This week, I speak with journalist Daniel Pinchbeck, who’s the author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. We explore the various views on the meaning of 2012, and examine their validity. By doing so, we delve into the broad array of different perspectives held across the world on the importance of this quickly approaching date.
Tami Simon: I’m noticing these days that I’m becoming a bit of a 2012 grump, if you will, and I think it’s because so much of what I hear about 2012 is speculative, unfounded, metaphoric, dreamy, hallucinogenic—and yet at the same time, I feel something deep inside that thinks there’s something actually happening, a type of quickening, a type of change. But yet, most of the time when I talk to people about 2012, the kinds of things that they say don’t rationally make any sense to me. And I’m wondering, Daniel, if you can help me with this—my grumpiness.
Daniel Pinchbeck: That’s interesting. I mean, I’ve found that the essays in the book were fairly compelling, and even convincing on all sorts of levels, and whether it was Peter Russell’s take that you can see the successive transformations in culture and consciousness happen in exponentially shorter amounts of linear time, or the work that John Major Jenkins has done on understanding the exact alignment of the solstice sun rising at the dark rift at the center of the milky way—so it’s kind of an eclipse of the solar center. Or other types of research that weren’t presented in the book so much—this Russian science demitria, I was looking at—the sort of periods where more cosmic energies are coming to the solar system, that the whole solar system seems to be going through a transformation on a system level, where the outer planets are gaining atmospheres, and the magnetic poles are shifting, and he sees more vacuumed—I think they’re called vacuum domains—on the Earth, like hurricanes, tornados, which he thinks represent more plasma phenomena, which represent these other energies coming in. I can talk about that stuff a little bit, but I mean, yeah, I’m personally not a hard scientist—I think that the whole paradigm makes sense on a lot of different levels, and yeah, some of those levels are intuitive, where the whole thing that I was just discussing is that it’s really trying to find this juncture between intuition and rationality. And the old mindset of strictly only paying attention to quantifiable and material indicators is a little bit outdated, as is the sort of new age mindset of only caring about intuitive and visionary and kind of channeled material. So it’s really a very delicate process of finding that juncture.
Tami Simon: Yeah, so let’s look at that juncture a little bit more. It seems that most people would be able to easily agree that there’s this huge acceleration of time of transformation occurring that we’re in. It’s the pinpointing of the time, the winter solstice 2012, where I think my own rational mind starts asking some questions. I mean, you can talk about all these things that are happening in the sky with the galactic alignment, etc., but there’s an interpretive component there, of how will these different factors of astronomical alignments, etc., actually be affecting human consciousness? I mean, how do we make that, how do YOU make that leap? I mean, you’re a journalist, Daniel—what evidence has come to support 2012 for you? That’s what I really want to know.
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, I mean, the evidence was presented in a 450-page book, that took me four or five years to write. And it was all sorts of different levels of evidence. I thought about it at great length—so it’s hard for me to just put it all into one little answer. But also, personally, I don’t really give a hoot about the winter solstice 2012. I mean, in a way, I think what’s most important is to have a focal point for a kind of transition that we can see is underway. Personally, I can’t get anything done, you know, without a deadline. So, in a way I think that this whole 2012 meam can be utilized as a positive spur to the cultural imagination, and as a way of activating people’s energies and resources toward transformation. Now, having said that, it does seem that there’s a lot of good evidence that keeps pointing toward this date, kind of like a surprising amount. Whether it’s Ervin Laszlo putting out, based on his systems theory work, that the chaos point come around then, where if we don’t change the direction of human society, that we wouldn’t be able to get it together, you know, beyond then. So for me I personally almost get bored of thinking about focusing on 2012, and more focused on what’s the trajectory of this process that’s underway, and what do we, as individuals or as members of communities, as leaders of communities, as business people, hopefully like openhearted people—I mean, like what do we do in this time? I mean, we’re seeing now, the potential for a huge amount of chaos in the world. Huge amount of hunger, starvation … I mean, even the guy Zelek, who runs the World Bank, he began to get choked up when he began to recognize that the developing world’s focus on its own financial missiagoss was neglecting our ability to keep our financial system going, due to all these people around the world who are, you know, waiting to get their little sugarcane or their little goods to the market.
Tami Simon: Well, of course I agree with you that the more important question is how, as open-hearted human beings, can we create a different and better world—of course I agree with you—but when you talk about 2012, as like, “Hey, this is a focal point, we can all kind of rally around it, and people who have interesting observations can write books and use that as the focal point,” there’s a way that it becomes a little specious to me, if you know what I’m saying. Do you know what I mean? Like …
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, I mean I don’t think so, ’cause I just went through about five different ways that the thing is not specious at all. There’s an astronomical event, winter solstice sun rising to the dark rift at the center of the Milky Way, there’s physicists and scientists like Dimitriov observing solar-system-wide phenomena of transition. There’s a solar cycle, solar maximum, which has been going up over the course of the whole century, which could lead to all sorts of electromagnetic changes on the planet. There’s a huge amount of research that’s available. I mean Lawrence Joseph, I mean he published a lot of this stuff in your book—I mean it’s more and more compelling. Anything that we do, whether we’re scientists or myth-makers, I mean all we can do as humans is use language and techniques to create models. So, you can always deny any model, just as people deny global warming, even though it can be statistically measured, and the vast majorities of scientists in the world support that it is happening and it’s caused to a certain extent by human intervention in the natural climate system.
Tami Simon: So, Daniel, just, if you can help me out for a moment, just be a friend, OK, be a friend: These different things that are happening, astronomically, can you explain to me what your sense is of how they will affect us here on the Earth? The actual effect that we’re going to experience, and why there is an effect?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, to a certain extent I can, and to a certain extent I can’t, as I keep saying, I don’t pretend to be a scientist, and I haven’t done the depth of research into it that John Major Jenkins has, and I think there’s a certain level of mystery here, so, I think that that’s all part of it. For me, there’s this incredible acceleration of technology development, there’s an incredible acceleration of biospheric destruction, and there’s an evolution in human consciousness that seems to be taking place, which can’t be statistically verified, but antidotal can be supported when you talk to people about their own experiences subjectively, of increasing amounts of synchronicity, of increasing experiences of intentionality. So it really almost feels as if humans on the Earth are being reorganized, you know, the way, you know, metal fillings begin to kind of reorganize as a magnet approaches. You know, I don’t think anybody has the exact scientific framework for what is causing this, and why this acceleration is happening at this time. And why this critical threshold that the Mayans seem to have recognized from 1,000-1,500 years ago, does seem to be the make-or-break point for humanity. But, the fact is that it does seem to be the case that this threshold, whether you want to say 2012 exactly or you know, 2009-2015, this is it for us, if we don’t pull it together, you know, we’re probably not going to survive as a species, or, at least, not in very good shape.
Tami Simon: Um-hmm. How did you first become interested in the Mayan world, Mayan prophesy, etc.?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, I wrote a book, Breaking Open the Head, where I started out as a secular materialist, from a sort of cynical NY background, and I began to explore psychedelics during a spiritual/existential crisis, spiritual emergency, and because I had journalistic training, I was able to get assignments to go to West Africa to go through tribal initiation, the Amazon, and beyond having these amazing visionary experiences. I also began to have a number of experiences that confirmed aspects of the shamanic knowledge systems that I didn’t personally believe in, but then I had these experiences that subjectively confirmed them. So, that could be, Shamans telling me information about my life that they couldn’t have accessed through normal means, that I hadn’t told them. People telling me stuff about what they heard was going to happen to them, uh, that then happened to them. Even kind of occult experiences, where I had sort of poltergeist phenomena, spirit manifestations and so on. And I had no context or belief system for this, so I began to recognize that there was a huge validity in the traditions in the shamanic knowledge systems of indigenous people. And so, at that point, I mean, I also knew about Terence McKenna’s work, and his hypothesis around 2012, and I’d read a bit, but I began to note that a lot of indigenous cultures around the world who we’ve basically dismissed as not having quote-unquote real knowledge or scientific knowledge, seem to have a coherent understanding of being this prophesied transformation time, you know, whether it’s the Hopi, now, or the Inca have come forth. And then we have this data from the classical Mayans, and they seem to have been the most sophisticated shamanic wizard scientists in their use of a combination of astronomical observation along with ritual technologies and exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness through psychedelics to kind of put together this knowledge system, to its most elaborate form.
Tami Simon: So can we just tease a couple things out there? Can you tell me what the Hopi and the Inca prophecies are, respectively?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, the Inca recently stepped forward and said that you know, they also understand 2012 as being this transformation time …
Tami Simon: When you say they recently stepped forward, what do you mean—was there some sort of proclamation or something?
Daniel Pinchbeck: You know Albert Villoldo? He’s been working with them. So that information comes from him, so he’d be a better person to talk about it than I would. But I do have a friend who was on a trip with him, and they went and visited these Incan elders in the mountains, and one of them asked, “OK, if this is coming true, what’s the true meaning of 2012 from your perspective?” And one of the Incan elders said, “Well, we’re going to miss our white brother.”
Tami Simon: Interesting.
Daniel Pinchbeck: The Hopi talk about this time as being the transition from the fourth world to the fifth world. They say they have a whole set of oral prophesies that they’ve inherited, and most of them come to pass, there are only a few left. I went down to the Hopi land just for a very short period of time and talked to Martin Geshastama, I think it is, he’s in the book, who’s one of the last lineage holders and the holder of all this information, and he felt pretty certain that this time of purification was imminent. And he specified, even, that the U.S. government or secret government was going to be creating extermination machines. And he said at that point that some of these machines had already been built in Louisiana, for whatever reason. I don’t know where that information came from, it was quite bizarre.
Tami Simon: Extermination machines—who are we exterminating?
Daniel Pinchbeck: The vast excess population that no longer has a purpose in this country.
Tami Simon: That’s a pretty out-there thought—projection into the future. What’s the transformation from the fourth world into the fifth world? What’s the fourth world, what’s the fifth world in the Hopi model?
Daniel Pinchbeck: None of these cultures do get tremendous specifics. I mean, the fourth world is the world that we’re in now. They have an emergence myth, and they kind of emerge from their kivas in their kochina outfits that symbolizes coming up from the underworld, the between world, into the new world state, into the new world. So in each of these world cycles, there is a cycle of destruction and recreation. So I really wasn’t able to glean from them what this fifth world would be like. That archetype seems to resonate through a lot of cultural traditions, including the apocalypse tradition of the West, the Judeo-Christian tradition of there being, you know, apocalypse, Armageddon, and then New Jerusalem. Kind of a new city, a new human community. But it’s hard to get specifics. The most specific construct, which is once again just a construct, just a model—and everything that I’m presenting here, I would also say that it’s not about a belief system, or a new knowledge system, it’s about a thought experiment, thinking through this stuff as best that I can with my own limited capabilities. But I really enjoyed Rudolf Steiner’s model, but he was an Austrian visionary in the late 19th century through the early part of the 20th century. He said that the mission of his life on Earth was to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the west. And that people incarnated again and again as Buddhist traditions talk about—but also the planet itself reincarnates. And he said that we are currently in the fourth incarnation of the Earth, moving toward the fifth incarnation. And he gave some specifics about the next incarnation of the Earth. And among the things he said was that the organ of generation of new beings like ourselves was going to shift from the second chakra, the sex chakra, to the throat chakra. So it would be much more of an aspect of creative communication. He also said that in each of these different worlds, we have different bodies, and that we now have the physical body, the astral body, the ether body, and the eye. And, in this next world incarnation, we were getting a new body, which he talked about as the spirit-self. And his concept was that basically, in this world, we just gain the eye, but it’s still very young and kind of fragile. And the desires that are pouring through the astral body are basically too much for the eye for most people, so they give in to these desires all the time: consuming, smoking, addictions. But as we develop the spirit-self, that’s the eye growing in strength to the point where it can transform the astral body, and it’s no longer prey by those desires, but can consciously mediate them and take command over them, mastery over them. So, in the next incarnation of the Earth, it’s about the development of the spirit-self, the fifth body.
Tami Simon: And, when you’re talking about Rudolf Steiner’s view of these different incarnations of the Earth, the inhabitants of the Earth are changing in each incarnational cycle, but the Earth itself is still the Earth, what do you mean, exactly, by the Earth’s reincarnation?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Uh, that’s a really fascinating question, and what I looked at in the book was this notion that our, you know, kind of form or realization of consciousness determines everything, you know, even how the kind of material reality is presented to us, and uh, you know, Steiner talked about how there are these different kind of realms of being: there’s the mineral realm, the plant realm, the animal realm, and in each of these successive incarnations, all of these realms transmute, and go into a kind of higher state. So at the moment you have the plant realm in a deep dreamless state of consciousness. And then in the next realm, the plants become, enter dreaming consciousness, they begin to wake up further. The mineral realm develops further. So he’s really seeing it as a very deep transmutation in the actual, realized experience of whatever the materiality of our dimension is. It’s almost more like another dimension than it is just a similar world.
Tami Simon: Hmm … OK and then another …
Daniel Pinchbeck: Oh, and I did want to note also that it’s very interesting that if you look at the experiences that people have on DMT or ayahuasca, dimethyltryptamine is a chemical that’s in the brain and the spinal column, and it’s produced by a lot of plants, and Rick Strassman wrote a book called DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and did a lot of research on DMT. He was a Buddhist, he’d been reading Buddhist texts, he found that the soul reincarnates, according to Buddhism, seven weeks after death. Then he discovered that the pineal gland, which is the singular organ in the middle of the brain, appears exactly seven weeks or 49 days after fetal conception. So he began to find this very numinous correspondence, he wondered if there was a chemical catalyst that somehow mediated the entry of the soul into the body when the fetus develops and then releases the soul at death, and he first explored melatonin, and then he was the first person since the ’60s to get to do research on human subjects with psychedelics, like with dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. And so, he ended up putting forth the thesis that DMT might be the medium that brings the reincarnated soul into the body at birth and then releases it at death. And so that’s pretty interesting. Ayahuasca is very sonically mediated, the indigenous cultures will always chant, or the Daimei will always sing, and the use of music and tone actually sort of conjures up or brings into kind of visionary reality different spiritual realms. And if you smoke DMT, you can also have glossolalia experience, very similar, like fast chanting, nonsense chanting, but it seems like you’re almost in communication with this kind of deeper spiritual intelligence. So it could be possible that that’s pointing toward this shift from the sex chakra to the throat chakra in terms of generation.
Tami Simon: I didn’t follow that last part—how are we shifting to the throat chakra?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, the shamans, when I visited in the Sequoia, talked about how they were able to sing plants into being through the ayahuasca ceremony—that sometimes they would need like a new plant, a healing plant or something for their tribe, and they would all get together, they would drink the ayahuasca, they would sing all night long, and at the end of the night, the shaman would look down at his hand and he would have like a seed in his hand or a sapling, and that would grow into the new medicinal herb that the tribe had wanted. It may be that in terms of developing kind of psychic or shamanic technologies, that there’s something about using sound waves, chanting, in these DMT states that is primarily generative. Kind of like a way of accessing the logos directly.
Tami Simon: OK, wild stuff here, wild. Now you also mentioned Terence McKenna? And his work with 2012—could you summarize that for me, I’m getting this sort of, you know, Cliff Notes here, Daniel, on so many different things listening to you, and so I’m counting on you to inform me here.
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well yeah, so Terence McKenna was in the Columbian Amazon in the early ’70s and he was with his brother and they were exploring psilocybin mushrooms, and they ate a whole bunch of them, and they both had to kind of break with normal consensual reality, and for a week, Terence claims that he wasn’t able to sleep, he was continually up, and he was in dialogue with the psilocybin intelligence, and he claims that the mushroom transmitted a lot of information to him. And, among the things that the mushroom explained was that it itself was a kind of galactic intelligence, a galactic civilization or society that traveled across the universe as spores on meteorites. And then it would crash into different planets, it would wait for a mammalian species to develop a central nervous system and a certain amount of consciousness and it would help that species to be a galactic level civilization. So the mushroom explained that we were on the verge of making that type of symbiotic relationship with the DNA of the mushroom to get to this next level of galactic civilization. And then at the same time, the mushroom explained that our model of time was extremely limited, and that there were different forms of time, that were different sort of realizations of time and space that were based on, kind of, your level of consciousness. You know, our whole concept of history is in itself a historical construct. Tribal groups don’t have linear, progressive history the way we do. They have a mythic-based reality. Traditional cultures didn’t have history, they had cycles and hero cycles and so on. So, the mushroom kind of warned McKenna that we were on the edge of one way of conceptualizing and realizing time and space, so that there would be a breakthrough into a different realization of time and space. And so McKenna left the jungle and went back home and was sort of feverishly obsessed with this notion, and he spent years trying to create a mathematical model out of it. So then he developed the time wave, which was meant to chart the ingression of novelty into history. And he did some work with the I-Ching Hexagrams , and made a kind of mathematical system out of them, and when he put this whole thing together, kind of possessed by this concept, he ended up putting the end of our form of time at the year 2012, without knowing about the date of the Mayan calendar, he claims. And it was only later that he discovered that the Mayans had used the same date as the end of their Long Cycle.
Tami Simon: Hmm. You know, this idea of the mushroom spores coming from some galactic, some extra-terrestrial source, extra-earth source, you know, there’s a lot of talk with 2012 as our consciousness will become more quote-unquote galactically connected, perhaps, from the galactic alignment, etc. What do you think about all that?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, I don’t really know, I mean, uh, part of my last book, 2012, I studied the crop circles, and I ended up putting out the hypothesis that it really didn’t seem to me from studying it intensively that they could all be made by people. Which means that some other agency is making them. Which means that it would have to be some other form of intelligence, that’s trying to communicate with us, it would seem. So, it seems possible to me. Then if you look at the whole history of the sort of secret, murky history of alien abductions and the sense of maybe covert connections between aspects of the secret government and alien forces, Roswell and so on, there’s a lot of smoke there. Maybe some fire also. You know, maybe there is some truth to it. Or maybe, it may all be happening at a slightly different plane of consciousness, or slightly different plane of reality than our normal waking experience. But I think that it may have legitimacy, and it may be that as we intensify our own psyche, to a certain respect, we may be able to be more consciously interactive with other forms of cosmic intelligence.
Tami Simon: Have you had any personal experiences that would give you any reason to believe in alien forces, or extra-dimensional forces that could be responsible for something like crop circles?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Yeah, I mean I feel that I’ve had some, I mean I really try not to believe in anything, believe it or not, but I mean I’ve had interesting UFO experiences, I’ve had, um…
Tami Simon: Could you be more specific? What happened?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Uh, you know, like, um…When I was in Chaco Canyon, which is where the Anasazi were, and sort of mysteriously disappeared, or maybe they were the forerunners of the Hopi, I saw a fast-moving light, that was doing kind of incredible ridiculous patterns in the sky for a while and then disappeared. Totally impossible that it would have been either a star or an airplane, or anything that we know about. I’ve had, um… visionary experiences where I’ve had a sense of being in touch with different types of forces and energies … I mean I discussed some of them in the book. But, um, there’s no hard and fast evidence, really. I mean, I did have one experience which I didn’t discuss in the book of a manifestation. I took ayahuasca with some friends in NYC, and at that point was having writer’s block: I was thinking about Quetzalcoatl, I was thinking about cosmic serpent, which is what ayahuasca is sometimes called. We went out after our ayahuasca experience and they went to get a drink and I was standing outside, and I noticed this thing in a tree. And I pulled it out of the center of a tree and it was a metal pen, made of pewter, in the form of a cobra, and it felt as if myth and reality had kind of like merged or some other force had somehow placed this there for me to pull out. So, I’ve had other strange experiences like that, I mean a lot of synchronistic type experiences. Which I’m sure you’ve had also.
Tami Simon: Um-hmm. I mean, what I’m reflecting on, and once again, Daniel, I’ve already said I’m the 2012 grump, right, so you have to be generous toward me: what I’m thinking of is, I remember taking LSD as a kid, looking at a T-shirt in a swimming pool and thinking it was a lobster, and two days later, I saw that it was an orange T-shirt. But did I need to have an experience of a lobster at that moment for some reason?
Daniel Pinchbeck: What I discovered with the crop circles is when I brought people into that phenomenon with me, the types of experiences that they would have seemed to be determined by what their kind of set and setting was. Like what they would allow into possibility. So, people who had a basically skeptical and grumpy mindset about the phenomenon would have experiences that would confirm their skepticism and their grumpiness. And I had friends from California who kind of scoffed at the whole thing. We would find boards and string outside the phenomena almost, I’m exaggerating at little bit, but we’d find we really couldn’t find even one good crop circle. I had other friends who were more open to it. We would find extraordinary, pristine formations, which had a very strong energetic imprint. I visited another crop circle with a guy who was a kind of paranoid, phobic, government conspiracy guy—we were in a crop circle together for 10 minutes and a black helicopter appeared overhead and began to circle around the crop circle. People who were more new age, bliss-bunny types, they would see light beings or have chakra activations, so it began to seem as if the phenomenon was almost playing with the individual’s perspective. And kind of almost magnifying and amplifying what your intentions were, what your level of belief or skepticism was—again, we see the whole phenomenon in itself as a kind of teaching on the nature of consciousness and on the power of intention. That’s very much a lesson that one can get from the psychedelic experience if one explores it in-depth and with, you know, some seriousness.
Tami Simon: And so, if you were to just take that lesson to its conclusion, your conclusion is, dot-dot-dot … the world’s a reflection of your state of being?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, if you get into pedantic philosophy, which I pretty much ascribe to, there’s kind of no “you” anyway, there’s a singular consciousness which plays with its creation by taking individual embodiments. So that it can enjoy the maya, you know, interestingly the same word as the Mayan civilization. And so, you know, from that perspective, the universe is ultimately a construct of consciousness. And where you are at your level of being and consciousness magnetizes different sets of possibilities. And so, whether somebody lives in a prosaic or a fully realized magical realm is going to be a kind of projection of their state of consciousness. Now having said that, I would make a distinction between what I see to be a very dangerous distorted type of new age message put out by people like the people who made The Secret or you know, Deepak Chopra’s ideas of the spiritual laws of success, which is the sense that you can just create or invent whatever, because first of all there’s karmic, you know, burden, or aspect of each individual being, and second of all, the world that exists, is also crystallized out of our past behavior and our past actions, you can’t just like wish that away. I mean, personally, I’m often not looking forward to the next few years, I think a lot of people are going to suffer, and it’s going to be very, very difficult on many respects. It may also be very beautiful and moving in other respects. But it’s not like I can avoid it, I can’t change the channel or use the laws of spiritual success to just wish it away. You know, we’re all in this boat together. And this boat has been created by the karmic field of our species, which has gotten us to this point.
Tami Simon: When you say that when you feel into it that the next few years could be painful, what is it that you’re potentially seeing?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, I mean I think that this economic collapse is the second node on a kind of octave? I don’t know if you know the whole Gurdjieff Enneagram system—but it feels like 9/11 was the first node on this new octave of transformation in a way. And this economic collapse for me is like the second node in that scale. And, I think that it’s going to become, potentially, I hope not, and I don’t know, and I don’t want to you know, project, in a way, but the type of level of comfort and easy access to all types of stuff is not going to be there anymore. And in fact, we may end up in this country and in a lot of countries in the world going through a kind of mega-collapse. I mean, I recently wrote about Dimitri Orlov’s book Reinventing Collapse, he thinks we’re about to go through something similar to what Russia went through after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He recommends people begin to envision what it’s like to live in a world where money has no value, where everything is based on barter and black markets, and piracy and so on. That’s possible, it’s possible that our nation is going to collapse into feuding and fighting factions. I mean, I think anything is really possible. Foreign creditors have been funding two billion dollars a day to keep the U.S. in operation. We spend about a trillion dollars a year on our military. It’s not conceivable that that’s going to go on too much longer. And so then what happens? A lot of people are going to be very, very angry and frustrated. For, like, this was an inevitable collapse—in my book, 2012, I talked about socio-economic meltdown around the year 2008. I also discussed it in a 2006 Rolling Stone profile with me. So for me, if you look at capitalism and why it would have to reach this level at this point, I think there are two aspects to it at this point, and one is that capitalism is a debt-based economic system. That artificially forces competitive and hyper-competitive and hyperactive behavior. Because people have to keep trying to service this gigantic debt. And that works, as long as there’s more and more cheap energy that allows you to keep working away like that, and also, more and more new markets where capitalism can go and penetrate and extract resources and goods and stuff. Well now we have a single, globalized world market, there aren’t any new markets really to exploit like that, and also we have hit peak oil, so energy is now becoming, generally more expensive, and demand is exceeding supply. So at that point, those massive debts, which have been propelling the system, cannot be honored any more. So the basic underpinnings of the financial order have to crumble at that point. So it’s very likely to be a very difficult time. And then we also can see the continued acceleration of climate change and climate crisis, I mean, there’re already world hunger riots around the world in many countries, last spring, I mean we can see, you know, the forest fires in California, growing, and I traveled around last summer, you know, everywhere I went there were like massive floods, huge tornados. The weather is changing radically. So we have less money, less protection, and more destruction coming our way. And that could get magnified very quickly, you know. And certain people like, you know Amma, the Indian hugging saint?
Tami Simon: Yeah.
Daniel Pinchbeck: So apparently, uh, she recently was in a deity trance at her ashram, and she said that in a few years was going to come a time—I think she even specified two years—when there was going to be immense suffering on the Earth. And that, uh, most people were going to wish that they’d never been born.
Tami Simon: Wow.
Daniel Pinchbeck: And she said at that point that her ashram on the coast of northern California would be under water. So, obviously, that’s one person speaking. I mean, apparently after she said this—it was being videotaped—she had her followers erase that part of the tape, ’cause she didn’t want that message going outside of her ashram. So it’s only sort of trickled out by word of mouth, you know, it was like friends of friends who had been there told me about it. But, anyway, that’s one person’s conception of what could happen. But if you look at what a lot of scientists are saying—I read a book about sort of tipping points and climate systems—we really don’t know how sensitive the system is, and at what point the changes could accelerate much more rapidly than have been anticipated. And once again I go back to this concept that the Hopis talk about, about a purification. That, in a way, we’re going through initiatory process for human consciousness on a global scale. And at the end of this process, we’re going to be different than we are now.
Tami Simon: You know, sometimes when I hear people talk about 2012, they talk about it in black or white terms. Either we’ll have this rebirth of fabulous enlightened consciousness or we’re going to be going through all this pain and destruction. But it seems as if here we’re working with this archetype of death and rebirth, we’re going to have to have both, and I’m curious what you think about that.
Daniel Pinchbeck: Yeah, I mean, I totally agree, I mean, I think hopefully, we will ultimately, you know, move to a higher order civilization, and we can see that, or, I don’t know if we even have civilization at this point. But we can see that there are models, counter-histories to the dominant history. Histories of resistance, histories of non-violent force overcoming violent, oppressive, opposition. Histories of communities that work together, you know, the history of tribal people, and how they live together. So we have counter histories and counter mythologies, and counter-organizational possibilities to what we’ve been subjected to in a way. Hopefully, those get activated. It does seem that we’re going to be first forced to fully experience the consequences of our species behavior up to this point.
Tami Simon: We started off, Daniel, by talking about the intuitive and the rational and a time when we can bring this together, and how we have to bring these two things together in ourselves to even begin to understand something like 2012. And I’m curious, just inside of you, how those two things work, your intuitive nature and your rational nature. It seems like both are very developed. Do you ever find them not getting along, or how does this all work together for you?
Daniel Pinchbeck: Well, they get along better and better, they get along very well. And so basically, um, I was very much of a rational-type thinker, and then when I went through this process of kind of my own personal initiation to a certain extent into a shamanic world conception, I rationally integrated synchronicity intuition, trying to learn how to use these insights that emerge, or these chance meetings, or the way these kind of keys that suddenly emerge out of the normal chaos of activity as kind of magnetic devices to kind of pull me forward, and into new understandings. So I’ve just tried very hard to develop a personal methodology and I’ve tried to learn how to be patient, to be less attached to outcome, while never relinquishing goal or intention. A lot of native cultures really talk about intention being almost the most important thing in what it means to be human. For me, that’s a very powerful concept. Because I think what we see in our normal society is either people having no intention, or having miserable poor intentions. And so, I think that if enough people begin to change their intention, and begin to use it to try to bring about a different social organization, different result, that could catch, you know, could be contagious.
Tami Simon: And what is your intention?
Daniel Pinchbeck: In a sense, something between revolution and evolution. Like, I would like to see a, um, equitable, compassionate, global society, where resources were rationally distributed and I would like to see that the realm of the psyche would be integrated into mainstream awareness. So that, as a global society we would maybe begin to adapt a whole different paradigm for understanding reality, and that would reverberate on everything. I think reestablishing a kind of sacred conception of the universe, and one another would be a positive thing. But also, I’m very interested in really tools, I’m very interested in the whole design science, Buckminster Fuller design science approach to how you know, positive change could be brought about, like, Buckminster Fuller talked about really seeing all of society’s problems as design problems, to which there are design solutions. So, the money system is something that we’ve designed that supports competitive behavior, and sort of hording activity. Whereas, you know, people have put forth that you could redesign the monetary system to support collaborative and community-based behavior. This guy Bernard Lettier wrote a book called The Future of Money, and he was one of the architects of the Euro, and he looked at the whole history of money systems and put forth the idea that you could create a currency that used negative interest that actually lost value if you held onto it. It was indexed to a set of commodities and resources that had actual, tangible value, not just kind of free-floating like the dollar. If you use that type of currency, people wouldn’t gain from hording it, they would gain from sharing it. The benefit in having the money would be to share it with your communities. People would remember that you did them a good turn when you had the opportunity, they would want to do the same for you. So, we can see there’s certain types of basic aspects to human behavior that how we construct our social behavior that determines what types of behavior are elicited from people. This capitalist sort of empire system tends to elicit kind of sociopathic and ecologically destructive behavior, but that’s basically due to bad design. So, my intention would be to help influence a kind of rethinking and redesign of our global systems.
Tami Simon: If you enjoyed this interview and wish to be kept up-to-date on the latest information and insights regarding the 2012 phenomenon, from the most reputable authors and researchers on the topic we’ve found, then visit us at mysteryof2012.com. Check out blog posts from the experts, the 2012 countdown widget, free excerpts from 2012 books and audio, 2012 event updates, the latest videos and more, at mysteryof2012.com. Whether you are a skeptic, a true believer, or simply 2012 curious, here’s your chance to decide for yourself. What is really going on with the mystery of 2012? Again, that’s mysteryof2012.com. Mystery of two zero one two dot com.
