the timboucher experience

The latest from Daniel Pinchbeck:

These days I feel lost in the immense suffering and madness of our world. Something has snapped in the spirit of the time; events have gone beyond human capacity to control, predict or even conceptualize. Those who insist they know what is happening are merely pretending, or dissembling. When novelty arises, when old structures disintegrate before new patterns reveal themselves, there are no experts.

When I went to see Daniel Pinchbeck speak recently at Barnes & Noble in Seattle, the first thing he said to the audience was that he “feels like a robot” having delivered the “same spiel” so many times up until then. This article, or at least this paragraph, to me seems to indicate that maybe he is beginning to find a new spiel, or else, maybe his old one has finally collapsed.

I don’t know the man personally, and my past antagonism towards him publicly certainly isn’t likely to me to win his friendship any time soon. Nor is this current probe into the dark recesses of his mind which he is kind enough to throw a window into through his writing. But I have to wonder aloud, if only for my own sake (because I have been there, God knows), whether he’s perceiving the state of the world accurately, or if the meltdown he’s feeling has its roots in his own life.

My speculation, of course, ends there, as only he knows what’s in his heart. I know that within the tangled and overgrown recesses of my own heart though, that the times when I myself am going through the worst of it are the times when the world around me seems most tortured, most out of control and most ready to burst. Those times, fortunately, have always turned themselves around in the end when I most needed them to. And the world itself, somehow, has remained afloat regardless of my bobbings up and down.

I was once a great deal more in tune with Pinchbeck’s overall message: back when it had to do with taking positive action in the world, and looking for real solutions, rather than becoming possessed with Apocalyptic fervor. Reading the above, I wonder what happened to that Daniel Pinchbeck, what trials and lessons the man behind the words endured which so heartily knocked him off that course. May it be that they are healed in their own time in whatever way is most appropriate. For I can tell you, from my own experience (which strengthens every day as beautiful people and amazing opportunities unfold around me), that we were not sent here to suffer.

Those who live now in Hell and confusion within this life have the ability to live hereafter in Heaven. And they do not have to wait another five years for “paradigms to shift” or for the “overt irrationality revealed by the current financial crisis might [to] act as a necessary awakening, leading to a large-scale shift in values.”

It’s not that our values need to change, so much as it is that we need to stand true to them at all costs, and actualize them in everything we do into this world.

We have to master first ourselves, take control and responsibility for who we are, and work continuously to improve one another’s experience of life. This, to me, is the only “foolproof” plan for a troubled time: to recognize that it is not the time or the world that is troubled, but it is us as individuals. The world has no experience of itself except through us, its walking antennas. If each of us can fix that which Epictetus would say is within the sphere of our moral purpose, we will come to a place of rest and peace, and we can literally do anything, including not suffering any more. The choice, as always, lies squarely in your hands.

• Meat is Murder
• The End of Suffering
• Genesis, The Origin of Sin
• The Great Work
• Fat cheerleaders