1a. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Shor, Fran. "Daniel Pinchbeck. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl." Utopian Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2008, p. 340+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA189050949&it=r&asid=f0933408fe484c29ce5c6030683ab50b. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Pinchbeck, Daniel. "How soon is now?" The Bookwatch, Apr. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491583244&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. "How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation." Publishers Weekly, 12 Dec. 2016, p. 144. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475225121&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Bial, Raymond. "Nash, A. Leo. Burning Man: Art in the Desert." Library Journal, 1 Aug. 2007, p. 85. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA168088819&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Joseph, Stephen. "Pinchbeck, Daniel. Breaking Open the Head: a Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2002, p. 199. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA91474330&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. Monaghan, Patricia. "* Pinchbeck, Daniel. Breaking Open the Head: a Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism." Booklist, Aug. 2002, p. 1894. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA90796200&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. "Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. (Nonfiction)." Publishers Weekly, 24 June 2002, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA89159933&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017. "Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. (Nonfiction)." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2002, p. 864. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA87857390&it=r. Accessed 1 Oct. 2017.

• Huffington Post
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-soon-is-now-by-daniel-pinchbeck-book-review_us_58aa2c2de4b0fa149f9ac7f8
  Word count: 1037

  QUOTE:
  In a sense, “How Soon Is Now?” completes a trilogy and offers solutions to help us transition from a dying culture to a fresh one, and hopefully with a whimper and not a bang. However, for this to transpire, Pinchbeck proposes we may have to force a collective transcendence of our current state of being, a new understand of humanity and its relation to the planet and well as how humans relate to each other
  “How Soon Is Now” by Daniel Pinchbeck: Book Review
  02/20/2017 04:56 am ET Updated Mar 20, 2017

  How Soon Is Now?
  “…This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars — and yet they have done it themselves.” ~ Nietzsche

  “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” ~ Eliot

  It was extremely disheartening to watch Milo Yiannapolous on “Real Time with Bill Maher” last week. From what I could gather, Mister Yiannapolous’s argument is as follows: “I have reconciled being Catholic and homosexual and anyone who has not reconciled these seemingly dissonant paradigms must be stupid. In fact, everyone but me and a few other people who agree with me are stupid. And by the way, the Alt-Right isn’t full of homophobic Nazis who would Crazyglue homosexuals’ rectums shut or throw them alive off of buildings like ISIS does.”

  Like Donald Trump, Yiannapolous offers his opinions freely as if they were self-evident truths. But if you listen closely you will find that he is not partaking in the conversation. In fact, he is not partaking in any conversation that does not involve his own reflection telling him how pretty and smart he is. His slim charisma spews vitriol but advances no argument; he is a fledgling dictator buttressing his dubious beliefs with insults. Young Milo does not know how to listen. Thus, he cannot be part of the conversation for he does not even know what the conversation is about. But one thing is certain: if he were listening then he might have reflected back to him the fact name-calling is a far cry from solution finding.

  Thankfully, this week we are offered myriad solutions from the genius writer Daniel Pinchbeck. His poignant new book “How Soon Is a Now?” is extremely necessary at this time of name-calling and marginalization. This inspiring, visionary manifesto - featuring thoughtful prefaces from Russell Brand and Sting - offers an antidote to the grim negativity of dogmatists such as Yiannapolous and Trump currently gripping our planet.

  Pinchbeck proposes that we can break through our current blockages, activate our social imagination, and create a post-capitalist, post-work utopia. Overcoming limited greed and self-interest, we can design a resilient global civilization that works for everyone and not just the 1%. Pinchbeck believes that we have the technical ability to live harmoniously in a new paradigm and it is only our social systems and fractured ideologies that stand in our way of accepting our role as responsible stewards of Gaia.

  Pinchbeck considers the ecological and geopolitical crises that confront humanity as “rites of passage,” initiations, that will force us to evolve rapidly if we want to survive. The book then traverses this theoretical idea to propose the hands-on changes we must make to our technical systems - industrial, energetic, and agricultural - as well as our political and economic systems.

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  Surprisingly, Pinchbeck is optimistic that we can not only avert a catastrophic rupturing of the earth’s ecology, but in the process of doing so create a world that is far more equitable, peaceful, and harmonious. Even at a time when we are losing as much as 10% of the planet’s biodiversity every fifteen years as climate change accelerates, Pinchbeck claims that we are not powerless. Instead we should reframe this challenge to see ourselves as protagonists in a cliffhanger, a story just as amazing as “Star Wars” or “The Matrix.”

  Pinchbeck is most well known for his iconoclastic 2002 book “Breaking Open the Head,” which helped reintroduce the subject of consciousness-raising into the mainstream and preceded a renaissance in the study of several ancient medicines. His second book, “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl” was a controversial New York Times bestseller that explored the prophetic knowledge of traditional and indigenous cultures around the world - in particular, the classic Mayan civilization in the Yucatan, and the Hopi in Arizona. A philosophical and metaphysical epic, “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl” argued we were indeed in the crucible of an intense global transformation - as the Hopi describe it, a passage between worlds.

  In a sense, “How Soon Is Now?” completes a trilogy and offers solutions to help us transition from a dying culture to a fresh one, and hopefully with a whimper and not a bang. However, for this to transpire, Pinchbeck proposes we may have to force a collective transcendence of our current state of being, a new understand of humanity and its relation to the planet and well as how humans relate to each other: most people are trapped in a limited, egoic level of consciousness, focused on material rewards and comforts; the next paradigm could be win-win, rather than Trump and Yiannapolous’ zero-sum win-lose paradigm.

  “How Soon Is Now?” is replete with references to the work of other thinkers and visionaries such as Buckminster Fuller to Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, David Graeber, Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein, Antonio Negri, Albert Camus, and many more. For the sake of our planet and our species I do hope that people such as Yiannapolous and Trump start looking for solutions and stop imposing their moribund dogmas on others.

  Yes, I realize that Yiannapolous would deem me “stupid.” I find people who are not offering solutions boring.

• London School of Economics Review of Books
  http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/03/03/book-review-how-soon-is-now-from-personal-initiation-to-global-transformation-by-daniel-pinchbeck/
  Word count: 1512

  QUOTE:
  For anyone interested in considering how we got into this mess and how we can get out of it, How Soon is Now? will not disappoint. It takes readers on a journey through radical thought spanning Carl Jung and Hannah Arendt, Jack Kerouac and James Lovelock, Murray Bookchin and Buckminster Fuller. Even Pope Francis gets some attention. Pinchbeck is an important thinker of our time, and his is a brave and necessary book.
  Book Review: How Soon is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation by Daniel Pinchbeck

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  In How Soon is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation, Daniel Pinchbeck presents his argument for the need for urgent transformations at both the personal and global scale if we are to tackle the ‘hard problems’ posed by climate change and other pressing environmental issues. While querying aspects of Pinchbeck’s argument and the transition movement more broadly, Jason Hickel nonetheless welcomes this as a brave and necessary book from an important contemporary thinker.

  How Soon is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation. Daniel Pinchbeck. Watkins. 2017.

  Find this book: amazon-logo

  Our civilisation is in the throes of multiple, interlocking crises. Over the past 60 years, half our planet’s tropical forests have been destroyed, and by 2050 most of the rest will be gone. 40 per cent of our agricultural topsoil is seriously degraded, and scientists expect that continuing degradation will cause farming yields to collapse within our lifetime. Fish stocks are rapidly disappearing. Species are becoming extinct at a rate faster than any time in the past 66 million years. And we’re presently on track for around four degrees of global warming – with catastrophic consequences – even with the emissions reductions promised under the Paris agreement.

  In light of all this, I’m always a bit surprised by how little urgency I sense out there. It’s not that the writers who fill the pages of our newspapers and books are unaware of the magnitude of these crises: the science is hard to avoid. But people seem to feel that it’s somehow unbecoming to sound the alarm with any immediacy. Nobody wants to appear panicked or unreasonable, after all. And so the veneer of calm sophistication persists, with a few gentle reformist suggestions offered here and there – nothing too disruptive to our cellophane status quo.

  There are, of course, a few voices out there that buck this trend. Daniel Pinchbeck is one of them. His new book How Soon is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation ruptures through the fog with energy and passion. It offers a readable account of the hard limits we’re bumping up against, reviewing the state of knowledge on climate change, arctic methane, ocean acidification, land use and many other pressing ecological issues.

  What are the solutions to these crises? Pinchbeck is, refreshingly, not persuaded by those who claim that we can avert disaster without making any substantial changes to our lifestyles or the way our economy works. On the contrary, he cuts straight to the chase: the problem is our economic operating system itself, with its reliance on ever-increasing consumption and its addiction to exponential growth.

  Pinchbeck is no luddite. He is excited about rapid gains in solar technology and eager for new ideas like the ‘energy internet’, algae-based fuel and cold fusion – and his enthusiasm for these innovations is infectious. But he recognises that technology alone won’t save us. Even if we somehow manage to harness cheap, clean, unlimited energy, we would still proceed to ‘rapidly exhaust our resources, plundering the last fish from the deep in the oceans, pulling out the remaining raw material buried deep in the Earth’. To really stop our destructive momentum, he writes, we need to make a rapid transition to a de-growth model or a steady-state system.

  Image Credit: (Steve Johnson CC BY 2.0)

  How Soon is Now? is packed with ideas for how to make this transition happen. We get punchy primers on regenerative farming, permaculture, the localisation movement and the importance of shifting away from meat consumption, for instance. In a chapter on the money system (which, being based on interest-bearing debt, has a destructive growth imperative built into it), Pinchbeck explores alternatives like cryptocurrencies, time banks and demurrage. Recognising that policymakers are unlikely to organise a total system overhaul, he hopes these piecemeal alternatives – which are already being practised – will gradually catch on to the point of rendering our current system obsolete.

  For Pinchbeck, these practical alternatives are only part of the solution, however. More importantly, he says, we need an evolutionary leap in our collective consciousness. We need to shift from the dualism of Western thought, which posits a fundamental distinction between subject and object, humans and nature – the deep logic of our destructive economics – and move toward a philosophy of interconnection and interdependence. To illustrate what he means, Pinchbeck draws on his own personal narrative of moving from ‘secular materialism’ to a worldview of more mystical dimensions, aided in no small part by psychedelic substances like peyote, iboga, mushrooms and ayahuasca.

  Most people who follow the transition movement, for lack of a better term, have probably noticed that psychedelics are back in fashion. I first heard about ayahuasca a few years ago, when it was still relatively unknown. Today it seems ubiquitous. Many, like Pinchbeck, hail ayahuasca and other psychedelics as crucial medicines for our time – a way to help us recognise and transcend the logic of capitalist culture. And they recruit the insights of ‘indigenous wisdom’ toward this end as well, especially from those groups that have a long tradition of working with psychedelics for shamanic purposes.

  As an anthropologist, I agree that there’s a great deal we can draw from indigenous conceptions of the world, many of which reject human-nature dualisms. I think that people who see the world as characterised by relatedness and unity are able to grasp crucial truths that Western science tends to miss. Those who claim the mantle of ‘civilisation’ denigrate such people as ‘animists’, but learning – or remembering – their insights may well prove crucial to our salvation. In this sense, I agree with Pinchbeck wholeheartedly. That said, I do worry about how ‘indigenous tribes’ get represented in the discourse of the transition movement. Too often they are lumped together as though they’re all the same, and they are generally cast as timeless and unchanging in their beliefs and practices – as if they have no history. Such representations risk sliding into a kind of orientalism.

  Then there is sexuality. ‘We have inherited a restricted model of romantic and erotic love,’ Pinchbeck writes. ‘Most people still believe that monogamy is the only way to find enduring happiness […] But humans are not naturally monogamous, and the current system forces many people to act hypocritically.’ Then his strong claim: ‘the planetary mega-crisis is directly related to the problems we confront as a species in this area of love and sexuality.’ Drawing on Dieter Duhm’s manifesto, Terra Nova, and observations from Tamara, the free-love commune in southern Portugal, Pinchbeck argues that overcoming the jealousy and possessiveness of monogamous love is essential to achieving true liberation.

  I don’t deny that there is truth to this. But this vision of sexual authenticity rests on the assumption – peddled by some evolutionary biologists – that polyamory is the ‘natural’ form of sexuality for humans, hardwired into us over millennia. Most anthropologists reject this notion. Humans may not be naturally monogamous, but they are not ‘naturally’ anything else either. Expressions of sexuality and erotic desire – to say nothing of love – are always cultural; there is no ‘authentic’ sexuality that exists somehow outside of culture, no desire antecedent to language. Not even in Tamara. As Slavoj Žižek has put it: ‘There is nothing spontaneous, nothing natural, about human desires. Our desires are artificial. We have to be taught to desire.’

  These are not indictments of Pinchbeck’s book so much as cautionary observations about certain strands of thinking within the transition movement. For anyone interested in considering how we got into this mess and how we can get out of it, How Soon is Now? will not disappoint. It takes readers on a journey through radical thought spanning Carl Jung and Hannah Arendt, Jack Kerouac and James Lovelock, Murray Bookchin and Buckminster Fuller. Even Pope Francis gets some attention. Pinchbeck is an important thinker of our time, and his is a brave and necessary book.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8109-9290-0
  Word count: 250

  Burning Man: Art in the Desert

  A. Leo Nash, Author, A. Leo Nash, Photographer, Daniel Pinchbeck, Introduction by ABRAMS $29.95 (160p) ISBN 978-0-8109-9290-0

  Nash's understated black and white photography gives an unexpected and intimate glimpse into Burning Man, the art-centric festival-community (""essentially a temporary city... of up to forty-thousand people"") erected on an isolated stretch of Nevada desert every fall. Though it's known as much for hedonistic carousing as for art (if not moreso), Nash has been sleeping through the all-night parties for more than a decade so he can rise early and shoot artwork in the desert's morning light. More than a hundred of his stripped-down images are collected here, a strange and beautiful catalog of the structures, vehicles, monuments and performances dreamed up in the middle of nowhere. Writer and psychonaut Daniel Pinchbeck provides a brief introduction, but Nash's images are better complemented by his own plainspoken commentary, which focuses on the hard realities of putting on an event of Burning Man's magnitude: hazardous road trips, labor-intensive construction, infrastructure management, crowd control and the final clean up. Nash's singular, idiosyncratic perspective proves charming and frank; for instance, Nash isn't shy about tensions within the community (mainly between those who come early to build and latecomers who take the effort for granted). It's easy to imagine a lively collaborative volume on the festival, but by keeping things restrained, Nash provides a personal tour that gets to the heart of the spectacle.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-58542-837-3
  Word count: 241

  QUOTE:
  limited amounts of economic data,
  paranormal speculation and theories that won't convince skeptics that Pinchbeck is anything but a raving conspiracy theorist

  Notes from the Edge Times

  Daniel Pinchbeck, Penguin/Tarcher, $23.95 (193p) ISBN 9781585428373

  MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
  Pinchbeck's newest is a collection of essays about the transitional period in which the world currently finds itself. Looking at environmental issues like climate change, food shortages, and natural disasters, as well as the recent economic collapse, Pinchbeck returns to themes from his last book (2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl), focusing on the need for a new spiritual paradigm and practical structure for human civilization if we are to survive. He cites limited amounts of economic data, most of it at an anecdotal or survey level, and focuses a great deal on paranormal speculation and theories that won't convince skeptics that Pinchbeck is anything but a raving conspiracy theorist. While the author's quiet openness to being wrong is a refreshing trait in extreme believers of any stripe, it won't be enough to assure new readers that Pinchbeck has any answers (or even substantial ideas); rather, readers will likely find Pinchbeck yet another person claiming in his own way that the world is on a one-way course towards imminent self-immolation. Fans of his previous books may find this welcome and refreshing, but those unfamiliar won't find this a book of note. (Oct.)

• New Consciousness Review
  http://ncreview.com/notes-from-the-edge-times/discussions/677/
  Word count: 391

  QUOTE:
  Pinchbeck offers both critique and broad solutions to the challenges facing humanity,Pinchbeck offers both critique and broad solutions to the challenges facing humanity,
  Review Detail

  Notes from the Edge Times
  Notes from the Edge Times HOT
  Science & Consciousness
  by Daniel Pinchbeck September 23, 2010
  April 29, 2011 (Updated: April 29, 2011) Julie Clayton
  #1 Reviewer
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  Notes is a collection of Pinchbeck’s well-written social essays, largely culled from his website, Reality Sandwich” (February 2007 – April 2010). The jacket cover describes him as a “social critic” and a “skeptical philosopher of consciousness seeking the enlightened path;” and this book, “an unsparing tour of the perils and promise of the current era.” I agree. Publishers Weekly, on the other hand, stops just this side of calling him a “raving conspiracy theorist" because he dares to challenge current economic, political, ecological, sexual, and spiritual paradigms.

  As just one example, Pinchbeck predicted the housing market collapse and subsequent banking and insurance fallout, not from a drug-induced hallucination, but because it was obvious to anyone whose reason wasn’t clouded by the trance of consumeritis what the outcome of inflated housing prices and frivolous subprime loans designed for short-term profits for the elite few would be. In my own household we too prophesied this event years before it occurred. Or, as we would say, and to use a well known idiom from the book of Daniel, Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin: the writing is on the wall.

  The writing is on the wall for many of the conditions humanity faces today. Pinchbeck offers both critique and broad solutions to the challenges facing humanity, and while he has been criticized for not having a complete master plan for the future, no one actually does, yet. But to my mind it is imperative that truth-tellers such as Pinchbeck be heard and considered, for it is the innovators and innovative ideas that lead us toward the ideal as compassionate caretakers of a just and sustainable world. And, if you construe Pinchbeck’s edgy ideas as “merely” a myth, then I invite you to consider this: “we cannot live without telling myths, and we become the myth that we tell.”

• Spirituality & Practice
  http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/view/20335/notes-from-the-edge-times
  Word count: 416

  Notes from the Edge Times
  By Daniel Pinchbeck
  Hard-hitting essays criticizing contemporary culture and offering new ways of transforming the nation and its roll toward self-destruction.
  Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
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  Daniel Pinchbeck is the bestselling author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoat and coeditor of Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age. This collection of essays, arranged in chronological order, consists of pieces written over the past three and a half years. In the introduction, Pinchbeck calls this book an exploration of the perils and potentials of our time:

  "Our current culture extols irresponsibility, greed, and waste. If humanity chooses to awaken to its potential and confront the crisis we have unleashed, the culture that supercedes this one will express different values and run on a radically re-vamped operating system."

  In an essay titled "Mission Possible," Pinchbeck contends that America operates the dream-machine of the planet through television shows and movies. What we need is to shift the message of attaining a better life through affluence to one of working together to create a more just society. Rather than brainwashing people with violence and nonstop action films, we could present to the world inspiring portraits of community building, nonviolence, and eroticism as a tool for personal growth. If we don't change the worn-out media paradigm soon, we may reap more dark and dangerous times.

  Other dangers pointed out by Pinchbeck are our permanent war culture which has been casually accepted by most Americans; the continuing governmental secrecy about the study of the mind and behavioral control techniques; and the challenge of doing something definitive about the monetary system, the financial crisis, and unemployment.

  The author salutes the following positive developments in culture and religion: a new paradigm of psychic energy and intention; a new culture of initiation for young boys and others; a wiser and more integrated phase of the sexual revolution; advocacy of the benefits of psychedelics; developing nonviolence as a spiritual practice; and shifting from a remote-control oligarchy to a true democracy.

  Pinchbeck also includes essays on Evolver (of which he is cofounder; see www.evolver.net) and Reality Sandwich (where he is editorial director) — companies he qualifies as "interdependent media" aimed at supporting a paradigm change, elevating human consciousness, and offering practical and visionary alternatives to a culture entrenched in money-making, escapism, and the pursuit of affluence.

• New York Times Book Review Online
  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/books/review/18swofford.html
  Word count: 1092

  QUOTE:
  descriptions of his trips are New Age narcissistic and fortune-cookie cute.
  It's hard to swallow the counterculture self-help pill from a bohemian intellectual who writes plodding sentences that utterly fail to render his ascent into other, better worlds of consciousness and sensation.
  The End Is High
  Review by ANTHONY SWOFFORDJUNE 18, 2006
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  DANIEL PINCHBECK has done a lot of psychedelics, and he's here again to tell us about those trips and the resulting dreams, daemons and synchronicities, as well as the forthcoming "global decimation" that might be avoided if people begin "confronting their habitual mechanisms of avoidance and denial, overcoming their fear and conditioned cynicism."

  In his previous book, "Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism," Pinchbeck mined much of the same material and substances. "2012" pushes the baggie a little further and "advances a radical theory: that human consciousness is rapidly transitioning to a new state . . . a transformed realization, of time and space and self." He adds: "The transition is already under way . . . and will become increasingly evident as we approach the year 2012." That's the year the Mayan "Great Cycle" ends.

  In 2012, urban liberals and fundamentalist Christians alike lose their heads to the Pinchbeckian guillotine, a machine made not of wood and steel but the after-effects of DMT ("a seven-minute rocket-shot into an overwhelming other dimension"), ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, LSD and iboga ("a psychedelic root bark that is the center of the Bwiti cult").

  Of the multiple difficulties encountered by the writer of drug-induced-mind-expansion narratives, none is more important to overcome than that of transferring the effect of the drug to his prose, a near impossibility attained by only a few — William S. Burroughs comes to mind, as well as Thomas De Quincey.

  Not so Pinchbeck. His descriptions of his trips are New Age narcissistic and fortune-cookie cute. Apparently, when you are mindblown on iboga, the root teacher speaks in CAPS. Among the messages Pinchbeck receives: "PRIMORDIAL WISDOM TEACHER OF HUMANITY." While on a "fungal sacrament," Pinchbeck describes the Nevada morning desert at Burning Man as "a Narnia sunrise of golden cloud fingers and taffeta swirls feather-spinning across the horizon." No thanks, dude, I'll pass on the fungal.

  Continue reading the main story
  If you ingest psychedelics and write about their galactic psychic healing properties and tell your readers you offer them your book "as a gift handed backward through space-time, from beyond the barrier of a new realm," you need at least an ounce of humor and warmth to go along with it all. It's hard to swallow the counterculture self-help pill — or leaf or drink or droplet — offered by a self-proclaimed "somewhat bohemian and alienated intellectual," especially a bohemian intellectual who writes plodding sentences that utterly fail to render his ascent into other, better worlds of consciousness and sensation.

  Pinchbeck insists the crisis he's trying to help us solve is global, but throughout "2012" there is ample evidence that the crisis is Pinchbeck's own: there's his recently dead father; the birth of his daughter; the wealthy and beautiful partner who is unable to match his same high enthusiasm for psychedelics and an open relationship; the witnessing of the 9/11 attacks from his partner's Soho loft; the inability to score, while high, in an Amazonian jungle with a woman who calls herself a priestess; and ultimately being forced to live in an underheated South Williamsburg share apartment. The high seas of the global psychic crisis are rough.

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  Pinchbeck's thinking suffers from the deep navel-gazing that comes so naturally to this son of urban humanist materialist liberals, the very class he disparages for their atheism, passivity and greed. Not that he is off the mark. Most of the people who once sang Beatles anthems and marched for civil rights are now more concerned with the stock market and real estate — not to mention the quality of the new sod job at the golf course — than with world peace or the welfare of indigenous peoples. But haven't we known this for at least two decades? And will doing psychedelics really help usher in a new era of living and being?

  Pinchbeck's censure of corporate globalization and hegemonic thought is well meant. Petro-domination and the desecration of the biosphere are real dangers that require immediate attention. But Pinchbeck's reasoning moves quickly from practical, thoughtful criticisms to the conclusion that near the end of 2012 the world as we know it will end. It's akin to stating that because a 10-year-old shoplifted a pack of gum, next Wednesday her entire family will turn blue.

  "2012" occasionally engages the reader solely because of the cast of characters Pinchbeck befriends and cites — crop circle hoaxsters and devotees, believers in extraterrestrials, physicists and poets, time concept revisionists and their acolytes.

  Pinchbeck's most lucid writing surrounds the two periods of his life that receive the least attention in this book: his youth in Manhattan, in the atmosphere of truly avant-garde writers, personalities and artists (his parents among them), and a visit to Hopiland, at the end of the book. His rage at what he sees as the thieving and wasting of the Hopiland aquifer by a coal mining company, as assisted by Enron, is the kind of writing you want from a muckraker and subversive. Rage at social injustice is infinitely preferable to claims of drug-induced prescience and visionary flights, but Pinchbeck's romantic subservience to psychedelics and their doubtful global psychic breakthroughs (he liberally uses the words "might," "could" and "perhaps") soften the anti-establishment punches he occasionally throws.

  Since when can a guy on mushrooms land a punch? And no one likes a global morality bully who's tripping. Whatever happened to just taking drugs? Visionary flights sound like such a downer. But if things change in 2012, please paint me blue.

  Anthony Swofford is the author of "Jarhead." His first novel, "Exit A," will be published early next year.

• Publishers Weekly Online
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-58542-483-2
  Word count: 267

  QUOTE:
  Pinchbeck's exotic epic is a paradigm-buster capable of forcing the most cynical reader outside her comfort zone.
  2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

  Daniel Pinchbeck, Author Jeremy P. Tarcher $26.95 (408p) ISBN 978-1-58542-483-2

  MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
  Pinchbeck, journalist and author of the drug-riddled psychonaut investigation Breaking Open the Head, has set out to create an ""extravagant thought experiment"" centering around the Mayan prophecy that 2012 will bring about the end of the world as we know it, ""the conclusion of a vast evolutionary cycle, and the potential gateway to a higher level of manifestation."" More specifically, Pinchbeck's claim is that we are in the final stages of a fundamental global shift from a society based on materiality to one based on spirituality. Intermittently fascinating, especially in his autobiographical interludes, Pinchbeck tackles Stonehenge and the Burning Man festival, crop circles and globalization, modern hallucinogens and the ancient prophesy of the Plumed Serpent featured in his subtitle. His description of difficult-to-translate experiences, like his experimentation with a little-known hallucinogenic drug called dripropyltryptamine (DPT), are striking for their lucidity: ""For several weeks after taking DPT, I picked up flickering hypnagogic imagery when I closed my eyes at night ... In one scene, I entered a column of fire rising from the center of Stonehenge again and again, feeling myself pleasantly annihilated by the flames each time."" Pinchbeck's teleological exploration can overwhelm, and his meandering focus can frustrate, but as a thought experiment, Pinchbeck's exotic epic is a paradigm-buster capable of forcing the most cynical reader outside her comfort zone.

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