Pinchbeck argues that apocalypse means unveiling rather than annihilation, and that the present moment, marked by the Epstein files, the funding of ICE detention centers and the concentration of wealth in a few hands, is a collective initiation in which suppressed material is forced into consciousness. He connects Hopi and Mayan prophecy and the work of Jose Arguelles and Terence McKenna, which he treated in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, to Edward Edinger's Jungian reading in The Archetype of the Apocalypse and Christopher Bache's LSD and the Mind of the Universe. Working from Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism and Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, he contends that effective resistance requires a metaphysical basis.
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues that apocalypse in its original sense means revealing, and that Edward Edinger's Jungian account of the eruption and integration of the shadow describes what the Epstein files and the visible corruption of the ruling elite represent.
- The essay maintains that the 2012 threshold identified by Terence McKenna and Jose Arguelles was not a single date but an ongoing crossing that is still underway.
- Citing Christopher Bache's LSD and the Mind of the Universe, Pinchbeck presents a plausible outcome in which ecological and social breakdown is followed by local communities linking into a mycelial network that becomes the basis of a new planetary culture.
- Pinchbeck argues that the displacement of credentialed white-collar workers by AI creates a large, well-resourced population that could undergo political awakening and align with the working class and with movements in the global south.
- The essay attributes American passivity to geography, a mythology of regeneration through violence described by Richard Slotkin, and a secular materialism that breeds nihilism, contrasting this with the metaphysical force behind Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Full text
Hey folks, as you're probably aware, we're at a point where three American billionaires possess more wealth than half the population here. ICE just received $75 billion to build 23 detention centers or concentration camps. And many AI executives believe that within 18 months, every form of white-collar work will be performed better by computers. But I'm not here to give you a news update. I'm here to tell you about what is happening right now in a prophetic way. And that the word apocalypse does not mean what you think it means. To provide a bit of background, I wrote a number of books. My first, Breaking Up in the Head, came out in 2002, was all about psychedelic shamanism.
When I started that book, I was a scientific materialist and a skeptic, but I was also deep in an existential crisis. As I researched, I went through a number of transformational, psychic, and even supernatural experiences. Eventually, these broke open my fairly hard and and stubborn head. So, that book charted my eventual shift from materialism to a Youngian, animist, and shamanic perspective. Today, when I seek to define my ontology, I call myself an analytic idealist. That's the philosophical thesis that consciousness is actually our foundational baseline reality instead of anything material or physical. Just as Tibetan Buddhists speak about the nature of mind and the ultimately dream-like nature of reality, idealists understand everything as arising out of the primordial ground of pure, instinctive consciousness.
As the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup has noted, we are differentiated alters of that underlying immanent field of consciousness that exists outside of time and space. For my second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, I studied ancient and indigenous prophecies. The Hopi prophecies, the Mayan and Aztec prophecies. And I examined those in relationship to Judeo-Christian ideas of the apocalypse. So, the word apocalypse actually means revealing, uncovering, or unveiling. A time when all the hidden things become known. I believe we really are living close to that apocalyptic threshold right now, if not actually just in it. Uh in my book 2012, I focused on the Mayan calendar. I got fascinated by the ideas of Jose Argüelles and Terence Mc Kenna.
Uh Mc Kenna talked about what he called time wave zero and the singularity or the eschaton. Mc Kenna had an extremely powerful experience in the 1970s in the Amazon. He was just in his 20s at the time. Over the course of a week or more, he was convinced that psilocybin, sort of the intelligence of the mushroom, which he thought was an extraterrestrial being, was communicating with him directly and downloading massive amounts of information into him. The mushroom's alien sentience told Mc Kenna there would be an upcoming metamorphosis, a transformation in the nature of time, consciousness, and human civilization, that this was destined to happen in the near future.
A bit later, Mc Kenna discovered the Mayan calendar. He found that what he had seen in his visions indicated this threshold would be in 2012, which was also the ending of the Mayans 5,125-year long count. Jose Argüelles had very similar visionary experiences. He was an art historian. He wrote a book called The Transformative Vision about art and shamanism and consciousness in 1975. After his LSD revelations, he also beamed to 2012 as an archetype. He focused on the Tzolkin, the Mayan 13 by 20 sacred matrix. I actually edited and published Argüelles's last book, Manifesto for the Noosphere, before he passed away in 2011. So, Argüelles was kind of optimistic.
He believed we were on a trajectory to activate the noosphere, the collective psychic field of the Earth, and graduate as a post-technological species. He envisioned a singularity which would meld technology and consciousness into some ultimate tool or extension. Uh so many people felt that nothing happened as we passed the exact 2012 threshold. I I don't think it was about that exact moment. I believe it has happened, is still happening, and will continue to happen. We are actually meshing these prophetic start cycles and in some way we're crossing over. We're reaching the other side of something, although that's still very difficult to define or name. But it does feel as if reality is shifting under our feet.
The world feels very different than it did 30 years ago or 20 years ago with a crazy pace of social change, technological innovation, and ecological destruction. Time itself feels different. And I have to admit this transformation doesn't feel as fun as I once hoped it would be. From a shamanic perspective, we find ourselves today in a liminal zone. I tend to think of it as a collective initiation for the human psyche. In indigenous cultures, initiation involves integrating the visionary or transpersonal experience to overcome the grip of the egocentric perspective and attain maturity as a member of the community, to be responsible for the community as a whole.
Right now we find ourselves in between worlds. And what's happening in the United States, it's like a massive projection of our civilizational shadow through the Trump regime. Feels like part of this prophetic unfolding. It feels more and more like there's no way or nowhere left to hide. There's no dodge, diversion, or distraction that can keep us from seeing, sensing, and feeling the destructive forces we have unconsciously unleashed. Let's reflect on this idea of the apocalypse as revealing. Carl Jung's student Edward Edinger wrote the archetype of the apocalypse. Jungians understand the apocalypse as as ultimately a psychic event and ultimately a positive one. It represents first the eruption of the shadow and then the integration of all of the suppressed contents of the psyche, the darkest parts, the taboo material, which need to come out so we can actually assimilate it and recognize it and integrate it.
Edinger called this process the coming of the self into conscious realization. What we're seeing with the Epstein files feels like an inevitable part of this apocalyptic unveiling. We're now well aware of the corruption and malevolence, the psychopathic disregard for conscience, culture, and humanity that our ruling elite has for the world and unfortunately for the vast majority of human beings. Those who work immorally to amass vast hoards of wealth while so many are suffering and the earth itself is under threat, obviously represent a certain psychological type. We know that psychopaths often succeed in hierarchical systems like corporations where conscience and empathy actually work against you. And we can now see there are concentric circles of sort of psychopathology that ripple out from the top levels of wealth and power deforming all of our society and our culture.
That was always the case, but now the mechanisms are laid almost mathematically bare. It is almost as if part of the ritual for the Epstein class is to unveil their darkest secrets at a time when they believe they have attained unassailable power. After all, they have the military, they've got the nuclear weapons, they've got the drones, they've got the the sonic weapons, the thermobaric weapons, the biotechnology weapons, and of course they've got the huge surveillance system. And they've gained power over so much of the media that can that they can quite easily manipulate the beliefs and the nervous systems of their many, many millions of mind-controlled followers like they're playing an instrument. They can even let us know what they have been doing in secret because they believe we no longer have any capacity to do do about it.
Remember that, it's important. We're at a threshold for humanity and it does seem unfortunately that we're on the verge of flunking what Buckminster Fuller called our final exam as a species. So, all of that, but there are other forces at play also. For my book on prophecies, I studied the crop circles in England and aspects of the extraterrestrial and UFO phenomenon, which I'm currently looking at again for a series of essays. What's happening now, as terrible as it feels, seems somehow inevitable. We're undergoing this transmutation, this initiatory process, where as a species, we have to cross over through the abyss, let's say. Hopefully, eventually we're going to come out of the other side into healthy maturity and responsibility and so on.
What the time frame for that is, whether things get incredibly horrible over the next 10, 20, or even 50 years, or whether there's like a change in heart and new direction sooner, I don't know. I don't think anybody can know. And I have to be honest that in some ways I haven't even been pursuing kind of like certain speaking opportunities as much as I used to because I feel I don't necessarily have a wildly optimistic or easily relatable message right now. But I think that honesty and ambivalence in a way matters more than than comfort and certainty. One book that stayed with me was by this guy Christopher Bache, LSD in the mind of the universe.
Bache was an academic, but he underwent perhaps the most high-dose LSD sessions of anyone that I've ever heard of, with his wife helping as his guide. Over these sessions, what came through for him was a coherent vision of the near future. He saw things getting much worse at first. He saw profound ecological and social breakdown, a lot of death, and so on. But he also saw new local communities springing up, gaining force, and developing into a mycelial meshwork of authentic connection that would form the basis of a new planetary culture as our old system collapsed. The new culture which would be much more truthful and transparent and equitable and so on.
So, this still resonates with me as a plausible outcome. It seems that this domination exploitation with Tico empire complex has to reach its full manifestation and full final expression before it consumes itself and collapses, hopefully allowing people to go on a different journey beyond this threshold. Of course, another option is just human extinction which seems quite possible at this point as we're piling up the existential threats. In 2003, I visited the Hopi in Arizona were thought to be among the oldest settled peoples in North America. A Hopi elder told me that there would be concentration camps and death camps in the United States in the future.
He predicted that many millions of people would be killed in these camps. And that was very scary, but it also felt far-fetched at that time. I mean, not entirely implausible, but but far-fetched. Now, it feels much closer, almost imminent. When I see ICE being given 75 billion dollars and you know, kind of a lot of Nazi sympathizers in the right-wing and so on. When I read about the possible use of thermobaric and high-temperature weapons in Gaza that can vaporize people leaving no trace. It feels like we're entering a new stage of sort of technological or techno-feudal civilization where the psychopathic power elite had decided has decided that human life outside, you know, what they need or what what what their interests are is basically worthless.
I believe this is very much linked also to the ecological crisis, ironically. I mean, the right-wing constantly say they don't believe in global warming, but of course they are their corporate and and intelligence services have all done all the research. They're well aware that resources are going to become very scarce soon, that disruptive warming is happening much faster than even anticipated. I believe this is why the US plans to take over Greenland and, you know, has threatened invading Canada. They're aware that people will be pushing up from the global south as warming reaches critical levels and they can't survive there anymore and parts of the southern US also become uninhabitable.
The north has tremendous natural resources, fresh water, arable land, and so on. Current projections say many regions will reach 3° C above pre-industrial temperatures by 2060, which will be devastating for the global south. My third book, How Soon Is Now, was a sincere effort that took me like 10 years of trial and error to envision a framework for a new planetary culture that directly confronted the planetary emergency. I proposed how we could redesign our technical and social systems to allow everybody to survive and thrive decently as we shifted to regenerative practices and ecological stewardship while, you know, perhaps gently and humanely reducing the global population over time. Unfortunately, what we have now is a federal government in the US run by, like I would characterize them as an international crime syndicate, who are not only very dangerous but also pathetically short-sighted.
It seems most likely their response to the deepening crisis will be a mass power theft for themselves while huge populations are allowed to suffer and die. I guess this is kind of like what happened at the end of the Roman Empire. And yeah, then you have the AI experts and CEOs who believe that within a year or two every form of white-collar work, administration, programming, design, customer service, knowledge work is going to be assimilated by AI. This means that power and wealth will concentrate even further, which is almost hard to believe as it's already so extreme with as I mentioned three individuals possessing more wealth than half the US population. But I think in this disruptive transition, there are also opportunities for emancipation or liberation.
If all of the people who spent hundreds of thousands on advanced degrees anticipating stable careers are suddenly cut loose by the techno-feudal system, that represents a massive reserve of intelligent and well-resourced people who could undergo a political awakening to oppose what is happening. If the middle class in the US realize their interests aligned with the working class and even with other other movements in the global south like the landless peasant movements, other movements of solidarity around the world, then this threshold of disruptive change and danger becomes a real opening. It could lead to fascism, it could lead to socialism, or to some other form of redistributive and regenerative paradigm we can't even imagine as of now. As someone who has studied shamanism, animism, and magic, who has direct experience of the psychic and paranormal, uh to my own surprise, I recognize that things can seem very dark and dire just before there's some magical, you know, kind of eruption or unanticipated transformation occurs. Certainly over the last 50 years we're we're not able to resolve the contradictions of liberalism and our post-industrial society in a very reasonable way.
Secular materialism led to cynicism and nihilism feeding the general sense of dystopian despair. Today everybody in our ruling elite that we counted on has failed us. Now we see this entire political and economic apparatus laid bare and orchestrated against the common good. So we must fully integrate where we are now, reflect on it, and figure out how we use our individual and collective gifts to navigate a way out of it. In practical terms, people often ask what our ongoing responses should look like. Once again, I wish I had, you know, more amazing answers. You know, I do believe we should seek to form stronger local communities, but at the same time, I admit I remain a bit of a loner and outsider, and I can't say I'm modeling that behavior at this point.
I would love to be part of some movement or to establish some, you know, new authentic grassroots media and social networks, which I did try to build years ago. But at the moment, that's just an idea. Of course, we do need the Democrats, as flawed and often pathetic as they are, to retake Congress next year if we want to avert a deeper level of contract catastrophe. However, the sense is that the Trump regime and the Republican Party, now an overtly fascist and Christian white nationalist party, have no intention of giving up or sharing power. As James Spire wrote in the Daily News, the Trump administration is essentially acting as a massive criminal enterprise.
It lies, steals, extorts, and murders, all cloaked in the awesome authority of the state. A crime spree that puts Al Capone to shame. Viewing the Trump administration as a massive crime syndicate allows us to be clear-eyed about what is coming down the road. Will Trump try to steal the midterm elections? Of course, he will. He tried to steal the 2020 elections, and the lack of any consequences only further emboldened him. So, that was from the Daily News, of all places. But if the authoritarian forces remain fully in control, I really am concerned that we'll see the realization of this dystopian vision. Unfortunately, millions of people, mainly men, have become consumed by a cultural backlash around gender and traditional sex roles.
The rise of the incels and the triumph of the right is largely a reaction to women and minorities gaining increasing power and leverage in society over the last decades. Women now attain close to 60% of college degrees in the US, thriving in entrepreneurial and corporate careers, while men have tended to backslide. The toxic internet culture steered millions of disaffected underachieving men toward reactionary politics, nationalism, and far-right militias. I believe we need a radical approach to address the crisis around gender and sexuality. Perhaps something like a truth and reconciliation process between the genders. While AI has the potential to unleash tremendously destructive impacts, it could also be used to rebuild our social contract and create new digital infrastructures in a way that works much better for the people.
We could build networks where individuals actually control their own data, where every piece of media can be tracked back to its human creator to do away with the deepfake problem. We could recognize that our would-be autocrats are following a familiar playbook, one that's been used in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and many other countries, where it hasn't really led to a lot of happiness for most people. So, we need to keep raising awareness of the historical parallels, as many people in the US lack sufficient context or historical knowledge. At this point, the lack of a collective spirit resistance in the US is pretty glaring, and I think there are many reasons for this. The country is geographically spread out, lacking a single central hub, like, for instance, Paris, where government, business, and media can be halted in one fell swoop.
We have a hyper militarized culture and American mythology of kind of violence or what Professor Richard Slotkin calls regeneration through violence. I also connect the complacency of the American multitudes to cultural factors. Poor diet, a dystopian and pacifying media, uh psychotropic drugs like antidepressants that make people cynical, hopeless, and apathetic. Then, secular materialism is also a huge problem, as it can easily lead to cynicism and nihilism. If you believe that death is total, you know, wipeout, complete annihilation, you're less likely to risk your life for any cause, and more likely to give up and surrender to a technofeudal authoritarian state. Movements that were led by figures like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.
had a metaphysical or spiritual force that inspired courage and hope for a better world. Without that, our educated middle class seems willing to surrender their freedoms to preserve some fading facsimile of normality. They fail to realize that the Christian nationalists don't want just a little control, they want it all. The Heritage Foundation has made clear that the regime intends to roll back the rights of women to the Middle Ages while dismantling democratic institutions entirely along with anything that threatens them, such as institutions that engage in scientific research or preserve historical and cultural knowledge. What makes this struggle incredibly dangerous is the technological power and surveillance capacity now available.
The techno-feudal regime possesses the capacity to micromanage and manipulate what many people believe and think to an unprecedented degree. Algorithms reinforce radical ideologies slowly altering the entire imagination of the populace. With AI, it becomes extremely difficult to discern real from fake. And the deliberate darkening of the collective mood is also a known tactic of psychological warfare. You feed the people a steady diet of dystopian media and conspiracy till they feel detached, dissociated, and totally disempowered. I think we also have to be worried about the cognitive capacity of young people overwhelmed by the onslaught of new social technologies that cause you problems. For instance, the hippocampus is essential for spatial navigation and memory.
When young people outsource aspects of their innate cognitive capacity to digital tools, they can fail to develop those physiological areas, for instance. They may end up with permanent handicaps like they, you know, they I find that many people in their 20s who had smartphones as kids entirely lack kind of native spatial navigation abilities. Now with LLMs, people are also outsourcing their ability to reason in a linear way. If a whole generation becomes too cognitively impaired to understand what is at stake and to respond properly, they will be very easily to divide and and conquer and control. And as we know, division is the divisiveness is the basis of the authoritarian playbook.
As the Epstein files reveal, the Epstein class is that projects a false dichotomy of left versus right to keep the people fractured. So, the face of all of this, I still think we need to think about the role of the metaphysical. The uncanny, the almost supernatural way the historical tumblers have clicked together for this authoritarian movement to succeed kind of feels like a kind of dark magic. We're learning about ritualized taboo breaking and sacrificial practices that may go back to ancient Babylon operating, whether consciously or not, at the highest levels of power. But the counterforce to this must also be considered. As someone who believes consciousness is foundational, I agree with many of Rupert Sheldrake's ideas around morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance.
Indigenous cultures develop magical and shamanic techniques through reciprocity with their local ecology that they deepened over many generations. In the postmodern West, we also possess our own morphogenetic fields. These can be influenced, reshaped, resculpted by ceremonial practices, by decentralized networks for building new cultures, for mutual aid, and by the integration of analytic idealism, you know, sort of cutting-edge scientific thought, animism, hermetic philosophy, Union archetypes, and so on. Ultimately, I believe that everything is magic. Everything is made of morphogenetic fields co-creating the world we experience. From a Dzogchen or Tibetan tantric perspective, samsara is nirvana. At a deeper level, we are that, that consciousness which has woven this whole show together.
And in that sense, we're all exactly where we need to be at this exact moment, participating in this vast collective dream. So, I think this recognition is helpful, not disempowering or apolitical. It grants us the freedom to explore the deeper, darker elements of our reality without losing our equanimity. We happen to awaken to these bodies at this point in time on this strange, swiftly tilting planet. Whatever happens next will also be a magical manifestation. So, let's humbly support magic that is rooted in vitality, connection, and truth. We apply our unique gifts to awakening from the nightmare of history into the great dream of reality.
Transcript of the video essay, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.