Tag Archives for Daniel Pinchbeck

“The Fifth World and the Hopi Apocalypse” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur No. 14 (Jan. 2005)

Illustration by Arik Roper

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“The Fifth World and the Hopi Apocalypse”

Last summer, I visited the Hopi on their tribal lands in Arizona. The Hopi are thought to be the original inhabitants of the North American continent–this is what their own legends tell us, and archaeologists agree. My initial interest in the Hopi came from reading about their oral prophecies and their “Emergence Myth.” According to the Hopi, we are currently living in the Fourth World, on the verge of transitioning, or emerging, into the Fifth World. In each of the three previous worlds, humanity eventually went berserk, tearing apart the fabric of the world through destructive practices, wars, and ruinous technologies. As the end of one world approaches a small tunnel or inter-dimensional passage —the sipapu—appears, leading the Hopi and other decent people into the next phase, or incarnation, of the Earth.

Of course, most modern people would consider this story to be an interesting folktale or fantasy with no particular relevance to our current lives. Even five years ago, I probably would have agreed with them. However, my personal experiences with indigenous cultures and shamanism convinced me, in the interim, that there is more to traditional wisdom than our modern mindset can easily accept. The Hopi themselves say that almost all of the signs have been fulfilled that precede our transition to the Fifth World. These include a “gourd of ashes falling from the sky,” destroying a city, enacted in the atomic blasts obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a spider web across the Earth, which they associate with our power grid and telephone lines. According to Frank Waters, who compiled accounts from 30 Hopi elders in his Book of the Hopi (1963), the current Fourth World will end in a war that will be “a spiritual conflict” fought with material means, leading to the destruction of the United States through radiation. Those who survive this conflict will institute a new united world without racial or ideological divisions “under one power, that of the Creator.”

The 12,000 Hopi live in a dry and dramatic landscape strewn with enormous boulders, resembling the surface of an alien planet. Their towns are clustered on three mesas—high, flat cliffs overlooking vast swathes of desert. Traditionally, the Hopi are subsistence farmers; they work with ancient strains of corn and beans that are, almost miraculously, able to grow in that arid environment. For obvious reasons, water is sacred to their culture—many of their rituals are aimed at bringing rain. Each spring, each well, is precious to the Hopi. While I was visiting Hopiland I attended a raindance in the town of Walpi, on First Mesa. Perhaps 50 men of the town—wearing masks and costumes and feathered headdresses —participated in the dance, which was held in the town’s center. The dancers are dressed as katsinas, the spiritual beings that are thought to control elemental forces. The ceremony is a form of possession trance—the goal is to summon the katsinas to temporarily inhabit the bodies of the dancers. The Hopi believe that their culture can only prosper if they maintain direct contact with the supernatural powers that manifest directly through the natural world.

In his book Rethinking Hopi Anthropology, the Cambridge anthropologist Peter Whitely recalls, with an almost embarrassed reluctance, that during his time with the Hopi in the 1980s, he witnessed repeated demonstrations of their precognitive abilities and their ability to influence natural forces through ritual. He was transfixed by his first visit to a Snake Dance in 1980: “This was no commodified spectacle of the exotic … its profound religiosity was tangible, sensible. Within half an hour of the dance (which lasts about 45 minutes), a soft rain began to fall from a sky that had been burningly cloudless throughout the day.” When he went to see one of his informants, Harry Kewanimptewa, a septuagenarian member of the Spider clan, he would often find that the elder would answer the questions he had intended to ask before he could vocalize them: “I have no desire to fetishize or exoticize here, but this was something about him and some other, particularly older, Hopis that I have experienced repeatedly and am unable to explain rationally.”

I can sympathize with Whiteley’s plight. Since I started exploring shamanism almost a decade ago, I have found myself living in two worlds simultaneously—the world of Western rationalist discourse with its empirical and materialist emphasis, and the shamanic realm of magical correspondences, supernatural forces, dream messages, and synchronicities. The shamanic realm is one in which human consciousness is not an epiphenomenon or dualistic byproduct of a purely physical evolution, but an inseparable aspect of the world, intertwined with reality at every level. It seems that quantum physics has attained a perspective that is similar to the shamanic view, acknowledging a direct relation between the observer and observed.

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“Fellowship of the Vine”: an interview with shamanic psychonaut-author Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur, 2002)

Originally published in Arthur No. 1 (October, 2002)

“The Garden of Magic; or, the Powers and Thrones Approach the Bridge” by Alan Moore (1994)

Fellowship of the Vine
An interview with shamanic psychonaut-author Daniel Pinchbeck

Daniel Pinchbeck is a New York-based writer and journalist who co-founded the literary magazine Open City in the early ‘90s. The son of the writer Joyce Johnson (a member of the Beat Generation and author of Minor Characters) and the painter Peter Pinchbeck, Pinchbeck has been on a passionate intellectual quest for the last years that has taken him across Nepal, India, Mexico, the Amazon and West Africa, writing pieces on art, psychedelics, and altered states of consciousness for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Wired, Salon, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. His new book, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism (Broadway), is an account of that quest, blending cultural history, personal narrative, and metaphysical speculation. The original interview was conducted by Joseph Durwin on the eve of Breaking Open the Head’s publication; there’s been some slight futzing of the text by Arthur’s editor.

Arthur: In your book, you talk about exploring many of the same hallucinogenic drugs—LSD, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca—that postwar Westerm bohemians like the Beats and the Hippies were interested in. How does your quest compare to those of people like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary?
Daniel Pinchbeck: The Beats were working by instinct and intuition. They realized that modern society had become a horror show, and that their task was to begin to uncover, in Allen Ginsberg’s words, “a lost knowledge or a lost consciousness.” They took that process as far as they could in the context of their times and their individual personalities.

I believe that my approach—and my book—is more scientific and analytic, because that is the task of the “counterculture” in our time. Perhaps I am the only person who feels this way, but I see a clear goal ahead. This goal is a direct legacy of the counterculture —but it is actually hundreds, if not many thousands, of years older than that. In fact, it is the mission that we must somehow accomplish. Think of it as a secret raid to be carried out deep behind enemy lines, despite incredible odds, and with no possibility of failure.

The Beats and the Hippies saw through the abrasive insanity gnawing at the soul of America–this warmongering, money-mad, climate-destroying monstrosity, which is now casting a dreadful shadow across the planet. Where the Beats acted intuitively, from the heart, we now have the necessary knowledge to put together a new paradigm that is simultaneously political, ecological, spiritual, and far more scientifically accurate than the out-dated Newtonian-Darwinian model which is propping up the doom-spiraling status quo. The psychedelic experience supports the physicist David Bohm’s vision of a “holographic universe,” which is also identical to the alchemical perspective of “As above, so below.” We now have the tools to reinstate the archaic cosmological perspective on a firm scientific basis. Once that sinks in, it becomes obvious that the true goal of human existence is psychic and spiritual development, and the entire thrust of the capitalist system is a samsaric delusion that is keeping humanity from recovering its birthright.

Perhaps there is a reason that humanity has been frantically seeking to develop a “global brain” through the Internet, cell phones, and satellites: I suspect that a moment will come when complete social transformation becomes not only possible, but inevitable. That moment may be sooner than we think.

What were the circumstances that led to pursuing the experiences you relate in your book?
I first tried mushrooms and LSD in college–as many people do—and my experiences left me intrigued but puzzled. It seemed extraordinary that such vast alternative dimensions of consciousness could be revealed with such shocking immediacy. And it was equally extraordinary that the mainstream culture didn’t find this a worthy subject of discussion or thought. After college, I put psychedelics aside to enter the “real world.” When I hit my late twenties, I began to feel increasingly desolate and despairing. I was lucky enough to be connected to the New York media world, the art world, and the literary world, but all these scenes began to seem unbearably empty to me. I realized that I needed to know for myself if there was a spiritual dimension to existence–I really thought that I might literally go insane or prefer to die without access to some form of deeper knowledge. I didn’t think a bit of yoga was going to do the trick. At a bookstore, I heard about iboga, an African tribal psychedelic plant used in Gabon and the Congo that is said to show initiates the African spirit world. Most people just take it once in their lives–it lasts for thirty hours. I got an assignment to go to Africa and go through the initiation, and that was where my quest began.

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“Kali Can You Hear Me?” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 11 (July 2004)

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“Kali Can You Hear Me?”

When I bring up the subject of the “Kali Yuga” in polite company, I find that few people know what I am talking about, let alone that we are in the midst of it. So what is the Kali Yuga? According to Hindu lore, the Kali Yuga is the last of four epochs which can be roughly equated to the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age known in the Western tradition. Each epoch signifies a decline and a degradation from the previous phase. The Kali Yuga is the bottom of the barrel, where humanity has lost all connection to its sacred source and wallows in lower appetites, materialism and greed. In the Vishnu Puruna, this state is achieved “when society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth becomes the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion.”

Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction, usually depicted with four arms, dancing wildly on a corpse, tongue sticking out, blood dripping from her fangs. Kali is the wrathful manifestation of Shakti, the consort of Shiva. While Lord Shiva is the personification of pure consciousness, Lady Shakti represents the current of sexual energy behind all manifestation. The eternal act of love between Shiva and Shakti maintains the balance of forces in the universe.

According to some accounts, the four yugas are immensely long affairs, and there are hundreds of thousands of years left to run in our current Kali Yuga. However, some Hindu sects, such as the Dravidians, say that the entire cycle lasts 60,000 years in total, and we are currently approaching the finish line of the final epoch. The good news about the Kali Yuga is that Hindu time runs in a circle or spiral. The end of the Kali Yuga means a return to the Golden Age, the Satya Yuga, after passage through a transition made in darkness.

According to the French esoteric scholar Rene Guenon, writing in the early years of the 20th century, “We have in fact entered upon the final phase of this Kali Yuga, the darkest period of this dark age, the state of dissolution from which there is to be no emerging except through a cataclysm, since it is no longer a mere revival which is required, but a complete renovation.” Guenon scoffed at the “triumph” of Western values and empirical thought, seeing the modern worship of empirical science as a shallow delusion: “These lower forms of knowledge, so insignificant to anyone possessing knowledge of a different order, had nevertheless to be realized,” he wrote in The Crisis of the Modern World. This realization could only happen at the point where “true intellectuality,” knowledge of a different order, had disappeared or been completely devalued.

The standard liberal, feminist, or left-wing criticism of our society considers it a patriarchal dominator culture that represses the feminine and the natural. This is of course true, as far as it goes. However, in the Kali Yuga, it is the female daemonic current of Shakti energy that has gone berserk, and not the male principle. As Nikolai and Zenia Shreck put it in their entertaining Demons of the Flesh: “During this Aeon, the lunar, sinister current of the Feminine Daemonic is at its zenith, a spiritual condition which allows for the breaking up of all boundaries and the free play of creative chaos, unrestricted by the male ordering principle.” Since Kali is the wrathful manifestation of Shakti, the Kali Yuga could be described as the goddess Shakti throwing a hissy fit.

We find this idea coded into the Biblical story of Genesis. Man was satisfied in Paradise. It was woman, Eve, who bit the apple (of knowledge and desire), and she wants to keep biting. On the deepest level, men are unchanged by history—they are the same soldiers, shamans, and duffers now as they were five, ten, or fifty thousand years ago. Women are the ones who are trying to change. To bite deeper into the apple, “she,” the archetypal feminine, the Shakti-current, needs to be given recognition, permission, affirmation, by man and by the masculine Shiva-force of consciousness.

After giving this much consideration, I suspect that the “fate of the Earth” literally depends on understanding and acting upon this situation. “She” is going to continue to wreak havoc until she gets what she wants in the way that she wants it—which may have nothing to do with contemporary social values or moral and sexual stereotypes. The 1960s provided a dress rehearsal. The Shakti current opened up for a while, after the near-nuclear annihilation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the possibility of a global civilization based on love rather than domination became briefly apparent.

The “feminine” also represents the intuitive forms of thought denigrated by our rigidly masculine rationality, as well as nature itself. The Kali Yuga comprises all of recorded history—the last five or six thousand years. Historical time is the duration required for human consciousness to realize its separation from nature, and penetrate into matter through technology. As Francis Bacon put it at the beginning of the era of modern science: “We must torture Nature until she reveals her secrets.” Western science is a Sadean project. Western Man’s incessant probing of nature is, in itself, a quest for knowledge of the lost and defiled goddess whose body is the world.

When the feminine daemonic went berserk, at the beginning of the Kali Yuga, there was a withdrawal of maternal protection and sensual satisfaction from most of humanity. According to Robert Lawlor’s extraordinary book, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, this may have occurred through an actual shift or weakening in Mother Earth’s electromagnetic field. The aboriginals live without shelter or clothing on the southernmost continent, staying in constant contact with the planet’s electromagnetic force, its heartbeat. For the aboriginals, every day is the “first day” of creation, the origin point, and there was never a “fall of man” into a degraded state. Because they maintained this pure condition, they had no interest in developing technologies that would permit them to control or dominate nature.

At the core of our word “materialism” is “Mater,” mother. As the polarity of Kali/Shakti suggests, there are two sides to the mother archetype. There is the nurturing, fertile, and benevolent mother, and there is the aggrieved, possessive, devouring mother. In the modern world, we became obsessed with material goods and possessions. This obsession is due to our subconscious enslavement by the “bad mother” archetype. Kali Yuga humans, deprived of “mother’s milk,” of proper nurturing, become devious, depraved, greedy, insatiable, miserly—we have confused matter for Mater.

In his laboratory, the scientist has sought to understand the wound inflicted on him by the aggrieved feminine. He has asked the wrong questions and received the wrong answers. To ask the right questions, he would have to start with a different understanding. Rather than seeking some delusionary final closure, he would have to accept the nature of paradox, and the paradox that is nature.

Obsessed with the urge to escape the limits of spacetime through a direct phallic extension of his ego, through acceleration, man builds racing cars and rockets. Acting out of subconscious rage, man splits the atom in an attempt to annihilate matter/mater. The oceanic feminine waits for the wave to crash. Kali giggles. She whispers: “You do not know me yet, you man, you failed systemizer.”

Technology is an attempt to create a “second nature” that accords with limited masculine rationality. Modern technology imposes a rigid, static, dead order on the flowing fractal chaos that is feminine nature. At the moment of seeming triumph for modern science, the physicist discovers, to his horror, that matter is an illusion—there is only quantum foam, fluctuation, and flux. It is all feminine sinuous motion: Shakti. It is all relational. There is no hard fact, just spectacle and seduction and uncertainty principles. What holds reality together is consciousness, the observer who changes what is observed. Instead of a bedrock materiality, there is what the Hindus call “lila,” divine play.

The Western project of technology and science have been called into being by the secret workings of the aggrieved feminine current. This may seem counter-intuitive at first. However, it should be recalled that men tend to be “passively active,” while women are “actively passive,” impelling activity and erotic advances like magnets. The deviation in the feminine Shakti current impelled the anguished masculine drive towards rationality. My hypothesis is that the ultimate purpose of technology is to aid in the coming-to-consciousness of women—the realization of feminine desire and self-knowledge. At that point, Kali will retract her fangs, pull in her tongue, liberate her victims, and, with the faintest trace of a Mona Lisa smile, turn back into Shakti. As Wilhelm Reich put it: “Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the patriarchy.” The underground currents of our time lead in this direction. The mass-market success of The Da Vinci Code, a mystery based on the suppression of the sacred feminine by Christianity, is one of many indications.

As it says in The Tao, “Reversal is the movement of the Tao.” I propose that the conclusion of the Kali Yuga is a cosmic synchronization with the end-date of the Mayan calendar in the year 2012. By that time, masculine technology and feminine nature will have reintegrated, and the liberational movements that crested and collapsed during the 1960s will return, reformat themselves, and complete the task of establishing a new age and a new consciousness. The goddess is returning, and this time around, the apple will be eaten down to the core.

“The Dispassion of the Christ” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 10 (May 2004)

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“The Dispassion of the Christ”

Like Fast Food Nation, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ may have converted some of its audience to vegetarianism. The film was like watching a slab of wounded roast beef stagger through an elaborate literalization of the New Testament’s nasty bits. Calling to mind the Smiths’ anthemic “Meat Is Murder,” The Passion was long on flayed flesh and short on fun. Apparently, Gibson escaped cocaine addiction by connecting with his Higher Power, and the film could be seen as a metaphorical enactment of Mel’s ordeal as the stages of the 12 Steps.

Fundamentalists in the US—the core audience for The Passion, and supporters of the Bush agenda—maintain a self-serving and atavistic understanding of the Bible. Since Fundamentalists consider themselves automatically among the “Saved,” they believe they have the right to ignore the most basic Biblical commandments. These still-fresh ideas include “Love Your Enemy as Yourself,” and “Thou Shall Not Kill.” The Fundamentalist attitude seems to be that as long as you are “saved,” you can support a government that kicks global ass, toxifies the biosphere, gobbles the Earth’s resources and converts “developing nations” into cheap labor camps.

At the same time, “spirituality” is increasingly trendy among the wealthy elites of the modern-day West. This “spirituality” generally has an Eastern caste, avoiding Christ and the Bible altogether. Models and their stockbroker boyfriends spend thousands of dollars to attend yoga and raw food retreats, where they practice asanas and mantras in tropical locales. Corporate executives and their trophy wives decorate their country homes with Hindu statues and Tibetan thangkas. Architects incorporate a bit of feng shui into their designs. Nightclubs are called Karma and Spirit, while bands are Nirvana and Spiritualized. Millions meditate and chant, seeking relief from anxiety and some undefined feeling of “unity” with the cosmos.

Words can turn into their opposite. They can be emptied of meaning altogether. This seems to be the case with the common usage of “Spirituality,” which is amputated from the processes of life. Devoid of meaning, the term is banalized into a new system of commodifiable life-experiences, a way of making a pampered and guilt-ridden class feel better about themselves. Although it is crude and perversely violent, The Passion of the Christ does imprint the idea that pursuit of meaningful “spirituality” might require some form of tangible sacrifice that goes beyond vegetarianism or om-chanting.

Over the last few centuries, Christianity’s ambience of guilt and repression and its denial of the flesh increasingly repelled the modern mind—and rightly so. The Christian religion remains a destructive element in world affairs. Yet as Westerners, we can reclaim our own tradition. This requires careful thinking about this tradition, to reach a deeper level of understanding. As the Sufi philosopher Frithof Schuon writes: “The sufficient reason for the existence of the human creature is the capacity to think; not to think just anything, but to think about what matters, and finally, about what alone matters.” Thinking should be part of a spiritual path. Dedication to truth is a spiritual discipline.

Perhaps our separation from the Biblical and Gnostic Christ is a necessary part of the process of return. We needed to be cut off from this tradition so we could recognize it as if it were new and original. The significance of the events relayed in the Gospels can only be revealed to each individual through his or her own process of introspection. You must come to it in your own time, and in your own mind. What follows is my personal interpretation, a thought experiment I have made, borrowing ideas from Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, and others.

From my psychedelic experiences, I think of consciousness as a kind of vibration or frequency. There might be an infinite number of possible vibrations of consciousness, of levels of soul-development, at various planes of intensity. In this sense, the purpose of Christ’s “mission” was to bring a more intensified form of consciousness to the Earth.

Christ’s incarnation not only fulfilled the prophetic traditions leading up to his arrival but pointed the way to the future. The vibrational frequency of consciousness that Christ brought to the Earth was too much for humanity at that time—save for a few—and up until the present day. Of course, “descending” as he did from a more intensified phase of Being, Christ knew this would be the case. That is why he said he did not come to bring peace, but a sword—not to unite, but to divide. And indeed, the legacy of Christ’s coming has been two millenia of incessant bloodbaths and primitive horrors.

World avatars are frequency transducers who step up the voltage of Mind. Christ’s parables are not just “mythologemes” but devices to store and transmit higher energies. The receptivity of his audience to his impacted fables and statements was in itself miraculous—as much a miracle as any of his suspensions or transmutations of seeming physical laws. There is an almost cybernetic quality to much of Christ’s discourse. His parables break open ordinary logic to introduce a “supramental” element or higher-level logic that can only be conveyed through symbolic speech. His disciples listened in wonder, but understood only in part. Their amazement becomes apparent through reading a stripped-down version of the Gospel of Thomas, which dates from the same period as the canonical texts.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Christ proclaims the necessity of achieving direct knowledge—gnosis—of the Divine: “Open the door for yourself, so you will know what is.” He also declares: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” The essence of Christ’s “doctrine” can be summed up as: “No more bullshit.” There is no hierarchy, no priest caste, and no mediation.

To trasmit, a receiver is required. Without reception, there can be no meaningful transmission. The Gospel of Thomas, along with other gnostic texts, was found in a jar in the Nag Hammadi desert of Egypt, in 1945. I suspect that these lost scriptures were intended for our time. Throughout Thomas, Christ reiterates: “Those who have two ears better listen!” We are the subjects with the capacity to understand, and it is to the advanced present-day consciousness that Christ directs his statements.

We develop “ears to hear” by reconciling modern empirical cognition, which accepts the quantum paradoxes of spacetime discovered by physics, with a new understanding of myth. Myth is not antithetical to science. A new attitude to myth is described by William Irwin Thompson in his books Imaginary Landscapes and Coming Into Being. Thompson proposes we make a shift “from a postmodernist sensibility in which myth is regarded as an absolute and authoritarian system of discourse to a planetary culture in which myth is regarded as isomorphic, but not identical, to scientific narratives.”

One can understand the meaning of the “Christ event” from several different angles. From one perspective, Christ’s incarnation initiated the descent of the Logos into humanity. This process continues—realizes itself, I suspect—in our own time. Realization of the Logos illuminates the human soul from within. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” so begins the Gospel of John. The Logos is the light that came into the world, “and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” Through awareness of the Logos, consciousness realizes its self-identity with the Divine.

God is not a conscious being. God is the Logos, who, as William Blake wrote, “only acts, and is, in existing beings and men.” Immanent rather than transcendent, God, the Logos, comes to consciousness in humanity. Man is a Logos-being. Reality is syntax.

Only in stages of intensification that naturally appear in the physical realm as the destructive shocks of a historical process can consciousness be brought to realization of the Logos, and achieve awareness of its direct participation in the creative process. Christ says, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” No external temple or mountaintop contains the Sacred. The Sacred is everywhere. As Black Elk realized: “Every place is the center of the world.” The fact that religions today squabble and make war over particular spots on the Earth only reveals their deficient and outdated mentality.

From the Jungian perspective, Christ’s arrival humanizes the God-image. The tyrannical and patriarchal God-image presiding over the Old Testament represents phases in a dialectic. Humanity looks up to see itself in the mirror of the God-image, the God-image beholds Himself reflected in humanity. Both are shocked by what they find, and evolve as a result. Conflict creates consciousness. As human consciousness develops more sensitivity, the previously barbaric God-image becomes sensitized and compassionate.

In “God’s Answer to Job,” Carl Jung suggests that humanity’s moral and intellectual progress forced God to incarnate in suffering humanity. This is His mercy. First, He “descends” as a special and singular being, the Christ, thereby introducing the new vibrational level of consciousness. Eventually, God incarnates—seeks to know Himself—within the larger body of prosaic humanity. History is this story of the “descent” or incarnation of the Logos into humanity. At the same time, in fulfillment of His wrath, He prepares the Apocalypse. Edward Edinger, in Archetypes of the Apocalypse, describes the Apocalypse as “the momentous event of the coming of the Self into conscious realization.” Like the human psyche, the God-image unifies opposites: Creation and destruction, male and female, being and nonbeing are fused in Him, as in us.

Theorists have proposed that consciousness was not fully individualized in the pre-Christian Era. It may be that consciousness was first experienced as an extrinsic voice or presence—as Julian Jaynes outlined in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. For Rudolf Steiner, before Christ’s incarnation, a person identified him or herself with their “group soul” or ancestral line. When the Bible says that Abraham or another patriarch lived for many hundreds of years, it signifies that the descendants of Abraham had an awareness of themselves that was not clearly distinct from their originator, hence the descendants also considered themselves to be “Abraham.” Christ instilled the “I AM” in the human soul. He said, “You have to leave your father and mother to follow me.” In other words, people had to break from any diffuse connection with their lineage or tribe, and awaken to their own individuality. Once the process of individuation is complete, the Ego can be consciously sacrificed.

According to Steiner, the materialization of the Earth and the Ego increased the powers of demonic or Ahrimanic forces, seeking to drag humanity down into the mineral world, the inorganic and the death-trap of technology. Without the spark or seed-impulse provided by the Christ, impelling consciousness and feeling to a new vibratory level, humanity would have surrendered completely to materialism. The separation of human souls into discrete individualities necessitated the new commandment that Christ brought to Earth: “Love one another as you are loved.”

In the modern age, Colonialism on the one hand accelerated the materialist urge in its most destructive aspects. On the other hand, Colonialism spread the “word of Christ” across the planet, although this was done through the most brutal means. This process is, again, dialectical. Despite the genocide and cultural annihilation inflicted upon them by the colonialist powers, indigenous people understood and accepted the doctrine of Christ, incorporating it into older traditions. In this dialectic, the intensifying of consciousness first manifests naturally as destruction and capitulation.

These days, certain movies seem to be noospheric events—a means for the collective unconscious of humanity to speak to itself. This was the case with The Lord of the Rings. I would say that the “ring of power” represents the Ego, with its delusionary temptations of power. The ring has to be carried until all the psychic dark matter is revealed, then tossed away. As Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” This is one element of the collective process taking place in our time.

It is only as a fully self-reflective individual consciousness that one can make the choice, out of free will, to reconcile with the Divine, the Logos, through sacrifice, or supercession, of the Ego. As Christ says: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.”

In his words, his actions, and his inner being, Christ exemplified such a sacrifice. Unfortunately, Christ did not “save our souls” through the crucifixion. Instead, he showed us the path—a model for selfless action that can be internalized, and followed, if we make the free choice to evolve. Christ is only a “savior” when we follow his lead. We still have to save our own souls. Alas, this is no easy task. But without real sacrifice, there is no spiritual progress.

“One-Dimensional Christmas” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur, 2004)

Originally published in Arthur No. 9 (March 2004)

“Here and Now” column by Daniel Pinchbeck

“One-Dimensional Christmas”

This Christmas day, in my annual attempt to avoid the holiday spirit, I sat in an underheated cafe in Manhattan’s East Village and reread the last chapters of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Probably the most profound critique of modern industrial society ever written, One-Dimensional Man attacks the fundamental “irrational rationality” of our present system. Mechanized progress could—and logically should—have led to a reduction in labor time and the creation of a post-work and post-scarcity global society–what Marcuse calls a “pacified” existence. Since World War Two, the response to this deep threat to the ruling elite was the creation of “false needs” in the consumer; the perpetuation of the fear of nuclear war and terrorism; and the use of the mass media to enforce consensus consciousness.

Marcuse wrote: “Perhaps an accident may alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior of man, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change.” This was clear after 9-11: Awareness opened for a moment, but the media and the government worked overtime to close it and reinforce the usual trance.

The last chapters of One Dimensional Man are tragic—I wept as I reread them. Marcuse realized that with the increasing power of technology, the human imagination—rather than any abstract “necessity”–had become the determining force in creating social reality. Marcuse writes: “In the light of the capabilities of advanced industrial civilization, is not all play of the imagination playing with technical possibilities, which can be tested as to their chances of realization? The romantic idea of a “science of the imagination” seems to assume an ever-more-empirical aspect.” If the imagination running a technological society is one of dominance and death and control, then you get what we now have in the world.

The global misery we are currently enduring is not a problem of reality: It represents, in fact, a failure of the human imagination and of human consciousness. The mass culture, advertising, and propaganda industries work to limit consciousness to a low vibration—a frequency of mindless fear and insatiable material greed—to construct the subjects, the workers and consumers and soldiers, who are the “biomass” or fodder needed to feed the technosphere’s doom spiral. Yet, as Marcuse puts it, “the chance of the alternative” hovers over every manifestation, every moment, of this dreary dystopia.

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“Why I am glad George Bush is President” by Daniel Pinchbeck (Arthur, 2003)

Originally published in Arthur No. 5 (June 2003)

Why I am glad George Bush is President
by Daniel Pinchbeck

It is painful to admit it—I flinch away from saying it—but I am glad George Bush is President.
Don’t get me wrong: I consider him the worst and most dangerous leader this country has ever had. He is a smirking abomination, a fascistic fratboy, an avatar of the deepest, darkest murk burbling at the bottom of the American soul. In the 19th Century, Emerson wrote, “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” The current administration is the culmination of generations of American minds aiming lower and lower, gnawing upon their own emptiness and projecting it into the void. Attention spans and memories have contracted to the length of one news cycle. ADD and Alzhemier’s are the perfect metaphors for this amnesiac age.

I am glad that George Bush is President because humanity has to make a choice, and our time for making that choice is quickly running out.

In the greater scheme of things, Enron doesn’t matter. Halliburton doesn’t matter. “War on Iraq” doesn’t matter. Israel doesn’t matter. Al Quaeda doesn’t matter. Art doesn’t matter. Film doesn’t matter. TV doesn’t matter. Celebrity doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter. America doesn’t matter.
Only the biosphere matters. Without a radical change in direction, the imminent collapse of the planet’s life support systems is what counts.

The coral reefs are disappearing, the polar ice caps are melting, fresh water is becoming a scarce resource, every ounce of our blood contains a catalogue of industrial chemicals. The fancy gadgets we bought yesterday are leeching toxins into Third World soil today. Around the globe, desperate peasants are fleeing their parched and ruined lands to congregate in the slums of vast “mega-cities.” Within several decades, at the current rate of resource-depletion, there will be no tropical forests left on the Earth. Before that can happen, however, the structures holding together contemporary civilization will have disintegrated along with the environment.

Modern consumer culture is a vast machine of entropy, breaking down the planet’s life support systems and destroying indigenous cultures to continue its unsustainable addictions. The United States-­the worst offender-­consists of less than five percent of the world’s population guzzling 25% of the global production of energy and, by some accounts, more than 40% of the world’s resources. Bush and Cheney are old-fashioned gangsters, but Bill Clinton and Al Gore were smiley faced snake-oil salesmen for the corporate globalization that has unleashed its scorched-earth effects across the planet. Good riddance to them, their lies and their arrogance and their compromises. The changes that need to be made go far beyond what our current political system can enact–even if the system hadn’t been juked by crooked “ATM-style” voting machines and hanging chads.

It is time for the great dehypnotizing of the citizens of Planet Earth.

I agree with Bush’s spiritual advisers: We have entered the Apocalypse in the “Book of Revelation.” But who do they think was being referred to when the prophet wrote: “Destroyed will be the destroyers of the Earth?” And who are the meek who will inherit the planet when the destroyers are done with it? Could it be the indigenous people, who never lost contact with the heartbeat of the planet, who have endured the arrogance of forgotten empires in the past and will continue to endure?

Do you know where “Wall Street” got its name? Is it any surprise that Wall Street refers to the original barrier erected by the Dutch to keep out the Indians? Our economic system was founded on that dialectical divide. From the Indian perspective, the history of America is repression, treaty violation, and genocide. Despite our rhetoric, America has never been shy about using brutal force to loot the resources we desire and murder those who get in our way, whether in the “Wild West” or the Middle East today. Perhaps, when imminent environmental collapse brings the current form of civilization to an end, we will finally lose our contempt for indigenous wisdom. Was it the Indians who polluted their waters, destroyed their forests, irradiated their children, stockpiled nuclear and biological weapons, or added every living and nonliving thing into their maniacal calculus of human greed? But of course, when the Hopis marched to the UN to warn of the imminent fulfilment of their ancient prophecies, nobody took them seriously.

The Lakota shaman Black Elk said, “Without a vision, the people perish.” Ask yourself: What vision is our society following? Is our goal simply to continue maximizing profits and the level of comfort for the privileged few as the global environment melts down and brings a quick end to the human experiment on this planet? And for those privileged few, is the sci-fi fantasy of bio-engineered life-extension in gated communities looking out on a degraded world overwhelmed by desperate refugees an inspiring one? The government’s pursuit of “homeland security” through surveillance and force is an obsolete fantasy that will lead to disaster. Real security can only emerge from authenticity, generosity, transparency, and inner calm. In his Empire of Disorder, Alain Joxe writes, “The only benefit for the globalization of finance and military force for humanity is that it obliges us to think of a global means of equitable distribution, which is the only way to avoid the worldwide civil war that threatens to take the form of cold barbaric violence.”

Ultimately, modern society is an artifice held together by the mesh of people’s faith and belief in the system. When that faith collapses, the system will fall. We saw this, most recently, in East Europe in 1989. An alternative vision to the present consumer society is beginning to emerge and clarify itself. To paraphrase cyber-theorist Pierre Levy, the Internet provides a potential model for a global, horizontal democracy, one that would be “immanent and molecular” rather than the “transcendent and molar” structure of the current system. For Levy, the new system would be based on individual responsibility and on humanity’s “collective intelligence” working together in real-time. There are extraordinary scientists and visionaries who have developed models of alternative economies and currencies, methods to bioremediate toxified land and water, ways of producing clean energy, and industries that make almost no waste (for more info on some of these projects, check out http://www.bioneers.org). The development of modern information technology, the “global brain” of humanity, will facilitate the instant transmission of transformative ideas across the Earth, when it becomes necessary.

What is required is nothing less than the psychic and spiritual regeneration of humanity. To paraphrase the visionary Jose Arguelles, we need a “mass moral revulsion” away from the techno-dystopic direction of our current civilization. Despite current appearances, I suspect this will happen, soon, on a global scale and in a more conscientious and deeply transformative way than it did in “the Sixties.” It can be sensed, now, as an undercurrent, a distant rumbling in the mass subconscious. Humanity’s yearning for liberation and truth is due for an imminent volcanic eruption. And when it happens, I will be glad that George Bush was President, so that I got to watch him fall.

"The Light at the End of the Reality Tunnel" by Douglas Rushkoff, from Arthur No. 25/Winter 02006

“The Light at the End of the Reality Tunnel”
by columnist Douglas Rushkoff

(Originally published in Arthur No. 25/Winter 02006)

This has been a very bizarre couple of weeks for me. I changed literary agents, did a bookstore discussion/debate with former Arthur columnist Daniel Pinchbeck, learned of Robert Anton Wilson’s dire end-of-life financial predicament, and then left my wife and 21-month-old daughter to fly to Germany (where I am right now, stuck in an airport thanks to a canceled flight) to give a talk to a big magazine conglomerate about what makes their publications relevant in a mediaspace fast migrating online.

And I’ve found myself alternatively inspired and unnerved, about each and every one of these events. I feel their connection on an emotional level —as if the microcosm in which I’m participating reflects a greater theme. Like an archipelago, this seemingly disconnected string of islands is all connected beneath the surface. And that connection is about how we make value—for ourselves and one another.

Take the Pinchbeck event. Now it’s no secret to Arthur readers that he and I come from different ends of the spiritual spectrum. When he was writing columns in these pages about channeling the wisdom of Quetzalcoatl, I was warning the same readers not to take any prophecy too seriously—and certainly not literally. Then, I ran into Daniel in a coffeeshop just a week after a particularly critical screed on him and the “psychedelic elite” came out in Rolling Stone—an article in which I was quoted on the value of communities over heroes.

We concluded that a face-to-face discussion was in order, and figured we might as well do it in public. So Daniel asked a bookstore where he was scheduled to speak if we could turn it into a two-man show. Almost as soon as the discussion was announced, email started coming in, asking how I was going to “take him on” or “take him out”—the assumption being that we’d have a take-no-prisoners debate. And while I’m certain we’ve pissed each other off over the years, I thought the point of mixing it up a bit would be to learn something from one another. Find common ground. Meanwhile, we’d end up bringing together a rather unlikely audience of media students, recent Burning Man returnees, psychedelics enthusiasts and comics readers. In business terms, we were “creating value” for one another and our separate readerships by introducing them to each other.

I’ll admit, the event both inspired and disturbed me. Sure, the assembled crowd was varied and eager. But the conversation itself was too competitive, no matter how I intended otherwise. All I meant to show was that we each have our own reality tunnels – and that no matter how spectacularly “real” something may appear, especially on super-strong shamanic entheogens, it’s just one metaphor for whatever it is that might really be going on. None of us knows what happens when we die, whether there’s anything or anyone else “out there,” or whether the connections we seem to perceive all around us are conspiring or coincidental.

Daniel tended to dismiss my points he disagreed with as “thoughts,” to which I finally snapped that “everything we’re saying is just thoughts, buddy.” I leave it to you to choose who of us is more Zen, but my lasting impression of the conversation was that we didn’t quite transcend the zero-sum game as I had imagined we would. It was still just two white guys with microphones, competing for mindshare and the marketshare that goes along with it. Had I been used simply to get more people to show up at his book signing? Was I seeing in him the qualities I dislike in myself? Why should such misgivings even arise?

Then came word from a truer pioneer of mind and cosmos than either of us, Robert Anton Wilson: his post-polio syndrome had gotten worse, and the attendant medical bills combined with some trouble with the IRS had tapped him out. He was three days away from not being able to make his rent.

Say what? Robert Anton Wilson, author of Cosmic Trigger and Prometheus Rising, the guy who put the number 23 on the map, and delightfully upgraded the minds of thousands if not millions, forever, could no longer support himself? For those who may be unfamiliar with his work, Wilson is the man who put the many insights of Sixties into perspective. By approaching the seeming interconnectedness of everything with a grain of salt and two grains of humor, he’s helped to demonstrate the value of seeing one’s own reality tunnel for what it is: a limited take on a much greater whole. Rather than getting lost in any particular tunnel (or, worse, pushing it on other people) the object of the game was to learn to move between them.

On learning of his predicament, I felt an anger welling up. I refused to be a member of a generation that could allow an author and philosopher of his caliber to die penniless in a state hospital, so I dashed out a blog post (http://www.rushkoff.com/2006/10/robert-anton-wilson-needs-our-help.php) alerting the “community,” along with Bob’s Paypal address (olgaceline@gmail.com). Thanks to a link from BoingBoing.net, we raised over $68,000 dollars in just the first couple of days, along with a few hundred heartfelt testimonials in the comments section.

But there was a second thread in the comments section that disturbed me. “How do we know this is not a hoax?” some people were asking. Indeed, I wondered. How do I prove I’m not a scam artist of some kind, putting up my own Paypal address? This is the Internet, after all. Further down in the comments, someone had posted the response I might have been embarrassed to make for myself: “just look at Rushkoff’s site and his work.”

And that’s when the value of “reputation”—what business folks call “brand”—actually made sense to me as a good thing rather than just some ego trip. The fact that I’ve been writing books for 15 years and have been hosting an online community of one sort or another for nearly as long has earned me the trust required to communicate an urgent fact and have it believed. At least by enough people to make a difference.

While by far the majority of comments and email since then have been very positive both towards Bob and about the effort to keep him solvent and cared for, there’s plenty of cynicism out there, too. “Why should he get cared for over some other sick and poor person?” one egalitarian asked. “He should have managed his money better,” another complained to me (like I have time to read emails from people who have decided not to help Bob when I can barely process the ones from people looking to help). “I already paid him when I bought his book,” explained another, who best exemplified the trend. It’s the logic of a perverted sort of libertarianism —one that can’t see beyond its own very limited notion of the competitive marketplace.

For even if we use the raw logic of the market, Bob is simply being paid back for the value he created. Those of us who are contributing to Robert Anton Wilson now are still, in effect, paying residuals on what we got from him. We’ve all bought plenty of twenty-dollar books—but few have been worth as much to us as Bob’s. The works generated value for us over time, and we see fit to share this wealth in the form of cash energy with the person who created it for us. This is not the order of a free market economy, but of what might better be called a free market ecology.

“Economics” is based on the assumption that people act in ways that maximize their wealth as individuals. It holds true for many situations. All else being equal, we’ll buy products at the best price we can get them and take the highest wage we can find. The assumption is that we act out of selfishness—and economics is just its rational application. Under the laws of economics, we wouldn’t pay for the same book twice.

An ecology, on the other hand, though wildly competitive and occasionally just as cruel as any economy, is based on interdependency. The members of a coral reef or slime mold know how to take coordinated action when it’s called for. The shit of one organism is fertilizer for another. An ecology still operates under the assumption of maximizing wealth, but of the whole collective organism —and over time.

By refusing to let Robert Anton Wilson die penniless, we—as a culture, or at least part of a culture—are caring for a certain kind of thinking and activity, even if this is after the fact. By doing so, we not only acknowledge to Robert Anton Wilson the tremendous contributions he made to our lives, but we have the opportunity to reaffirm the same thing to ourselves. Like college alumni who reinforce their own positive feelings about their alma maters when they make donations to keep the institution going, we publicly affirm the value of Bob’s legacy —thus making it more valuable or at least less dismissible for a society bent on recontextualizing the Sixties, psychedelia and mental adventurousness as an embarrassing phase.

Just look at the recent spate of articles accompanying the tenth anniversary of Timothy Leary’s death, as well as Bob Greenfield’s recent biography. These writers are all-too ready to condemn Leary for his undeniably self-centered personality, but all-too reluctant to acknowledge his even more powerfully compassionate, activist nature that spurred him to sacrifice pretty much everything for his vision of an intelligent human species that needn’t destroy itself. It’s as if embracing our inner “hope fiend” is as uncool today as, I dunno, believing that anyone who sets pen to paper or text to a blog is doing it for an ulterior, profit-based motive.

And all this is what I attempted to explain to the magazine executives in Germany yesterday. At their best, magazines —like any cultural product—serve their audiences not merely through their own value, but by allowing their readers to create value for themselves and one another. Sure, this means understanding that a magazine’s true customers are the readers, not the advertisers—a lesson that quality pay-TV is fast teaching their ad-based broadcast counterparts.

It’s also why I changed agents. Not because the first one was bad in any way, but because I met one who challenged me to consider what I thought was the most significant contribution to the world, rather than what might be expected to sell the most out of the gate. This is not the way most people who call themselves “literary agents” speak. It’s economics in reverse; not “how can I get the most value from my efforts,” but “how can I create the most value for everyone through them?”

Those of us dedicated to keeping Robert Anton Wilson’s flesh and finale as dignified as possible are rewarding a great writer for never selling out. But this ethos must not end with the passage of this individual, however heroic—not when he’s given us so many of the tools required to turn this society’s notion of value inside-out. If we’ve learned anything through all this, it’s that the universe we’re creating together needn’t be one where no good deed is left unpunished.