The Necessary Cracking in the Eggshell and Collective Awakening

My name is Daniel Pinchbeck. I'm mainly an author and writer. I've written a number of books. My first book came out in 2002. It was called Breaking Open the Head, and it was about psychedelic shamanism. Then in 2006, 2007, I came out with a book called 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl.

And then I did some other things. I was featured in a documentary. I helped start a company in New York called Evolver, which had a web magazine called Reality Sandwich, and we published a number of anthologies that I edited. But I didn't publish the third book until 2017, I would say. That was called How Soon Is Now, which was looking at the ecological emergency from a system design perspective.

And then more recently, in September, I published a book with a woman anthropologist on ayahuasca called When Plants Dream, overlooking the whole phenomenon of the global spread of ayahuasca. And I've been publishing some shorter, self-published essay books, one on UFOs and aliens, one where I'm rethinking aspects of 2012, and so on.

I had an existential urgency in my late twenties. I had grown up in a materialist kind of culture. Nobody I knew believed in anything mystical or spiritual or religious. Everybody just thought consciousness was entirely based in the brain, and the universe was an accidental kind of phenomenon. We were accidental parts of this accidental phenomenon. There wasn't really any meaning to anything.

So ultimately I had a massive crisis of consciousness in my mid to late twenties, and then I remembered psychedelics and started exploring them again. And that opened me up. I had so many powerful and transformative psychic experiences.

Another big issue for me from the beginning was: why are humans kind of out of control on the planet? Why do we seem to be destroying our own life support systems? Why is it impossible for people even to take that with the gravity and the severity that it requires? Even when I wrote Breaking Open the Head, the first time I went to the jungle, to the Amazon in Ecuador, I saw how fast the oil companies were pulling it apart and toxifying it.

And then, once I went through these kinds of... It's a long answer, I guess.

I went through various initiatory experiences. I visited the Bwiti in Gabon, taking iboga, and visited the Secoya tribal community in Ecuador to work with ayahuasca, and the Mazatecs in Mexico. And I began to have a lot of psychic experiences, paranormal experiences, that seemed linked to undergoing this kind of initiation, which is what many of these ancient texts talk about.

So I began to really come to the conclusion that there was more to this whole indigenous cosmology, worldview or occult perspective, that it actually had to be taken very seriously, and that our denial or repression of the psychic and spiritual and occult aspects of reality had to be somehow part of this multidimensional crisis that's been unleashed on the planet.

So once I developed that perspective, I wrote the 2012 book. I looked at the prophecies of cultures like the Maya and the Aztecs and the Hopi, and also the yuga cycle of ancient India, and the prophetic traditions of the monotheistic religions. Everybody seems to be pointing towards this time as this culmination, or this threshold of transformation.

In a sense. In the US, many fundamentalists believe that we are in this sort of apocalypse time, and they're actually trying to accelerate the exact conditions that are described in the last book, the Book of Revelation. But even from a Jungian perspective: Carl Jung believed that the archetype of the apocalypse, as he called it, was constellated in the human psyche in the 20th or 21st century.

Sure. I guess one question is whether one believes in things like karma and reincarnation and so on, and whether spirits or souls have evolved in different ways. People could go through exactly the same conditions as I went through, but not come out of it with a longing to connect with some deeper truth. But for whatever reason, there was my combination of my psychology and karma.

I guess I had some inklings, because my mother had been part of a group of writers and artists called the Beat Generation. She'd been involved with Jack Kerouac, and I knew Allen Ginsberg growing up. In the 1940s, after the Second World War, they were all in the circle around Columbia University in New York. And they were trying to figure out why there was no spontaneous expression of human individuality in their culture, why everything was kind of constructed. They felt there was no consciousness. They listened to the politicians and academics or whatever. So they decided they had to excavate their consciousness by whatever means necessary.

That included experiments with sexuality, experiments with drugs, journeying like hobos around the world and so on, to break through the constraints and the structures. They were a big inspiration for the hippie movement in the 60s.

One of the main things about the Beats was that you really couldn't trust any experience unless you had it for yourself. And they also really believed in direct experience, transmission of consciousness, spontaneity. I was working in the media and in magazines and so on, and most of the people I knew were really not into that. It was more about the sort of second-hand perception through the mediation of the culture, inside jokes. The idea that you would actually go out and excavate truth for yourself, or try to find something essential, was not very [common]. Now it's more popular in the culture than 15, 20 years [ago]. I think there's a lot more emphasis on that, partially because of the growing popularity of psychedelics, and for other reasons.

It wasn't a kind of copy of their experience. It was more like they gave me the...

The inspiration. Because I look at my friends who were in different circumstances than I was at that time, and who didn't end up going to Africa and taking iboga, or going to Ecuador and taking ayahuasca, and some of them ended up dying of heroin overdoses and so on, because I got very depressed.

But I think it was having that connection to the Beats, and this notion that you really could only... It's the same idea you find in Gnosticism or whatever: you have to open the door for yourself. Nobody else can open it. The fact that somebody else opens a door doesn't mean anything to you. You have to go and do that for yourself.

Yeah, maybe. Or generations before that. I think it's a lineage of Gnostics, romantics, alchemists, the underside of Christian capitalist culture.

Well, there have definitely been a number of turning points, but that was probably the most significant.

Then, writing the second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, I was researching the Maya and the Aztecs, and the Jungian ideas of the apocalypse, and all these other things. And I had a transmission experience: a voice that announced itself as the voice of Quetzalcoatl, giving me this prophetic transmission over the course of a week. So that was a channeling experience. I maintain skepticism about it even in the book, but that was quite transformational also.

And then, when I was starting my company in 2006, I really thought there was a way to rally people cleverly, to put together a new cultural paradigm to address the ecological emergency.

And now there's been another turning point in the last few years. I'm very pessimistic in a sense. Maybe there wasn't even time back then, but I feel that we may have really missed the boat. But then you have to see that as an evolutionary [process], that was just what happened: the effects of what we're doing to the planet are far outracing our capacities to awaken and restore the balance.

It was like the Saturn return: 28, 29, something like that. 29, 30. Breaking Open the Head came out when I was 35.

I was certainly very excited, because I was really fascinated by the idea of 2012: the way the Maya pointed to 2012 as the culmination of a long cycle, and the work that José Argüelles did about that in his books, like Earth Ascending and The Mayan Factor. That we might actually have a breakthrough, an uplift to a level of collective consciousness. What Argüelles talked about was the activation of the noosphere. And Terence McKenna, who was another major psychedelic figure, talked about it as the singularity or the eschaton.

So I thought those things were going to happen around 2012, and they still very well might happen. But I definitely felt that it was fascinating that this ancient culture was pointing towards this time. And we really could see it as such a crescendo, in terms of the effects we're having on the planet, the rapid evolution of our technology, the meeting of all the world's mystical traditions and so on.

I don't know how well versed you are in this material, or how interesting it is to you. Graham Hancock wrote this book, Fingerprints of the Gods, and he found all this evidence all around the world that they were looking towards 2012, as he thought, as a physical catastrophe. There would be massive flooding, or a comet would hit the earth or something. His book was a huge bestseller, and then none of that stuff happened like that.

But then I'm thinking: maybe we're actually the comet. Maybe what these ancient traditions saw was the end of the cycle, the culmination of a process beginning around that date. But that cycle is something that ultimately leads to a world that either doesn't contain humans at all, or contains very, very few of us, in much more precarious circumstances.

And I still think there's hope. That's what How Soon Is Now is about. We can see that we're going deeper into an emergency, right? Australia, massive fires: a billion animals just died in Australia. The Arctic at 65 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer by far than it's ever been. Things are melting like crazy. The ancient methane that's frozen in the Arctic is now releasing. And here, basically, the whole winter was like spring.

So things are actually accelerating faster than the worst predictions of a few years ago. And then you have the Pentagon, or different institutes, issuing reports that it's looking quite possible that there won't be human civilization as we now know it by 2050. But it could happen even faster than that, considering the acceleration of the acceleration. We have a feedback loop.

But it could still be that this is something like the necessary cracking of the egg. There's this strain, particularly in American thought, of conscious evolution, Barbara Marx Hubbard: this idea that maybe what's happening is that we're undergoing something like a caterpillar-into-butterfly metamorphosis. In the pupa stage, within the cocoon, the caterpillar is devouring every last piece of resource, and it looks like it's all done, but then it's going to emerge in another form.

And we can see, for instance, that we do now have a global communications infrastructure where anybody in the world, except maybe in China, is able to see your podcasts once you put them out, and so on. So theoretically, that could be utilized as a very, very rapid learning machine for humanity. If, for instance, we realized that we all had to stop consuming fossil fuels, and compost, and grow food, all of those skills could be taught through the internet. And we have 3D printers, so whatever tools people need could be made. So it could be that the whole thing that we've created is setting us up for this sudden collective awakening. And that would be amazing.

The other possibility: even if we had a huge catastrophe, floodings and droughts and everything, maybe we could still cobble it together. But it would basically eradicate the nation-state boundaries, the current financial system, forget all of that. We would need to use potentially blockchain or whatever to construct totally different ways for people to communicate, make decisions together, apportion resources and so on. So it could be that this whole capitalist system is on the verge of breaking down. But if we have enough creative and technical understanding and initiative, maybe even in that breakdown we can actually construct this other thing that would actually work for humanity.

So I can look at the different avenues. One is we just go extinct. One is we have this incredible breakthrough, and we decide to work for the human family as a whole, for everybody's benefit. And another is that smaller enclaves of wealthy people, and maybe handfuls of indigenous people in the mountains of Peru, will survive, and everybody else is just going to go down in flames. That almost seems like the most likely one, but I do see the range of options.

I think that we're actually in a very different reality now than we were 10 or 15 years ago, even eight years ago. Obviously, the Trump presidency is an unbelievable kind of phenomenon. Now we see the historical parallels to the rise of fascism and Hitler and so on. But there's something about it that feels almost dreamlike. It does almost feel like since 2012, there's been a shift in the human psyche. It's almost like we're on this collective psychedelic trip together. Everything is highly intensified, and a lot of people feel the amping up in different ways.

In the Nahua tradition, which is the Aztec tradition, there's a guy called Sergio Magaña, who has written a book called The Dawn of the Sixth Sun. And he says that their view of it, from the Aztec lineage, is that 2012 to 2021 is actually the transition from what they call the age of the fifth sun to the age of the sixth sun. The fifth sun, which was the last 5,200 years or whatever, was a sun of light, and we're moving into a sun of darkness. Those are their characteristics. The sun of light means a time when human consciousness is more focused on daylight clarity, waking rationality, reason, science, technology and so on. As we move into the sun of darkness, the darkness signifies the dream world and the psyche.

So actually, in a sense, we're going back into something more like a dream, like a lucid dream reality, where manifestation happens faster, where our thoughts can be very destructive, and so on. I think that is really fascinating, because it does feel like something like that is happening. Although when you over-literalize it, it can also seem kind of ridiculous.

I've done a lot of work trying to understand how to approach occult and esoteric cosmologies and concepts and so on. And it's a little bit different than just scientific evidence. You have to approach it with intuition, imagination, a kind of artistic perspective also.

Sort of like how in most cultures there's some kind of initiation?

We haven't [had that] in our culture, because this whole idea of there being other dimensions or other perceptions has been taken away. When most normal people here think of initiation, they think it's a cultural event: "Oh, it's cool, the Indians go and dance with feathers, or somebody stays up all night."

But actually, Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote a book called The Biology of Transcendence. And his argument in that book is that the part of our brain that makes us most distinctly human, I guess, is the prefrontal cortex. That has only evolved to its present state of complexity relatively recently, in the last few hundred thousand years. And although it's working, for it to mature and really properly function, it needs a secondary shock from outside, preferably in late adolescence or early adulthood. Otherwise, without that secondary cultural shock, which could also happen naturally through an accident or war or something like that, it's hard to escape the egoic individual self.

So that's why these cultures designed these initiations, where you would undergo some kind of training in visionary or transpersonal experience, through walkabout or fasting or firewalking or visionary plant shamanism. And the idea is that once people had gotten out and seen into the spirit realms a little bit, they were able to be welcomed back as mature adults into the community.

So in a society like ours that doesn't have that, people, and it's for both sexes, but maybe men particularly, often never become mature in that sense. They're always after their own self-interest. And that's what we see reflected in our failing institutions and so on.

Yeah. In Breaking Open the Head, I talked about Walter Benjamin, who was an amazing German Jewish critic. He noticed that the First World War was maybe, because of the loss of initiation... That no matter what, humans have to undergo some experience of what he talked about as commingling with the cosmic powers. That can be done through ritual, creatively, which we see in efforts to construct those types of rituals in the transformational festivals, like Burning Man or something. But if it doesn't happen through some culturally constructed ritual, then those same forces will often get unleashed destructively, through wars or genocides or whatever. Those forces get bottled up.

And in a way, obviously, we knew about the ecological crisis since the 60s. We even knew about greenhouse gases. We didn't know maybe that it was going to go this fast, but we knew that we were pushing the limits way back when. Why haven't we been able to deal with it? Well, it's almost like we've been forcing this situation, forcing a crisis circumstance, where we either bring about our own evolutionary metamorphosis or we die.

Well, I don't think we can survive with this current capitalist economic system. I have a lot of friends who are conscious or green entrepreneurs. I just talked to a friend yesterday, and he's starting a new company which is trying to figure out how to monetize the growing of a trillion trees around the planet. And I just have a dubiousness around this effort that you see now, of people trying to squeeze profit out of the ecological emergency. So that's the big issue.

In How Soon Is Now, I talked about the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri. His definition of capital is that, ultimately, capital is a social relation. Which basically means it doesn't really exist. It's something that we've reified. If somebody owns $1 billion, what do they actually own? They own legal documents, they own data that's swirling in the digital banking system and so on. Humans have made a social relation where we've defined that this person gets to control all of that value. But it's ultimately an imaginary construct of the mind.

So what we would really need to do would be to rethink from the ground up how we create value, how we ascribe value. And then really only allow value-based activity that is supporting this transition right now. It would be kind of draconian in a way, but we're definitely going to hit the skids if we keep doing this.

It's a system design thing that has been going on for a few centuries, and it got us to this point. It was extremely efficient. It did all sorts of things for us. But it's now in direct conflict with our survival.

Obviously in the US there's the Green New Deal. I think that's a great idea. That's still within the current paradigm of the dollar-based economy, but rather than creating these huge deficits and handing it to the military to build more weapons of torture and surveillance devices, why not, if you're going to create money out of nothing anyway, fund just transitions to an ecological, regenerative society? And then we do have lots of scalable solutions that could be exponentially implemented, finding the juncture of indigenous techniques and contemporary technologies.

Even there, it's quite possible it's too late, to be honest, in terms of the curve of what's happening with the methane. CO2 lasts in the atmosphere for about a hundred years. Methane is something like 30 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas than CO2, but it only lasts in the atmosphere for about 10 years. And that's what's bubbling up in the Arctic right now. What you often have in the extinction record of the past are these periods where tons of species go extinct in a short period of time. That's probably because you have this massive eruption of methane, and suddenly you have a six-degree warmer climate in a decade. And every organism has evolved to fit into certain niches.

And then the other issue with the warming is that we lose the tropical forests. We're losing them right now. We lose the plankton in the ocean. The plankton produces 60% of our oxygen, the forests produce 20% of our oxygen. So then what's producing our oxygen at that point? I don't know.

But anyway, the hopeful point would be to really turn humanity's direction and focus in this direction. You could have global tree planting projects every weekend, reforestation projects, people learning on a handicraft level how to work organically with bees. We can do what we can to stop and reverse the damage. But at the moment, we're accelerating in the other direction.

In terms of the economics, I think it would be a blockchain-based system that would ascribe value to ecologically regenerative systems. And then your profit would be based on how much you are enhancing and contributing to those systems. And if you're removing from those systems, then you're penalized harshly, or something. The opposite of what we have now.

At the moment, with the capitalist economic system, you have externalities. Corporations don't have to pay to pollute. Even you are shooting me with all this lovely gadgetry from Apple and so on. Every six months or a year, they make people who want to stay on top of this stuff buy a whole new thing. It's full of rare minerals, conflict minerals, minerals from Africa. 4 million people have died in the Congo or wherever because of genocides over conflict minerals, to make these iPhones. These things could be built to be component-based, so you don't replace a whole model as soon as it goes down. But they've made them as slick as possible, as seductive as possible. It's part of the capitalist system, based on planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption, which is what drives the profit margins for these companies.

Well, I had hopes for the Extinction Rebellion movement, but now it doesn't feel like it has enough traction, to me. Any movement that starts, whether it's Occupy or Extinction Rebellion, is like what an occultist would call a hypersigil. It attracts certain types of energies to it. In a way I liked Extinction Rebellion, because it was super punk rock, with a kind of "fuck the system" energy and so on. But I think that we need a hypersigil for a global movement that is extremely utopian and super positive.

And also for me, as I said, I've gone through mystical and psychic experiences. So I know that there is a deeper story to the nature of reality: that we are woven into the nature of consciousness itself, that the world we're experiencing is consciousness having a dream, or telling a story to itself, and we're all part of that story. I think that actually there is a new paradigm that can be defined, based on a precise integration of science and mysticism, quantum physics and Vedanta and so on. And that provides a sound basis for people to feel that their lives actually have meaning, and that they can sacrifice material excess to contribute to something that will bring them evolution on a spiritual and soul level.

So that, for me, would be [the way]. But I tend to doubt that there's time, because I feel people have gotten so imprisoned by the indoctrination of the media and commercial ideologies.

And that's why I've also been fascinated by the psychedelic renaissance: it could at least provide people with those direct experiences where they have the insight that there's a bigger story going on. That can often change people's focus faster than other things. But on the other hand, I'm also beginning to have questions even about that, because I feel that it's being domesticated into the entrepreneurial or capitalist system, rather than being seen as something that can deprogram people from that whole system.

Microdosing is now seen as something that you give to Google engineers and it makes them more productive. The same thing happened with mindfulness. The capitalist machine is incredibly efficient at assimilating anything different, anything threatening. It's like a metabolism: it absorbs whatever it can use, and everything else ultimately gets shunted to the side.

Right. And he still had no problem tormenting teenage workers in Asia and stuff like that.

Well, I don't think that psychedelics by themselves make you an empathic and enlightened soul. In fact, they can be used for power and so on.

And also, I had high hopes for Burning Man a while back. When I wrote Breaking Open the Head, I was very excited when I first went. But over time, I feel that, once again, it's this assimilation process. There was a tension between an anarchist, hippie, "let's save the world" radical spirit, and a more hedonistic, libertarian ethos. And I feel that over time the hedonistic and libertarian ethos has triumphed.

Burning Man has ten very interesting principles: leave no trace, nobody's a spectator, everybody's a participant, et cetera. But it leaves the question of social inequality and wealth kind of off the table. So essentially, Burning Man becomes a reality defined by the wealthy people, who are the ones who build the big stages or the big art cars, and people gravitate to the spectacle of these things. So in the end, it has really just replicated the dominant culture. Instead of having yachts, you have art cars. And that liberational spark, I feel, has now been assimilated into something [else].

It's still better than there not being a Burning Man. You and I have gone there and had really amazing conversations with people at the pinnacle of these different professions, wealth holders and so on.

And once again, what's going to be most interesting to see is what happens in the next few years, as this crisis ratchets up and intensifies. Some super wealthy people may decide that they're going to... I already know some who moved to New Zealand, or developed underground bunkers or something. But that's not a sustainable solution either. That's no solution.

That's an interesting question. I don't really think in those terms, man. I grew up in a literary culture. My mother was a literary writer and editor. So when I grew up, the idea was to create a book, a literary icon that would last generations and so on. Now I feel that the pace of transformation is so quick, and what we're going towards may be so different, that I'm just trying to figure out how to help the most, how to be of service in the process.

I definitely feel that, being humans on the earth, we're in an interesting, exciting situation. It's like an incredible video game, movie, holographic projection that we get to experience. And certainly it would be more interesting and exciting to see a positive evolution, and to participate in that.

Whereas what we see now is kind of grim. We have people in the US who are now hating on black people again and storing guns. China is mind-controlling everybody, making it so that if they step out of line, they lose all their privileges or whatever, and that's probably going to transfer to other cultures that are similarly repressive. We could move into a totally totalitarian or oppressive paradigm, combined with total ecological breakdown. That would just be disgusting.

Whereas we could also move into awakening into our true nature as divinities, unifying our human family, and using our creativity, what we can learn from indigenous cultures and what we can take from modern technologies. We definitely need to be more discerning and careful about how we use technology, and then re-engineer our planet, our situation, to be an enduring, heaven on earth kind of situation.