Post # 2 by Daniel Pinchbeck

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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?

When I hit my crisis, I recalled my psychedelic experiences in college, and this seemed to be the most sensible method for testing the possibility that there were unknowns beyond the limits of what our science presupposed to be true or possible.

The Russian mystic Gurdjieff talked about how if you were to wake up one day and find yourself in prison, one of your first and eventually your most urgent question would be, Is there a way to escape from it? We who have awoken into the bleak vortex of secular materialism might ask ourselves the same question.

I feel that I have done my best in my work to maintain my skepticism ­ but logically, skepticism has to extend to skepticism itself. Many of the skeptics I know are actually believers ­ they are believers in skepticism, and they take enormous pride in their own skepticism. When I wrote Breaking Open the Head, I was forced over time to interrogate my own skepticism about psychic phenomena and the existence of occult realms that were beyond the understanding of Western science, up until this point. I looked at the matter through my own personal experiences, through the stories I collected from many people, and from the books that I read. After much careful thought, I finally decided for myself that it was more reasonable, as a paradigm or hypothesis, to propose that there were psychic phenomena and therefore that the psychic and the physical world were not cut off from each other, but deeply interrelated.

This understanding led me to realize that indigenous and traditional cultures might have been just as curious and even sophisticated about the world as we are, but they were interested in profoundly different aspects of being and experience. The Mayan Calendar, for instance, codifies a completely different relation to time than the Gregorian Calendar we use today: They view time as a loom or tonal structure that has different patterns in it that repeat at different scales over time. It is a qualitative and symphonic model of time, incorporating precise astronomical knowledge.

If shamanic practices have validity, but the modern West suppressed any access to the mystical and intuitive dimensions of the psyche, then we should take seriously the claims made by these cultures based on their access to sources of wisdom outside of our cultural paradigm or our construct of knowledge.

My new perspective led me to explore the end of the Long Count of the Mayan Calendar in 2012, the Hopi awareness that we are currently transitioning from the 'Fourth World' to the 'Fifth World,' and many other similar bodies of knowledge. The results of this five-year deep dive into the realms of the psyche were presented in my book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.

The logic of my quest (quest-ion) has continued in what seems to me to be a straightforward manner. If the Hopi and the Mesoamerican cultures did possess meaningful insight into this period as a time of transformation, they didn't leave much direct indication of what we were supposed to do at this time. It seems that 2012 is a window of opportunity in which we can catalyze a shift in planetary culture and consciousness to a sustainable paradigm that integrates scientific empiricism and mystical intuition, or we can sit by as climate change, pollution, resource burn-out, and species extinction end the tenure of humanity within a relatively short period of time.

My efforts now are to understand the dynamics of system transformation, and the particular characteristics of this time that might allow for an accelerated shift to a new form of society. The books Multitude by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and On Revolution by Hannah Arendt, have been my most significant study tomes recently.

Also realizing that no one person could really shift the paradigm by themselves, I have created a web magazine, Reality Sandwich, to support a community of shared interests, writing and speaking about the subjects that matter to them urgently. I have also been involved in an animation project, Post Modern Times that takes ideas from my intellectually dense 2012 book and turns then into 'information snacks' that can be consumed by anyone. I would love to hear feedback on our first episde from anyone who checks it out.

-- Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012

View more information about Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

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