With the ongoing meltdown of our financial system, we have entered a new epoch of uncertainty, a time of improvisation and discovery. At the same time, we face much deeper threats to our future that must be addressed. The absurd deficit numbers and quadrillion dollar bailouts mean nothing compared to the far more ominous data on the health of the biosphere. Human activity is rapidly eroding the planet's natural capital, with 90% of the large fish gone from the oceans, with tropical forests and coral reefs disappearing. As climate change accelerates and Peak Oil approaches, sea levels rise and agricultural tables shrink. It is estimated that 25% of all mammallian species -- perhaps all species in general -- will go extinct within the next three decades.
Such problems go beyond the scope of current policy discussions. My personal hypothesis is that we have reached an evolutionary crisis as a species, and the only way we can hope to resolve this crisis is through a self-willed evolution -- a spontaneous mutation -- in human consciousness itself. We will need to change the basic operating system of our civilization within the next few years. To make a shift to sustainable patterns and resilient local communities in an accelerated time frame may require something like a spiritual revolution, accompanied by a deep transformation in our basic values and ethics.
I developed my unusual perspective on current affairs through my research into the abstruse, occult, and esoteric. I am the author of two books, Breaking Open the Head (Broadway Books, 2002) and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin. 2006). My first book is a study of tribal shamanism and the psychedelic experience, a subject avoided by the mainstream since the tumultuous '60s. My second book explores the prophecies about our time held by indigenous people and traditional cultures around the world. I studied the Classical Maya, whose 5,125 year Long Count ends on December 21, 2012, and the Hopi in Arizona, who believe we are in a transition between two planetary states, the Fourth World and the Fifth World. Many indigenous cultures have prophecies about this time as a transformative threshold for our world.
I began my research as a skeptic -- a Manhattan atheist who had written for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Esquire, and many other publications. However, I was a skeptic with a longing to know if any other dimensions of the soul or the spirit existed, despite the reductive materialism of modern science. In my quest for illumination, I underwent a tribal initiation in Gabon, eating iboga, a bitter-tasting psychedelic root bark that induces a visionary state. I visited the Mazatec Indians in Oaxaca, taking mushrooms in ceremony. I went to the Amazon in Ecuador, drinking ayahuasca, a potion brewed from plants, with shamans of the Secoya tribe. I also explored the postmodern neo-tribal culture of the West Coast, and experimented with new substances created in labs.
Over the course of my journeys, I had a series of psychic experiences and also collected a vast amount of anecdotal data from others who had followed a similar path. While writing Breaking Open the Head, I switched from a Freudian view of the psyche to a Jungian one. In his work, Jung developed a capacious model of human psychology that validated psychic experiences such as telepathy, dream foretellings, synchronicities, and so on. If such experiences have validity, then consciousness is not brain-based. Instead, the brain could act like a receiver and transmitter for consciousness, which is ultimately non-local.
Breaking Open the Head offered an argument for reconsidering the psychedelic experience. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, psychiatrists considered substances such as mushrooms, LSD, DMT, and peyote to be astonishingly safe "wonder drugs," and the most profound tools for exploring the depth dimensions of the human psyche they had ever found. The upsurge of interest in shamanism and psychedelics during the '60s led to a ferocious backlash. Psychedelic substances were demonized and legitimate research on them was stopped for several decades. In the last few years, there has been a resurgence of research in psychedelics, replicating the positive results of experiments conducted more than a generation ago. A recent John Hopkins study gave psilocybin to volunteers who had never taken a psychedelic before. According to The Wall Street Journal and CNN, many of the participants reported a long-term positive change in their worldview from the experience.
The Dionysian excesses of the 1960s produced opportunists like Timothy Leary, who proclaimed that an entire generation should "turn on, tune, in, and drop out." Since then, we have learned a great deal about the pros and cons of psychedelic exploration. Used haphazardly, psychedelics such as LSD can occasionally induce psychological problems or expose previously undiagnosed conditions, such as schizophrenia. However, many drugs that our society condones pose significant health risks, such as alcohol, tobacco, and anti-depressants. A larger question is what our society might gain from the legitimate use and study of psychedelics, if their benefits as well as risks were well understood and articulated.
In indigenous cultures, these substances are considered to be "medicine," healing for both the body and the mind. There are very few reports of natural psychedelics such as ayahuasca and peyote inducing psychological problems. Personally, I have found ayahuasca, especially, to be a positive influence, leading to personal insights and an integrative understanding. Ayahuasca is still illegal in the United States because it contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a psychedelic compound produced in our own brains and expressed by many plants. However, a recent US Supreme Court decision protected the sacramental use of the potion by Uniao do Vegetal, a Brazilian religion that uses ayahuasca in its ceremonies.
I propose that our society did not outlaw psychedelic drugs because they endangered health or sanity. The psychedelic experience was ridiculed and demonized because it challenged the values and beliefs of mainstream society and revealed gaps in Western rationalism. When young people took psychedelics, they explored the inner realms of their consciousness and developed a deeper connection to nature. They lost their drive to dedicate themselves to wage labor or corporate jobs. As they became more sensitized to their environment, they were more likely to protest against environmental destruction and military assaults. Psychedelics remain powerful tools for self inquiry that can lead to an awareness of social conditioning.
Rather than a freaky aberration, the 1960s might be considered the first phase of an initiatory process for the modern Western psyche. Forty years later, it is possible that we are entering the next, deeper phase of our initiation. There is a growing movement of people studying shamanic practices in the US and Europe, as well as many other spiritual traditions. From Jack Kerouac to Ekhart Tolle, the modern West has developed a deepening fascination with Eastern disciplines such as Buddhist meditation and yoga in the last fifty years. The study of mysticism can no longer be dismissed as a fad or a trend, but should be seen as a real shift in priority for many millions of us.
One lesson of shamanic initiation is that each person has to take responsibility for themselves, and not depend on outside authorities. Despite Obama's victory, there is no sign that our government - trapped by inertia and beholden to hordes of special interests - can confront the biospheric crisis that our species has unleashed on the earth. If this is the case, it means that we as individuals have to organize to bring about social transformation. One great model is Transition Town, a grassroots form of social organizing developed in in the UK. Transition Town provides motivated individuals with a set of techniques to unite their community around critical issues like climate change, energy, and food production.
The effort to bring ecological responsibility into our daily lives and build resilient local communities could be part of a spiritual practice that integrates all aspects of life. Rather than being passive victims of circumstance, we can become active co-creators of our world. According to the Hopi, "We are the ones we have been waiting for." The question is whether we will get here in time.
tradition Daniel mentions. It means to me that every individual is responsible for their own understanding and development of the spiritual aspect of their life. This does not mean I don't get regular tune ups by reading a book by Ekhart Tolle or Depak Chopra.
Frankly, I find that people who prioritize mind-blowing visions are almost impossible to work with for any of the change that we so desperately need. And don't get me started on 2012 predictions--oh wait, I already did get started on them. See my HuffPo blog post "Why 2012 Predictions are Really Stupid" for more about the level of discourse that passes for profundity these days.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-hill/why-2012-predictions-are_b_156959.html
They probably can''t.
How can we persuade the hostile Powers That Be to work for peace'n'plenty? We CANNOT. It will never happen because IT NEVER HAS, and the best predictor of the future is the past.
There HAVE ALWAYS BEEN educated Beta Male leftys working for "change", with incremental advancements. IT'S ALWAYS THE SAME AVANT-GARDE.
The problem is not the lack of plans (which we also don't have) it is HUMAN NATURE.
Man wants to fight and see who dominates. Alpha jostling. If there is no conflict, Man creates one. We are hard wired. If we REALLY want CHANGE beyond driving a Prius to seminars, meditating and saying "sacred" we must amp up OR down to the "dominators'" level because THEY'RE WINNING.
THEY'RE SMARTER, MORE PASSIONATE THAN WE ARE. Any suicide bombers for equality?
"My deep concern is that we are indeed running out of time" sez you, Daniel, but we ARE out of time. Yet we - you - muse ayahuasca, shamanism, Spirit Guides, 2012, fractals, instead of prioritizing definable action.
To anyone who suggests I 'educate' myself about the MANY POSITIVE WORLD WIDE PROGRAMS AND SPIRITUAL, HARD WORKING PEOPLE that have made a Critical Difference in improving what-fricking-ever... I say show me the dent they've made.
Ayahuasca, 'shamanism', meditation, etc. will not cause positive world change of any kind unless the people using it are *already* IN ACTION on that path.
http://www.xanaduxero.blogspot.com
I don't see how Mr. Pinchbeck is trying to force some kind of epistemological conversion upon the reader so much as using the eschatological horizon of 2012 to concretize an undeniable shift that is all around us as well as provide an autobiographical context for his own transformative experience. Perhaps the language of ancient cultures is too distracting or threatening for modern sensibilities, in the same manner even that psychedelic culture threatened the underlying values of the technocracy as described in the article. But that is still not the point of the article, which, to me, seems to carefully avoid fetishizing the idea of 2012 and the discrepancy between our view of time and that of the Mayans.
An initiation of personal responsibility, ecological awareness(in the deepest sense), and the resurrection of dormant imaginative capacities that preclude the cognition of a spatio-temporally non-localizable center of consciouss acting through physical manifestation should be the focus. If they were, then questions surrounding the validity of long counts and apocalyptic thinking would answer themselves. If the focus remains upon debunking "myths" essential claims for one side or another, then the question will remain locked in the tautological prison of a neurotic repitition compulsion, leaving our fate to fulfull us.
Thanks, Daniel! Your willingness to share your knowledge is greatly appreciated.
Time is a product of the motion of celestial bodies. One does not exist without the other. The longest cycle our society considers to be significant is the most obvious one: the earth's orbit around the sun. There are, however, untold numbers of other cycles that we are either not aware of or consider to be insignificant. The Mayans identified one such cycle and put a lot of effort into passing it on to us in stone. I think it's highly unlikely that they would go to all that trouble based on something they made up out of the blue.
The idea that an entire civilization would create cycles of time based on nothing is ridiculous. There's something there. What it is, however, is anybody's guess.
The key word here is CYCLE. The year 2000 was not a cycle. It was a single point in linear time that people thought was significant based on the supposed birth of Jesus and our base 10 numbering system.
Our calendar year is a cycle based on the earth's orbit. That's as far as we go with cycles. Everything beyond that is linear backwards and forwards.
The amazing thing about the Mayan long count is that it is a cycle that resets approximately every 5125 years. Contrary to popular belief, the Mayan calendar does not "end" on Dec. 21, 2012. It resets. Most of the theories out there focus on the "end" date being a winter solstice. This completely ignores the fact that the previous cycle "ended" in our month of August.
Fascinating and mysterious to say the least.