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A few days ago I picked up Who Cares?!, a book by Ramesh S. Balsekar, an Indian sage known for his blunt, cutting, almost nasty approach to the quest for enlightenment. Ramesh's perspective is that the individual self is an illusion and "doing" is an illusion - we find ourselves in a reality-movie where God is playing all the parts. The actions of our individual "body-mind organism" are determined by the Source, the universal consciousness that creates and occasionally dissolves our egos in order to continue lila, the divine play. For Ramesh, enlightenment is the extinction of personality, the annihilation of the illusion of self and doer-ship.

When I first read Ramesh, I was shocked by a philosophy that left no place for individual choice, meaning, or agency. We in the West are obsessed with free will - with individuality - but Ramesh negates this entirely. Over time, I stopped being depressed by this, and began to find his Vedantic view oddly liberating. While free will on an individual egoic level is not possible (because all of our thoughts and actions are based on past conditioning), there is absolute freedom on the level of the singular consciousness - the "one without a second" - that exists within and beyond all relative manifestation. When we identify with the unlimited Source, rather than our individual story or ego-game, we participate in that absolute and unconditional freedom.

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While people from the mainstream literary and media culture often find my ideas weird, 'too much,' or somehow 'out there,' for me, my entire project has been fundamentally and quite strictly logical.

When I had my spiritual crisis in my late twenties, I confronted something that I had always felt lurking in the background of my consciousness: The nihilism of contemporary culture, which values material gain while denying any possibility of the existence of the soul. This denial is based on the very recent development of science in the last few centuries ­ we can see its contemporary expression in writers like Richard Dawkins and David Dennett. It is almost as if secular 'scientific' materialists take a cold comfort in their certainty that there can be no such thing as 'God' or an afterlife, that human existence is the result of random conditions and genetic mutations over time.

Just because a few centuries of science appears to support this claim does not make it true. Many concepts and theories have been accepted by people for hundreds or thousands of years that eventually turned out to be false.
The question we might want to ask ourselves is how can we demonstrate the validity or invalidity of this claim of materialist meaninglessness for ourselves?

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This year I attended my eighth straight Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert of Nevada. It was an awesome event, featuring a lunar eclipse, an early act of arson perpetrated on the festival's iconic stick figure, a more-than-double rainbow, and some of the greatest works of art I have ever seen, touched, jumped on, and danced around. I stayed at Entheon Village, one of the largest camps on the Playa, bringing together 400 people from around the US and the world. Entheon featured several domes and stages, a nightly environmental film program, a cardboard zendo for meditation, a goddess temple, and a full kitchen serving delicious Vegan food to the entire camp. Entheon brought together and synergized different groups that I have known and camped with before, including 'tribes' from Salt Lake City (rabble-rousing former Mormons turned shaman-artists), North Carolina, and the North West (visionary vibesters responsible for a giant 'art car' in the form of a fire-breathing, copper-skinned dragon), scientists from MIT (my friend Ryan Wartena's nanotechnology projects have been featured on the cover of science magazines ­ his website is growingarchitecture.com), and Djs, jam bands, visual artists, and performing artists from the Bay Area.

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Daniel Pinchbeck is our guest blogger during the week of September 10th. If you have any questions for Daniel Pinchbeck, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some information about 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl: 

“Pinchbeck, who is actively bidding to become his generation’s Timothy Leary – or, more precisely, the less famous psychedelic thinker Terence McKenna – has created a scene around him that is perhaps the youngest and most vibrant of the current psychedelic establishment.”

- Rolling Stone

Cross James Merrill, H. P. Lovecraft, and Carlos Castaneda -each imbued with a twenty-first-century aptitude for quantum theory and existential psychology-and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for the lucidity, rationale, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms.