Daniel Pinchbeck is one of the leading voices in today’s counter-culture, exploring the connections between psychedelics & shamanism and their importance in the modern era. Join Pop Occulture for the second half of this exclusive 2-part interview. Also, don’t forget to check out Part 1 in case you missed it. Special thanks to Daniel for this intriguing interview.

POP OCCULTURE: In Steiner’s book, How to Know Higher Worlds, he seems to advocate a very slow, very measured approach to spiritual elevation. In defense of this slower path he states:

“There are, of course, other approaches that lead more quickly to the same goal. But such faster ways have nothing to do with the path presented here because they have certain human consequences that are considered undesirable to anyone experienced in esoteric practices. […] If we do not wish to entrust ourselves to dark powers, whose true nature and origin we do not know, we shall do well to leave such other approaches alone.”

Though he may or may not be talking about psychedelics here, it seems like this is a rather stinging condemnation of certain aspects of your own path. Your conversation with Neil towards the end of BOTH also seems to point in this direction, when Neil says “People are entering the lower realms of the spiritual world unbidden and unprepared, exposing themselves to delusions and deceptions.” How do you reconcile this apparent dichotomy between your deep interest and respect for Steiner and your own psychedelic experiences?

DANIEL: We tend to think of visionaries and philosophers of the past as being static thinkers whose thought is preserved, as it were, in a kind of psychic amber. This is really unfair to Steiner, who was a deeply and completely evolutionary thinker. For Steiner, everything was in a state of continual tranformation – humans were developing towards other conditions of existence, plants and stones possessed consciousness and were becoming more conscious, spiritual entities developed on other planets and dimensions. His understanding of reality bears resemblance to the ideas of the scientist Rupert Sheldrake, who proposes that the “Laws of Nature” are not actually laws but more like “habits” that change and evolve over time, through the creation of new “morphogenetic fields.” We only think they are “laws” because science developed at a time when the model of God was of an immutable and unchanging patriarchal figure. One of Steiner’s main accomplishments was to fully integrate an evolutionary approach into the occult cosmology. He was always evolving his understanding of reality by studying modern thinkers and so on. If he had lived into our age, he would have continued to change and develop his thought and his way of articulating it.

Steiner was painfully aware that humanity was in a process of rapid development, while dangerously under the sway of Ahriman, the evil earth spirit who represents minerality, materiality, material technology, hardening, and death. He believed we needed a return to the influence of Lucifer, the “light-bringer” who carries us up towards beauty, glamour, inspiration, but also haughtiness and arrogance and disdain for the earth. I think if Steiner had lived he would have recognized psychedelics as necessary Gnostic catalysts, giving us a necessary spark of Luciferic inspiration in a very Ahrimanic age. Steiner apparently said that humanity as a whole would crossing the threshold into the spiritual world after the Twentieth Century. I think that psychedelics are Luciferic, which means they restore direct vision of supersensible worlds that can be distorted by the unprepared ego of the individual. They also tend to pull us away from the earth and earthly responsibilities – whereas the Ahrimanic force of modern culture would drag us down into endless bureaucracies, the “cold evil” of our technological framing of reality, locking us into a deeply limited world.

I suspect that Steiner would have seen the necessity of psychedelics from the 1960s through today – he would have also cautioned against their overuse. The urgency of our time requires fast development, and psychedelics can definitely accelerate your psychic evolution. Sometimes, risks are necessary. Neil’s own opening to this material was created by psychedelics, so it is a bit disingenuous to then want to prevent other people from having those experiences. Western Buddhists often do this as well. By the way, I don’t find the statement a “stinging condemnation” at all – I believe these areas are highly complex, and it may represent your own state of mind that you find yourself searching for “stinging condemnations” of my position, rather than going deeper, even in your questions, to articulate a situation that is multi-layered, paradoxical, ambiguous, and dynamic.

You’re fond of repeating a particular saying from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, attributed to Jesus: “Open the door for yourself, so you will know what is.” What translation are you getting that from, as I’m unable to locate it in any of the usual sources online? Are you interested in Gnosticism beyond this basic principle of direct experience? If so, what appeals to you about it? What impact could its revival have on the modern world?

I don’t know where exactly I read it in that form – here is a translation of what must be the same statement from an on-line translation: ” 94 Jesus [said], “One who seeks will find, and for [one who knocks] it will be opened.” I know I didn’t invent my version. I don’t know how much lattitude there is for translation. The Gospel of Thomas is extraordinary, perhaps crucial for understanding Christ in a modern context. It is clear that most of his followers were bewildered by most of his parables – I consider it possible that this text was a transmission designed for our contemporary moment. Parables are an extraordinarily compact way to transmit crucial information across vast oceans of time and space.

Ralph Metzner described psychedelics as “gnostic catalysts,” and I think that is a great description. The basic revelation of Gnosticism – that this reality is a kind of matrix and there are other dimensions or imaginal realms as well – is made vividly apparent through DMT. I wouldn’t agree with the Gnostic idea of the Demiurge – that this world was created by a deluded or wicked entity, who trapped us in this material plane. I would see that this reality is a necessary phase in what could be a larger evolutionary process encompassing many “worlds” as the Hopi or Rudolf Steiner say. You can’t fly until you learn to walk, and you can’t walk until you learn to crawl. I think the Gnostic concept of the Archons is also useful for understanding how astral entities may function in this reality, compelling arbitrary belief in various institutions or systems, whether nationstates or corporations or cult-like religions.

Your next book (yet to be published) is called 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and deals with planet-wide transformation of consciousness, crop circles, ancient prophecies and the end of the world. Now, I’ve heard all kinds of crazy predictions on this, but what do you personally think (or hope) is going to happen in 2012? What are you planning to do if nothing actually happens?

First of all, I think it is already happening – the nature of reality is indeed shifting on us. This is happening on many levels at once. Most obviously, it is taking place in material form through accelerated climate change – check out the UN Millenium Eco-Systems Assessment for details. There are about two fish left in the oceans, and Eskimos are going to find it hard to have a snowball fight soon enough. The imminent depletion of energy supply in a Peak Oil crisis is also not a hallucination but something that is going to radically change our lives within the next few years. At the same time, something very peculiar has happened to our political sphere and mainstream media. It is as though they have entered a delusionary and superficial forcefield that allows no room for nuance or integrity or intelligent questioning. I see it as the exhausting or emptying out or forfeiting of an entire form of human consciousness – what the philosopher Jean Gebser called the “mental rational” structure of consciousness, which perceived everything through dualistic concepts that must be “grasped” (even our metaphors for thinking are inappropriate spatial ones). Gebser foresaw the crisis of anxiety for this form of consciousness, forcing a “mutational break” into a new structure of human consciousness, which he called “integral – aperspectival,” with a different relationship to time, space, psyche, cosmos, and a different model of truth.

I look at the situation through many different prisms, and I think I have developed a very coherent and sensible understanding of what is taking place. If we are indeed passing through the archetypal matrix of the Apocalypse, a word which literally means “uncovering” or “revealing,” then the Jungian view tells us that this is essentially a psychic event, the “coming to self-realization of human consciousness,” or the “coming of the Self.” According to the latest and most amazingly sophisticated reading of the Mayan Calendar in Carl Johann Calleman’s The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, the Mayan understanding saw time linked to the evolution of consciousness in a series of accelerating cycles or spirals, each one twenty times faster in linear time than the previous one. A nine stage process began 16 billion years ago with the Big Bang, and completes itself in the year 2011 – 2012 when we reach the phase of “conscious co-creation” of reality. Before we can possibly reach this stage, the shadow of the psyche is revealing itself in all of its many dimensions.

Looking at the energetic cycles that pulse within the larger structure of the Mayan Calendar, Calleman proposes that 2007, roughly, will be the year that the new level of consciousness is crystallized, while 2008, roughly, will see the collapse of the pre-existing form of consciousness, perhaps in a large-scale socio-economic meltdown. I don’t know if these dates are correct, but this seems to me to provide a possible model for what is taking place. Since the cyclical wave-form of history is accelerating, we are now in a period that bears resemblance to many past eras simultaneously – the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, the last days of the Ancien Regime before the French Revolution. I think that 2009 – 2010 we may see the drastic end of the current civilizational structure and the immediate movement into a harmonic planetary civilization with no nationstates, based on compassion, creativity, and generosity. If that doesn’t happen, instead of activating the noosphere – the thought-envelope around the Earth – we may end up in a necrosphere, a dead planet.

In your interview with the Daily Grail, you wrote: “I see the current biospheric crisis as a self-willed cataclysm designed to force human evolution to a higher level of consciousness.” Self-willed by who or what? The planet? Aliens? Humanity as a whole? Some secret group of elites?

The cataclysm is self-willed by ourselves, by the collective psyche of humanity, by our unconscious desires. Nietzsche is helpful for understanding this – check out Geneology of Morals. He thought that comfort made humanity despicable, that suffering was necessary – even the discipline of great suffering – in order to intensify human consciousness. After World War Two, we could have created a post-work global leisure society, using industrial technology to reduce everyone’s work to a few hours a week, but instead we chose to create this present nightmare. The “irrational rationality” of this system is analyzed properly in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Now we have burned through our resources, ruined the climate, and turned a former green world into a pressure cooker bristling with nuclear warheads. Who is doing this? We are doing this – it is our shadow projections, our unconsciousness, that has caused this mess. Therefore, we will need to attain a deeper level of consciousness – integrating our shadow instead of projecting it – in order to resolve our problems.

What’s the difference between a Christian Fundamentalist looking forward to the Rapture and a New Ager looking forward to 2012?

I can’t really say what some imaginary generic “New Ager” thinks about 2012. I can only say what I think about it. I think “looking forward to 2012″ would be a huge mistake. I believe McKenna was slightly responsible for creating this mistake in people’s minds, as he often implied the 2012 transition would be essentially technological, and therefore we just had to await the creation of some timespace-bending UFO-like object. This has been picked up the transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil and made into a doctrine of the approaching “technological singularity,” believing that some new technology would make us immortal or create super-potent AI’s that will solve our problems. My thinking is utterly opposed to this. Jose Arguelles has also created a new form of this mistake with his single-minded insistence that a switch to a “13 moon” calendar would, in itself, make a difference. Not only do I have problems with his calendar as a new global standard, I think that much more is required from us, on all levels – what Marx would call infrastructure and superstructure.

I believe that 2012 is happening this minute, right now, in a very real sense. It is the work that we do on ourselves, transforming our own psyches and our communities and our global systems, that brings “2012″ into existence as a positive outcome for the world. There is nothing passive about this at all – it is completely active, absolutely “here and now” oriented. We have to entirely awaken to the current situation – with its death-like grip of totalitarianism and foreshadowing of mass genocide – and then put all of our energy and clear, cogent thought into creating the alternative that will supersede the current form of globalized inequity based on greed, fear, and ego-centrism. The phase-shift takes place, first of all, in our own minds, and moves outward from there.

Fundamentalists look forward to a passive “Second Coming” of a Messiah, and believe they will be saved because of their faith. I feel they are sadly deluded. We are the second coming. As William Blake said, God only acts, and is, in existing beings and men. It is through the active work of transforming this barbaric, violent, earth-destroying civilization into a truly human world that we will attain our own liberation and salvation.

What do you imagine Rudolf Steiner would have to say about 2012? Seems again like it violates his idea of a gradual spiritual maturation.

Apparently, Steiner said that at the end of the Twentieth Century, humanity as a whole would be crossing the threshold of the spiritual world. What I get from my reading of his work is that he thinks there are different forms of time, appropriate to different worlds and epochs. The acceleration we are currently experiencing could only happen because we are ready for it. I think he knew that we were quickly approaching a kind of phase-shift, which would be experienced as a different realization of time and space.

I also don’t think Steiner was infallible. I don’t turn to his work as some kind of gospel, even though he was absolutely amazing and an extraordinary teacher. It is one vector with which to understand things – and I don’t think there is any absolute Truth. Nietzsche suggested there was no such thing as a linear or unitary Truth – that Truth could be much more like a value, the way painters use values in a painting. That seems much more authentic to me. However, there are better and worse paintings, stories, and works of art. If consciousness is co-creating reality, then we should seek to give our energy to the greatest and most helpful story, or artwork, which fits the perceptual and historical data that surrounds us. Reality itself may be a work of art.

At the end of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas we find another saying which could be applied here powerfully:

His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”
“It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’ Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.”

To me, this seems like very sound advice when it comes to speculating about the end of the world. Yet you seem to write and talk about it extensively, so you must believe there is some usefulness to Apocalypse myths. Why should we watch for the coming of the Kingdom when it’s already spread out around us?

That statement is very similar to the Buddhist idea that “Samsara is nirvana,” which I also agree with. I am not speculating about the end of the world, by the way. That is a literalist simplification based on your own projections, that are probably fear-based. I am theorizing about the ongoing transformation of human consciousness, leading not to the end of the world but a birth – the birth of humanity’s higher mind. I am prophesying, in a sense. But this must be understood properly. I agree with the Hopi anthropologist Armin Geertz, “Prophecy is not prediction, even though it purports to be so. Prophecy is a thread in the total fabric of meaning, in the total worldview. In this way it can be seen as a way of life and of being.” Prophecy is an expanded sensitivity to the implications of the present.

It is always easy to wave around some passage or other and use it to close down thinking. In the Biblical narrative there is certainly a great sense of preparation for a future event of the Apocalypse, despite this passage. I would take the Hopi perspective that in a sense “All time is present now,” but we still have to pass through the cycle or the sequence as it takes place from our limited view into the spacetime matrix, which is already pre-existent in four-dimensions, as quantum physicists tell us. We are moving towards this event – and yet, in another sense, it has already happened. We have to hold paradoxes in our mind in order to appreciate this – for instance, roles are preassigned, yet freely chosen and self-willed. This kind of understanding is syntactically embedded in the Hopi language.

My interpretation of 2012 and the Apocalypse is that we are now called upon to act – not to passively “watch for the coming of the Kingdom.” It is through our actions that we ready ourselves for this future state. As Nietzsche said, “The deed creates the doer – almost as an afterthought.” We will enter the Kingdom by transforming our consciousness, which can only be done through the pragmatic labor of transforming the Earth, bringing compassion and light and generosity and intelligence down into this world. Once we accomplish this, we won’t have to argue about it anymore, as we will find ourselves actually living in the Kingdom.

Fans of psychedelics, alternative religion and counter-culture were pleased to find out earlier this year you were working on a new magazine called Metacine. What happened to this project and what can we expect from it if and when it comes back to life? Will it be nationally available? What effects do you hope this new publication will have on people?

First of all, we have now changed the title of the magazine and the larger project to Evolver, and the Evolver Project. My inspiration for creating Evolver was directly related to my understanding of the prophecies, gained while writing my 2012 book, which will come out in April. I realized that the positive fulfillment of the prophecies in a better or perhaps utopian world is entirely dependent on our thoughts and actions – that it is out of the question to wait for a positive passive fulfillment of the Great Cycle. Therefore, we have only a very short time to create new systems and institutions that will support a transformation of consciousness and a liberation of human potential. The goal of Evolver is to create a media and membership organization that will aggregate the creative intelligence and resources of the progressive base that exists in the US and abroad. We are looking at models including AARP, National Geographic, and the Whole Earth Catalog. The media, including a magazine, DVD, and podcasts, will disseminate new ideas and new pragmatic tools, techniques, and technologies in sustainable food-production, community organizing, alternative energy, complementary currency, shamanic and meditative transformation, etc. Then through the membership organization, we will help people access these tools as quickly and locally as possible. We are counting on an active and engaged membership who will help us to envision, and implement, a new planetary culture – hopefully within the next few years. We plan to release the first issue of the magazine and DVD in January, with the beginning of the membership. We are working on a collaborative model, seeking to find the points of integration in the progressive communities, ranging from Burning Man to MoveOn, Bioneers to Rainforest Action Network, and much more. I hope that those who read this interview will join us in this evolving process.

Thanks again to Daniel Pinchbeck for this great interview opportunity. If you’d like to find out more about the Evolver Project, check out their website. At the moment, there isn’t too much on it though. You could also try this listing for them on Tribe.net to get a better sense of some of the community interaction surrounding this project.

Also, don’t forget to check out Part 1 of this interview if you haven’t already!

2012, authors, daniel pinchbeck, evolver, gnostic, steiner