Daniel Pinchbeck

It's as an armchair travel guide to the lands beyond rationality (whether you think those lands lie above or below it,) that this book works best. I didn't mind a big dose of Pinchbeck's personal story being woven in, since we expect that from travel writers like Pico Iyer and Paul Theroux, who can be just as unlikeable and self-involved as Pinchbeck, and are driven to their travels by a similar sense of jaded exhaustion with the possibilities of conventional experience.

It's a big question, show more though: is there or isn't there a mythic dimension to our collective experience? If there isn't, then I agree with Pinchbeck that human history can seem irredeemably, catastrophically pointless, and consciousness is a bad joke. But if there is, why do we seem to be traveling away from it at breakneck speed, and why is its preservation in the hands of such a bunch of untrustworthy seeming folks: borderline psychotics and over-privileged, empty-headed questers?

I like his continual questioning of his own convictions and those of his guides, his erudition, and his writing ability generally. I like the idea that it's possible to think about time in a different way that could invest life with meaning beyond the day-to-day. And I like that he offers no prescription for enlightenment or salvation, as if they could be dispensed like the drugs he takes so liberally. What to do with all that? Who knows? The lack of resolution is part of the appeal. To coin a phrase: the Way is open, but there are neither travelers, nor guide. show less

An overwritten, self-indulgent and sometimes incoherent mess of a book, but oddly engrossing at the same time. (I read it in a few sittings.) 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl gets its structure from Daniel Pinchbeck's own peripatetic interests and self-absorption. That's both good and bad: it prevents 2012 from becoming a dry academic treatise because it's deeply (sometimes cringingly) personal, but it also flits from topic to topic, depending on the author's level of enthusiasm or show more disillusionment.

Contrary to popular perception, 2012 won't necessarily be apocalyptic; it's a movement into a different stage of consciousness. Pinchbeck plunges into a wide-ranging examination and comparison of cross-cultural (and atemporal) phenomena and theory that deal with the eschatological; social scientists (and physicists too, probably) would fling the book against the wall early on, but it's fascinating regardless. It's not often you find one place that discusses the Mayan calendar, alien abduction, Terence McKenna, crop circles, quantum physics, Teilhard de Chardin, Burning Man and ayahuasca at the same time -- well, if you were at Burning Man, maybe.

It's all fun until the whining takes over. There's nothing wrong with all this self-reflexivity in a memoir, but Pinchbeck later justifies his cold behavior towards his family through his theory that polyamory as a more "evolved" form of interrelationships. Sure, we're carefully led through his process of self-realization, but it smacks the reader of self-aggrandizement at this point in the narrative. (And I won't reveal the ending concerning the author's role in all this, but let's just say it concerns the subtitle.)

There's no relation to the Roland Emmerich disaster movie 2012, which is a good thing, but at least the movie had a better sense of humor. show less

Am I the only person who thinks this dude is a total twit? His prose is boring and staggeringly unoriginal, everything he writes is informed only by his pomposity and desire to manipulate his "theories" (most often a murky composite pilfered from others) to justify his own behavior and desires. Also, though I am usually interested in hearing about the spiritual paths of others (epiphanic moments, etc) his regurgitations of his malcontent childhood and coke-snorting years just come off as show more self-absorbed and pointless. This dude is on a crazy ego trip. It's terribly unfortunate that he's become the de facto, or at least most visible (probably due to the publishing contacts he has from those frosted flake celebrity-profiler days) voice in support of entheogens of our time. He is an exemplar of how entheogens do not do the work of spiritual sublimation for you, they are merely a vessel, like yogic asanas, that take you wherever you decide to go. And used sacreligiously in a party context, they're only hallucinogens.

Anyway, he's a false prophet. Like Tim Leary and a succession of acid fascists and psychedelic capitalizers / exploiters before him, he was blessed with epiphany like so many but he lost the plot. For a genuine contemporary sage, try Ken Wilber. show less

This is a book about metaphysics, which I found eerily fascinating. Pinchbeck's key premise, which he arrived at through his own experiences beginning with his experimentation with psychedelics, is that consciousness is not just a product of matter, an epiphenomenon of brain functions. Instead, he asserts that mind and matter are inseparable and are in fact interactive. With the ideological landscape swept clean by Nietzsche's general refutation of the modern Western worldview Pinchbeck show more finds support for his unorthodox metaphysics in Jung's concepts of the collective unconscious and the universal mythical archetypes, from the uncertainty principle of quantum theory, which renders objective knowledge completely illusory, and from fellow psychedelic explorer and writer Terence McKenna, among many others.

Depending on the philosophical orientation of the reader and the conclusions the he or she chooses to draw, this book can be read alternately as a nonsensical drug-induced paranoid delusion or as a metaphysical critique of modern industrial society and its dogmatic rationalist materialism (or both, I suppose). The gatekeepers of academic orthodoxy predictably will raise flags of "pseudoscience" and other charges of blasphemy for his sparing and often dismissive allusions to mainstream scholarly research as he pursues more fertile sources of the unthinkable. Personally, I find the book difficult to criticize because Pinchbeck could not be any more forthcoming or humble about his objective, which he calls "an extravagant thought experiment."

This is not a book about the Maya, and it cannot and should not be judged as such. Pinchbeck is considering that the Mayan epistemology (as interpreted and popularized by new age writers) and modern epistemology are only different archetypal reflections of the same collective unconscious (as are the knowledge systems of every culture ever to exist). The world of superficial appearances is no less real than the worlds of the mind like dreams and hallucinations, and the latter can in fact convey a better overall sense of reality than the former, a fact that he believes the ancient Mayans understood. In contrast to contemporary society's general distaste for hallucinogenic substances, for example, Maya leaders like Pacal the Great ritually used them to guide their decisions.

Pinchbeck writes of the origin of the modern Western mind: "The drastic shift--mutation or leap of quantum creativity--into the mental-rational structure was foretold by a myth: the birth of the goddess Athena, who emerged from the painfully throbbing head of Zeus, split open by an ax. The blow was 'accompanied by a terrible tumult throughout nature, as well as by the astonishment of the entire pantheon,' writes [Jean] Gebser, paraphrasing Pindar. Once sprung, Athena, goddess of knowledge and clear thought, bestowed her protective grace over Athens, cradle of the modern Western mind. In the movement from the mythic to the mental-rational mind-set, human thought was directed outward, discovering the external world, for the first time, as an object of inquiry in itself." (210-1)

Pinchbeck is advocating another such shift in global consciousness toward a non-dualist myth-embracing culture that he believes is the only hope for human societies to transcend the imminent crises of peak oil, imperialist war, mass extinction, nuclear war, and ecological collapse--essentially the disastrous culmination of this "mental-rational" civilization finally becoming apparent.

He identifies this shift with the transformation of the world that is supposed to occur at the completion of the 13th bak'tun of the Mayan Long Count, or on Gregorian 12-21-2012. As this and other apocalyptic predictions and prophecies accumulate in the collective psyche, Pinchbeck sees potential for a physical manifestation of them: "If the Apocalypse, as an archetype, is currently constellating in our world, we have the option of bringing the 'dynamic agency' and primordial pattern, fully into our awareness. By giving it our conscious attention, we can mediate the process, potentially avoiding its most catastrophic effects." (110)

To me, this thesis cannot be answered by any point-by-point criticism of its assertions. Instead, it stands as an intersubjective challenge to the skeptical reader to explore non-ordinary states of awareness for herself and find whatever value she will there. show less