Author name: Daniel Pinchbeck

Alexander Beiner, author of The Bigger Picture, executive director of the Breaking Convention conference and a co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, talks with Pinchbeck in this excerpt from the Future of Consciousness course. Beiner participated in Imperial College’s extended-state DMT study and contrasts two readings of the DMT realm: that its entities are genuinely autonomous, and the view associated with the Qualia Research Institute that the states correspond to shifting geometries of experience. He says his own interest has moved from that metaphysical question to practical application. He criticizes how far medicalization has crowded out the cultural and consciousness-change agenda of the earlier psychedelic underground, discusses the FDA’s rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy as a setback for MAPS and Rick Doblin, and describes the psychedelic-assisted innovation work of the Minds organization founded by Bruce Damer.

Alexander Beiner, author of The Bigger Picture, executive director of the Breaking Convention conference and a co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck’s online course The Future of Consciousness. He presents his theory of the age of breach, arguing that the fluid nature of online identity pools collective desire and resentment into archetypal communities, with QAnon as an example, and that these formations breach into physical reality with results their participants do not anticipate, as on January 6. He compares navigating online worlds to shamanic practice and argues that skills learned in psychedelic work transfer to a world saturated by generative AI. He draws on Jung, Terence McKenna, Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror and Jamie Wheal’s Recapture the Rapture.

An excerpt from philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s session in the Liminal Institute online course The Future of Consciousness. Kastrup, executive director of the Essentia Foundation and the leading proponent of analytic idealism, argues that treating everything we have a word for as a separate thing with its own point of view mistakes the structure of language for the structure of the world, using the example of a fist that vanishes when the hand opens. He says the boundaries of distinct points of view follow the boundaries of biology. Kastrup adds that he finds ordinary experience mysterious enough that the paranormal holds little interest, but that synchronicity and telepathy follow straightforwardly from a single mind divided by imperfect dissociative boundaries. Pinchbeck raises the Kogi, the Hopi, and Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance.

Jude Currivan, a cosmologist with an Oxford physics degree and author of The Cosmic Hologram and The Story of Gaia, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck’s online course The Future of Consciousness. She presents a case that the universe is constituted by meaningful in-formation rather than random data, projected holographically onto a two-dimensional boundary and pixelated at the Planck scale, citing the holographic principle associated with black hole thermodynamics and Leonard Susskind, and a 2017 analysis of the cosmic microwave background at the University of Southampton. She traces the same fractal and power-law patterning through earthquakes, human conflicts, internet hubs, galaxies and city growth, and points to a 2018 entanglement experiment linking laboratory photons with starlight and quasar light as evidence of universal nonlocality. She also responds directly to Bernardo Kastrup.

Yancey Strickler, co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter and now director of Metalabel, talks with Daniel Pinchbeck about how creative people can build economic structures that do not run on profit maximization. Strickler traces his path from a farm in southwest Virginia to music criticism at The Village Voice, Spin and Pitchfork, citing Harry Smith and Smithsonian Folkways as formative, and recalls the unease he and Perry Chen felt about crossing from art into business in 2005. He sets out the argument of his book This Could Be Our Future, that most organizations are built to select whichever option makes the most money, and that artists are equipped to decide by other values. Pinchbeck asks whether entrepreneurs have inherited the cultural authority once held by musicians and artists. Strickler closes on Walter Benjamin and the loss of aura.