Crossing the Threshold: Realms of Consciousness Beyond Physical Death
Four online seminars on what the evidence and the traditions say about consciousness after death, moving from scientific materialism to monistic idealism. Includes a free ebook.
Essay and Articles
Mexico’s Psychedelic Renaissance
Written from Tulum for Purple’s Mexico issue. Pinchbeck traces Mexico’s psychedelic legacy — psilocybin and the Mazatec, peyote among the Huichol and Tarahumara, Salvia divinorum, the Sonoran toad, and Castaneda’s disputed Don Juan — against the commercialisation now overtaking it, from Thiel-funded psychedelic startups to Tulum’s Bufo trade. Recounts his own DMT initiation at Palenque, a 5-MeO-DMT session in Mexico City, and Wasson’s encounter with MarÃa Sabina, and closes on Sergio Magaña’s account of the Sixth Sun and Octavio Paz on Mexican solitude.
Cosmic Thought, Cosmic Memory, Cosmic Dream: An Introduction to Rudolf Steiner
A short, coherent overview of Rudolf Steiner — Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and the cosmology of human evolution that lies behind both. Recorded January 2021.
Conversations
Our Regenerative Future with Bruce Parry, Rory Spowers, and Daniel Pinchbeck
Pinchbeck introduces Building Our Regenerative Future, a month-long online course launching in June 2020, alongside the writer Rory Spowers and the documentary maker Bruce Parry, known for living among Indigenous communities for the BBC series Tribe. They lay out eight sessions covering food, health, community, economics, culture and consciousness, with archived recordings, reading lists, optional workshops and a certificate. Spowers frames the underlying argument: the extractive economy is linear while living systems are cyclical, so the way back is to build systems that are regenerative by design. Pinchbeck describes three aims, knowledge, action and connection, the last meant to create a network of people pursuing the same shift. Parry discusses what community and solidarity mean under the conditions the pandemic has exposed and the need for a shared narrative.
Building Our Regenerative Future
More than twenty-five speakers across six modules on the path to a regenerative society — food, health, culture, community and the new professions that a planetary culture will require.
Christopher Bache’s LSD Prophecies
Christopher Bache on twenty years of high-dose LSD sessions and the cosmology he derived from them, recorded for Building Our Regenerative Future. Free, and paired with his dialogue with Ervin Laszlo.
The End of It, September 2019
A short poem staging the end of the world as a sequence of last things: the final sunset, the last hungry kiss, gravity dissipating and DNA unzipping while the angels blow their trumpets and God plays a violin sonata. It closes on a white hole in the uncreated void, called the paradoxical fulfillment of nobody’s desire.
Reporting on Climate Change Is Harmful if You’re Not Offering Solutions
An interview in which Pinchbeck argues that relentlessly bleak climate journalism, including New York Magazine’s The Uninhabitable Earth and much of VICE’s reporting, serves corporate culture by breeding fatalism unless it is paired with solutions. He invokes Slavoj Zizek on mindfulness as the ideology of postmodern capitalism, faults Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, and calls for full renewable energy within twenty years.
A Journey of the Mind and Soul
Originally published on VICE US. Pinchbeck interviews Allan Badiner about his anthology Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, asking whether the two traditions conflict. Badiner recounts a grueling Sri Lankan meditation retreat, meeting the chemist Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna, and cites Huston Smith and Ken Wilber on the gap between altered states and altered traits.
Introducing When Plants Dream!
Announces When Plants Dream, co-written with anthropologist Sophia Rokhlin of the Chaikuni Institute in Peru. Pinchbeck traces his route from Manhattan magazine journalism through Bwiti iboga initiation in Gabon and ayahuasca with the Secoya in Ecuador, then argues that the global ayahuasca boom carries real costs: scarcity of banisteriopsis caapi vines, destabilized indigenous communities, and shamans pulled onto the international circuit.