Meet Daniel
Bio
Daniel Pinchbeck is the author of Breaking Open the Head (2002), Quetzalcoatl Returns (2006, originally published as 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl), and When Plants Dream (with Sophia Rokhlin). His early works helped to initiate the new psychedelic renaissance and consciousness movement. His 2017 book, How Soon Is Now, explored the systemic changes needed to avert ecological collapse and near-term extinction.
He was featured in Joao Amorim’s 2010 documentary, 2012: Time for Change, which promoted a holistic approach to redesigning our civilization, centering the value of indigenous knowledge systems. He has written features for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, and elsewhere. He is a regular contributor to Purple Magazine. He has been a columnist for Dazed, The Art Newspaper of London, Art & America, and other magazines. He cofounded the pioneering web magazine, Reality Sandwich. He speaks at festivals and conferences around the world.
Paid subscribers to his newsletter receive discounts to his courses on www.liminal.news .
Background
Daniel Pinchbeck was born in New York City in 1966. His father, Peter Pinchbeck, was a painter who worked in the tradition of the Abstract Expressionists. His mother, Joyce Johnson, is a renowned book editor and author, whose most famous work, Minor Characters, chronicled her early years, including her relationship with Beat Generation icon, Jack Kerouac. Daniel grew up steeped in New York’s countercultural and literary milieux, and started the literary magazine, Open City, with writers Thomas Beller and Rob Bingham in his mid-twenties, while working full-time as a magazine editor.
Daniel published his first book, Breaking Open the Head (Random House, 2002), at the age of 34. His second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006; republished recently as Quetzalcoatl Returns) was a New York Times bestseller. Daniel appeared on The Colbert Report and was the subject of a feature in Rolling Stone. Unfortunately, the mainstream media responded negatively to the book, partly because Daniel described in detail the experience of a visionary transmission, where an entity calling itself Quetzalcoatl communicated with him telepathically for a week. This happened in 2003, while he was working with the Santo Daime, an ayahuasca-based religion, in the Brazilian Amazon. A documentary, 2012: Time for Change, produced by Mangu TV and directed by Joao Amorim, came out in 2010, focusing on Daniel’s ideas, interviewing a range of visionaries and ecologists including Paul Stamets, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Bernard Lietaer.
In 2005, Daniel started a company, Evolver, with a group of investors in California. The goal of this company and nonprofit was to develop a new media and social network infrastructure to enable a rapid evolution of human society, integrating the realization of the climate emergency and providing tools (from permaculture to local currency templates) and community infrastructure to enable rapid transformation. After his first attempt failed, Daniel re-started the company in New York with business partner Ken Jordan. They launched Reality Sandwich, a web magazine, and The Evolver Network, a scaffold for self-organizing community groups. Unfortunately, lack of capital and issues between the founders led to Daniel leaving this project in 2013.
Daniel hosted Mindshift, a talk show, on Gaia TV. His next book, How Soon Is Now, with introductions from Sting and Russell Brand, came out in 2016 from Watkins Press. When Plants Dream, a study of ayahuasca co-authored with anthropologist Sophia Rokhlin, was released by Watkins in 2019. In 2021, he launched his Substack, Liminal News, and online course platform, The Liminal Institute, also publishing a collection of essays, The World You See Is The Myth You Are in, as well as shorter works including Afterlife, The Occult Control System, and Conspiranoia.
Influences
Daniel’s work and thought draw from a vast range of literary, philosophical, and esoteric sources. Among his primary influences are Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Dion Fortune, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Rimbaud, G.I. Gurdjieff, Jose Arguelles, Terence McKenna, Thomas Bernhard, Allen Ginsberg, Virginia Woolf, Antonin Artaud, Aldous Huxley, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson, and many more.