Theatre of the Mind Podcast Episodes

2012 with Daniel Pinchbeck

Kelly Howell: Welcome once again to Theatre of the Mind. Your host: Kelly Howell. To continue our exploration of the Mayan calendar and 2012, our guest today is author Daniel Pinchbeck. In his book "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" Daniel takes the role of a modern shaman and embarks on a journey of exploration into what he calls "an extravagant thought experiment that revolves around 2012.

Hey, Daniel.

Daniel Pinchbeck: How's it going?

Kelly: Good. How are you?

Daniel: Good.

Kelly: You sound good.

Daniel: Yes, I'm on a land line.

Kelly: Oh, OK, great! I know; they're hard to find these days.

Daniel: They are, yeah.

Kelly: So should we start with your version of what you do? And I'd also like to know what inspired you to write your book.

Daniel: I had written the first book "Breaking Open the Head" that was about psychedelic drugs and shamanism. And basically what happened was that in my late 20's I'd had this sort of massive existential spiritual crisis. I'd been working in the magazine world in New York, and it was this sort of secular materialist culture and I had never really had my own kind of breakthrough into mysticism or whatever. So at that point I began to look around and I remembered my psychedelic experiences from when I was younger. So I decided that I would make that a kind of serious inquiry. So I began to visit different tribal cultures and learn about the sort of evolution of psychedelic cultures of the 60's. I ended up taking Ahayuasca in the Amazon with a tribe and working with Iboga, sometimes also known as Ibogaine, in West Africa, and visiting the Mazatec Indians in Mexico, taking mushrooms. And I had a number of experiences during these experiences and other experiences that sort of convinced me of the validity of shamanic work and that there was a kind of psychic dimension to existence.

So when I'd had those types of experiences, that include synchronicities and foretellings and sort of occult experiences, I then realized that there was a lot more to indigenous knowledge than we normally understood. And so that led me to think about not only what they say about shamanism but what indigenous cultures believe about the time that we're in now. And I began to discover that all around the world there's a kind of coherent set of prophecies or foretellings about this time as being this sort of crucial transition transformation time.

And then the most kind of systematic or scientific or sophisticated kind of view or sophisticated model of that system is the classical Mayan civilization, who really evolved to be highly advanced. They built these amazing structures and spent hundreds of years kind of looking at the sky, doing astronomical research and also kind of using non‑ordinary states of consciousness to explore the nature of the future.

And they ended up devising this whole complex calendar which ends in the year 2012; or at least the end of a Great Cycle happens then. So, yes, that was how I got interested in the whole thing.

Kelly: It's interesting too. I just got off the phone with Carl Callaman, and he spoke about these different Great Cycles, or these underworlds, as almost archetypal in their quality of energy. So, your experiences with the shamans and the sacred medicine kind of fits with all that too, doesn't it?

Daniel: Yeah. I mean he has a very fascinating and compelling kind of construct of how the calendar works. And there are other people who've also been involved in studying it, which include John Major Jenkins and Jose Arguelles. In my book "2012" I sort of tried to integrate their different perspectives, because they differ on some of the specifics. But basically in a larger sense they're saying the same type of thing; that we're at this threshold point where there could be this evolution of consciousness on a global level and somehow that seems to be defined by this calenderical system. And whether that is actually going to happen or not is really up to us right now.

Kelly: Can you explain what you mean, especially for people that haven't read your book, what you mean by your subtitle, "the return of Quetzalcoatl"?

Daniel: Yeah. Quetzalcoatl is an Aztec word for a deity, a greater deity. He's often represented as a feathered serpent, a plumed serpent, a feathered snake. A Quetzal is a bird with rainbow colored feathers; Coatl is the serpent. So, yes, so this is an archetype or symbol, or deity who appears in different forms and different times and has been involved with... According to the Mesoamericans there were these different creation cycles, these different worlds, and we're now in the fourth world. And in previous world cycles humanity reached a certain point and then kind of degenerated, and then was kind of sent back to the underworld. Quetzalcoatl would go down and retrieve fragments that were left of humanity and bring them back up to the surface to try again. I see the idea of Quetzalcoatl as an archetype that represents integration. So it's the meeting of bird and snake, which is air and earth, or heaven and earth, or spirit and matter. And it could also be the integration of knowledge systems. So I think about it as the integration of the Western empirical scientific rational way of being and knowing with this more kind of shamanic and mystical knowledge system. And I feel that's really what this kind of evolution of consciousness is all about. It's not about retreating from rationality back into kind of intuition and mysticism, or the opposite. It's really about integrating science and spirituality.

So we see that happening with some of the advances in quantum physics, and the Dali Lama's work that he's been sponsoring with brain scientists, meditating monks, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, work on psychic research. So we're really being able to substantiate the kind of subjective experiences and occult experiences that people have had through the ages.

Kelly: Yeah, the blending of ancient and modern technology. You start off your book, I love the way you start your book, by saying that our civilization is on a path of ever increasing acceleration. And you ask "but what are rushing toward?" What are we rushing toward?

Daniel: Well, I think at the moment we're rushing toward some kind of cataclysm. I mean, we're using up the resources at a very high rate, and this kind of increasing militarism; we're kind of undoing a lot of the rights that were won over the last few centuries. So, yeah, we have to kind of look at the direction that our culture is heading and really think about where could we be heading. It's a part of what my work is really, I think, about. It's sort of proposing that there's a whole different orientation for global civilization which would really incorporate the quest for spirituality or a kind of illumination. So you have like Tibetan Buddhism, and Tibetan culture was very focused on that as kind of the center, the meaning of the civilization.

Perhaps the classical Mayan culture was similar. So at the moment we have a kind of materialist orientation; it's just about the ego and the individual kind of getting ahead, and we don't really have a sense of what humanity as a species is doing on the Earth of what our higher purpose is.

Kelly: You also have a very optimistic side to that view too?

Daniel: Yeah, well I think that experiences that I have and continue to have, the psychic experiences and paranormal experiences and synchronicities, suggest that there is this reality of the psyche, that there is a whole other potential story for how humanity can develop.

Kelly: Yeah, you have some very interesting theories on how cell phones, the Internet, and social networks are repatterning consciousness. Can you tell us about that?

Daniel: Sure. There's actually a nice little animation video clip, where I should have narrated some of my ideas, at postmoderntimes.com. But yeah, I think you can look at this kind of transition in terms of these three aspects of the biosphere and the technosphere and the noosphere is one way to look at it. But one aspect of what is happening in technology is this incredible evolution that is taking place and I think that that evolution is changing our lived experiences of being selves. So in some ways I think that's very positive. If you look at the 19th and early/mid 20th century, there was existentialism, romantic isolation, the sense of this end point of individuation.

And now I think in some weird way cell phones, social networks, and email are kind of meshing us back together so you get quicker and quicker feedback loops and reactions. And connectivity has increased, so in a way I think we're being meshed together into a global tribe and that I find very interesting, and potentially very positive.

Kelly: It's fascinating too and the speed with which people can bring their creativity out to the public and worldwide, basically, is kind of phenomenal, what's happening.

Daniel: It's unbelievable. And that's like a new phenomenon. It's fascinating because that's happening in the technological realm, but then also many people that I know are reporting more and more psychic experiences and synchronistic experiences, the sense that if you have an attention about something it manifests faster than it previously did, so it almost seems as if the boundary between the psychic and the physical is becoming less dense than it once was.

Kelly: I have a theory that the time delay between though and manifestation has shortened and it's almost like technology has been kind of like training wheels for us. We're getting used to having that instant access, instant connectivity, and so when we're not attached to some computer we're still having that experience.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly.

Kelly: And people are getting more telepathic and more intuitive.

Daniel: Yeah, maybe some people are, yeah. Of course, the problem is that it's very easy. If you look at this idea of biosphere, technosphere, and noosphere as these kind of three realms where things are changing really quickly. To chart the destruction of the biosphere and how out of control that's gotten to the point where we're looking at 25% of species potentially being extinct in thirty years and the fish are 90% fished out of the ocean, it's very clear that some kind of massive social paradigm shift has to happen very quickly, on that level.

Kelly: According to the Mayan calendar, next fall in November we go into the sixth day, which is supposed to be blossoming.

Daniel: I wouldn't really say according to the Mayan calendar, I would say more according to Callaman's model...

Kelly: Oh, OK. Alright.

Daniel: As far as I know, that's more of a model that he constructed when he looked at the nine levels of the pyramids. I don't think that's embedded in the Mayan calendar as such. I certainly haven't seen or heard of it being separate from his theory. But I think that's very important because Jose Aguelas also made a sort of interpretative matrix around the Mayan calendar, which he called the Dream Spell, but actually his challenged version of the Mayan calendar is not the Mayan calendar. So I just think we have to be careful about these kind of interpretative systems that people have created around this thing in comparison to this thing itself.

Kelly: Right, because Callaman states that he's going at it from a scientific approach.

Daniel: Well he may have come up with something really extraordinary. I find that, however he devised it, it seems really powerful and kind of accurate. Well this year will be very interesting, from now until November it's the fifth night or something?

Kelly: We're in the fifth night going into the sixth day.

Daniel: The fifth night is supposed to be when...

Kelly: Teth. [laughs]

Daniel: ...break apart and break down...

Kelly: The last time the fifth night happened was between 1931 and 1951, something like that. We had Hitler, we had the depression, Hiroshima...

Daniel: ...the Final Solution and all that stuff.

Kelly: Anyway, who knows...

Daniel: And so far it looks like it's not going to be as bad as all of that, so it might hurt his theory, you never know.

Kelly: It could and it's also only one year compared to twenty years, according to his theory. Anyway, but you spent time with Jose Aguelas. What was that like?

Daniel: It was cool, I liked him.

Kelly: Yeah?

Daniel: And by the way I'm not like...although the book is called 2012, I'm not like a 2012 fundamentalist. For me, it may be that there is some tremendous event on December 21st, 2012 at 11:11am when the sun and dark rifts kind of conjoin, or it may be that we're in a changed period that lasts from now until 2016 or whatever.

Kelly: We don't know.

Daniel: We don't need to be so incredibly precise about this change. I mean, for me, when you look at the ecological data and the evolution of technology and the change in the nature of the psyche, we are entering new territory as a species. And I would say that we have the potential to catalyze a very positive shift into a higher order global civilization. Whether we manage to actualize that potential or whether we end up in a destructive, global prison situation, police state where the pollution gets worse and worse and all the animals are gone and then we don't even make it as a species, that's for us to decide in the next period.

Kelly: So are we at a tipping point?

Daniel: Oh, yeah yeah. We clearly are at a tipping point.

Kelly: You devoted a large part of your book to the investigation of crop circles. What do you think is responsible for their creation?

Daniel: I think that from the work that I did on it, and I know that most people find them a little bit ludicrous, but if you go in deep and study and visit them, I don't think that there's any way that the whole phenomenon is human made, so it suggests that there's other forms of intelligence in the universe. So I see them as a teaching on the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality, and that teaching has to be coming from other orders of galactic intelligence, potentially other forms of galactic civilizations, because it means that there are some adults out there somewhere. [laughs].

Kelly: Barbara Hand Clow, who we interviewed, said our planet has been under quarantine because we've been so bad.

Daniel: Yeah, I guess, what is that like channeled information or whatever? I mean, I try to be careful about what I feel confident in saying based on the kind of work and research I do and what seems more speculative. But it may that we are only now beginning to become conscious enough as a species that we can come into some kind of aware interaction with other forms of being in the universe.

Kelly: Well when you went in to investigate crop circles, what was your opinion? Did you have a previous opinion? Were you a little cynical, did you believe in Bob and Dave or whatever those guys were with their boards?

Daniel: I had first written about it...my introduction was to write a piece about it for "Wired" magazine. When I interviewed a bunch of people about it for "Wired," I already began to realize there was a bigger story going on about it when I began to look at the crop circles online. So, I tried to remain skeptical but I was open and tried to remain equally skeptical of my own skepticism. I think with a lot of people the skepticism is becoming sort of like an archetype and people get trapped into the skepticism, which is actually kind of a belief in secular materialism masquerading as skepticism.

Kelly: So you went in with a healthy skepticism but you knew that there was something there?

Daniel: It felt highly likely when I'd done these interviews. Even when I talked to a bunch of hoaxers and skeptics and staunch scientists, their reasoning didn't seem fully reasoned out, it seemed to be coming more from an emotional place. When you look at the crop circle images, the ones that people have done even given a lot of time and money from corporations, they don't have the same kind of pristine quality of there being some kind of impression from above that the ones that are mysterious have. And then also there has been work done by biophysicists who've studied what happens to the plants in the formations and have discovered molecular changes. They've published papers in peer‑reviewed science journals which are basically about how there are these molecular changes to the crop that really can only be caused by some kind of electromagnetic or microwave energy coming from above, so it doesn't really correlate with it just being made by people.

Kelly: And you were in one, right?

Daniel: Oh, I was in dozens of them.

Kelly: And could you feel anything?

Daniel: In ones that are new there's definitely a kind of energetic charge. I mean, a lot of people feel called upon to sink to the ground and meditate.

Kelly: What about you; what did you feel?

Daniel: I definitely felt compelled to be very, very still. The closer you can get to where one actually has been imprinted, the sort of more powerful the energy of it.

Kelly: Have you kept up with what's going on now with crop circles?

Daniel: Sure. I was there last summer briefly.

Kelly: Are the patterns continuing to be more complex?

Daniel: It seems like it, yeah, in the last few years. There's actually been a whole bunch of really complex ones that have used imagery from sort of the Aztec and Mayan world too.

Kelly: Oh! They have? I haven't kept up with it.

Daniel: Well, then it's also very interesting because there's been... I've been reading a lot about extraterrestrial stuff. There's Steven Greer's work with the disclosure project, and Richard Hoagland's new book "Dark Mission". And there were some very complex UFO sightings with all these symbols on them. The UFOs seem to have evolved, at least within our kind of archetypal imagination or however they're presenting themselves, to these much more complex vehicles with these complex symbol systems. This guy had a website and he claims that he worked in Silicon Valley trying to reverse engineer alien technology for the government. And he presented this manual of these symbols and he explained that these symbols that were on the outside of these UFOs were actually a kind of operating system for the UFOs and even if a tiny little change was made in the symbol system the whole form of how they worked would change.

And those symbols seem to relate to the evolution of the crop circle. So I began to realize that maybe the crop circles were some kind of primer in a kind of alchemical sign system that could actually base consciousness manipulating technology.

Kelly: This guy that you're talking about, is the one who wrote "Dark Mission"? Somebody else just told me about that book too.

Daniel: No. There's a website. It's a guy whose pseudonym is Isaac, and it was the Caret Project. I have a web magazine called "RealitySandwich.com". We've written about it a bit, and I did a review of "Dark Mission" also. Yeah, "Dark Mission" is interesting although he's more in the sort of conspiratorial mode. He believes that NASA is actually an occult organization where sort of Free Masons and SS rocket scientists came together to kind of disguise and hide all this information they discovered. For instance...

Kelly: Like zeitgeist or something.

Daniel: Stuff like that. But it's definitely compelling. I don't know exactly what to make of it. But he definitely does a lot of work in this area, in the field.

Kelly: And you also segue from crop circles into sacred geometry. Do you believe that these geometric forms can affect our consciousness?

Daniel: The crop circles, a lot of them are based on the sacred geometry and also seem to be indicating, once again, this kind of integration of science and mysticism. So they'll take like the Star of David and make fractals out of it and stuff like that. So they're showing how a modern chaos math and fractals can relate to the symbology from mystical systems.

Kelly: What are you working on now?

Daniel: Well, first of all I'm working on editing this website, RealitySandwich.com, which has been going great. We're really sort of offering a lot of different types of articles and essays around these new paradigm ideas. And I'm working on another book, really thinking about how system transformation could take place. I mean, if there's any validity to Callaman's work or all this Mayan calendar speculation it could be that we're about to go through some really intense system transformation process at a global level.

So I've been looking at different political theorists like post‑Marxist theorists like Antonio Negri, Michael Hart. Also ideas about, like for instance, currency reform, how you could create complementary currencies that use negative interest so that people wouldn't hoard it so much, it would be more about getting money back into circulation.

It's sort of like, if you look at our society's problems at the moment it's like we have a series of design flaws and in a way we need design solutions that could begin to mesh things back together in a more sustainable fashion.

Kelly: That's wonderful. I wish more people were doing that. Maybe our government one day will do that.

Daniel: Yeah, maybe. Or maybe we'll transition to a different form of government.

Kelly: I want to ask you about your hallucinogenic experiences. So you went to the Amazon, you went to Africa, you went to Mexico, and you took all these different sacred medicines to explore archetypal realms. What was the most compelling piece of knowledge that you gained from that exploration?

Daniel: Well, the most compelling piece of knowledge?

Kelly: Mm‑hm. I mean what...

Daniel: Well, I mean the whole thing was deeper and deeper types of revelations for me. I came from this New York City secular background and then I began to have all these visionary experiences of archetypal domains and deities and interact with spirits of the dead and my ancestors and was given information by shamans that turned out to be accurate. So I can't really isolate one piece of information or knowledge, but it was a whole process of relearning what I understood about the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality. I think one aspect of psychedelics is it sort of changes your conception of possibility and time and it sort of deconditions you from a lot of your concepts about society. I don't really see them as... I think the 60's made a big mistake when psychedelics were seen as answers. Timothy Leary was like yelling at everybody to drop out and...

Kelly: Drop out and drop in.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. So I see them more as tools, which if used properly can really give you new levels of insight into your own life and into the world that we share.

Kelly: Now, Iboga is being used, which I didn't know about until I read your book, but it's a medicine that's being used to help people get off heavy drug addictions, right?

Daniel: Exactly, yeah.

Kelly: Could you explain your experience with it, or what you know about it and how that would happen?

Daniel: When I first did it in Africa in an initiation, one thing that happened during my experience was...I think I was probably 28 or 29 at that point and I was in part of this literary media world of New York and there was a lot of hard drinking. I don't think I was an alcoholic, but I definitely drank a lot at parties and stuff. During this ceremony I began to see all of these images of myself at parties drinking, acting like a jerk; you know, waking up hung over and not able to do anything. It was almost like these loops of these visions of how alcohol was affecting my creativity and my personality and my life. Then, really after that experience I cut down on the use of alcohol significantly. I was never really enthusiastic about it ever again. And so, that's how it affected me. I definitely have a few friends who quit heroin use after taking Ibogaine a few times in treatment. I think it's a combination of psychological and physiological aspects.

There's one researcher who thinks that Ibogaine makes a mesh that have the hemispheres of the brain back together again or allow them to function in a balanced way for awhile. So, that just gives you a window of opportunity to change patterns that you've set for yourself.

Kelly: And these are different than, say...oh, back when I was in New York in the 80s a lot of people were doing Ecstasy therapeutically with a therapist who was not ingesting the drug, and you would have extraordinary insights and realizations, but I'm not sure that it really caused any change in the regular world.

Daniel: Oh, I've heard good reports of MDMA used in couples' therapy and so on.

Kelly: Well, maybe. What would you say the difference is between Iowaska and Iboga?

Daniel: Well, they are very different. Iowaska lasts for about three to four hours. It sort of feels like you enter this liquid medium of your dream life or the astral realm or something, has a certain frequency to it. Iboga is just a different type of experience. It's much longer. It's much harsher. It's a lot more of a stern fatherly figure that comes to address you very psychologically about problems you have and so on.

Kelly: It doesn't sound like a recreational experience at all.

Daniel: Definitely not.

Kelly: It's done clinically, too. It's administered. Well, you went to the Bee‑Tree tribe, but you also went to Mexico.

Daniel: I also took in a clinic in Mexico where it's not illegal. Yes, it's being done clinically. We may ultimately discover that there are good reasons to it in a shamanic initiatory context, but there's a clinic in Canada, in Vancouver, doing it. I think there's one in Europe, maybe, Holland.

Kelly: It's also really expensive to go to Canada and do it. It's a couple thousand dollars.

Daniel: Well, the thing is that it is legally available outside of this country, and here it is still a Schedule one substance. There probably are underground methods to do it here, but it would be outside of any legal structure.

Kelly: Iowaska, I always associate with that church, Dyme.

Daniel: Huh? Oh, there are many different ways to do Iowaska. Originally, it was a medicine of the tribal people in the Amazon. I've had many experiences doing it with shamans in that kind of tribal context. The Dyme developed in the 1920s when the Mesitos who were working in the Amazon began to drink Iowaska with the local natives. And so, they began to receive visions and songs that were mediated through the Christian context. I love the Dyme. I worked with them down in Brazil. I think it's a very, very beautiful modality. Recently, there are religions from Brazil that use Iowaska, what is called Unaya Digitalis, and that's interesting because they recently won a Supreme Court case in the U.S. giving them permission to use Iowaska as a sacrament, much like the Native American church uses Paotae.

Other groups, like the Dyme, are now petitioning to be included in that judgment, so Iowaska may become legally available to more people as an access.

Kelly: We have a church here in Santa Fe.

Daniel: Santa Fe, that's where the...

Kelly: Bronfman, he was the one who...

Daniel: Started it, yeah.

Kelly: You sound like you have a little bit of a cold.

Daniel: I have a cold. I've been fighting this cold for awhile now.

Kelly: Oh, drag [laughs]. I hate that. You had a wonderful quote in your book. You wrote that, "If the shadows appear to be growing darker, it's because the light that casts them is getting brighter. We are heading towards, perhaps, apocalypse and perhaps something else."

Daniel: Well, I think that quote is a little bit self‑explanatory but thank you. In the book that's what I talked about, the oldest concept of the shadow and will we have it reckoned with in our own individual and collective psyches. We then project to other people or to the material world so you can see a lot of our militarism and our destructive use of technologies and so on are aspects of our shadow that we haven't done the work of integrating. There, it's really like a two part process that has to take place and what is on the individual level people bringing light to shadow material and then once they've reached a certain clarity, then hopefully, we can go out and do the work on society that needs to be done so we don't have to go through a destructive apocalypse.

As I discuss in the book, the word, apocalypse, itself literally means revealing or uncovering so that could be a great thing if you have great stuff in you. Maybe, more and more of that will get revealed.

Kelly: Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Daniel: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Kelly: And what's your website address again?

Daniel: The website and the magazine is realitysandwich.com.

Kelly: Thank you. Daniel Pinchbeck's website is realitysandwich.com. Coming up on our next show, Mark Allen will talk about his new book, "The Greatest Secret of All", moving beyond abundance to a life of true fulfillment. He says, "You have everything you need: a miraculous body, a phenomenal brain, and a vast and powerful subconscious mind. Now, it's just a matter of focusing your mind in the right direction." You can download this wonderful audio book right now at theatreofthemind.com. Hey, everybody, thanks for listening. Until next time, be well.

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