Introduction to Alan Watts’ The Joyous Cosmology
An introduction to Alan Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology, written in the early 1960s about LSD and psilocybin. Pinchbeck argues that Watts’s real claim is that the Western ego does not exist, and that the psychedelic revolution has barely begun. He cites Thomas B. Roberts’s view of entheogens as a second Reformation.
Essay and Articles
The Monsanto Act, Reality Sandwich, March 2013
A March 2013 Reality Sandwich piece attacking the rider Congress attached to an emergency spending bill, which shields genetically modified seeds from litigation. Pinchbeck draws on Fritjof Capra’s The Hidden Connections, geneticist Mae-Wan Ho, and biologist David Ehrenfeld to argue that GE crops mainly serve chemical sales, and proposes global training in organic and permaculture farming instead.
Essay and Articles
The End of Nature and the Birth of the Supra-organism, Reality Sandwich, Feb 2013
Published on Reality Sandwich in February 2013, this account covers Bill McKibben’s Cooper Union talk on 350.org’s university divestment campaign, modeled on 1980s anti-apartheid divestment. Pinchbeck accepts McKibben’s climate data but argues that the hunkering-down vision of Eaarth cannot compete with Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, and calls for regenerative design and a new planetary culture.
Essay and Articles
The End of the Beginning, Reality Sandwich, Dec 2012
Written for Reality Sandwich as the Mayan Long Count ended in December 2012, the essay concedes that predictions by Graham Hancock, Jose Arguelles, Terence McKenna and David Wilcock did not materialize, while maintaining the date marks a hinge in planetary consciousness. Pinchbeck cites climate tipping-point research from Fred Pearce and Mark Lynas and quotes Donella Meadows on nonmaterial needs.
Essay and Articles
Planetary Initiation, Reality Sandwich, Nov 2012
Notes from a TEDx talk delivered at the La Calaca Festival in San Miguel de Allende in November 2012, published on Reality Sandwich. Opening with Hurricane Sandy flooding his New York block, Pinchbeck frames the ecological crisis as a species-wide initiation, drawing on Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman’s Spontaneous Evolution, James Lovelock, and Bernard Lietaer’s currency proposals.
Book Introductions
Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness: An Introduction, Sep 2012
Opening essay for Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness, the Reality Sandwich anthology Pinchbeck edited with Ken Jordan in 2012. Starting from Harry Smith’s films, it argues that discovery happens in liminal zones, and links synchronicity, near-death experience, and Aldous Huxley’s reducing valve to the Hopi prophecy of a Fifth World.
Press & Interviews
Transformer: Daniel Pinchbeck, Dazed & Confused Magazine
A short Q&A for Dazed & Confused, published as the Long Count calendar’s 5,125-year cycle closed in December 2012. Pinchbeck argues that humanity faces a planetary initiation analogous to tribal rites of passage, that climate tipping points make it urgent, and that psychedelics such as ayahuasca and DMT widen consciousness enough to expose modern ideological assumptions.
Press & Interviews
Daniel Pinchbeck, Interview Magazine
Stephen Mooallem interviews Pinchbeck for Interview Magazine. The conversation covers his childhood as the son of painter Peter Pinchbeck and Beat memoirist Joyce Johnson, his break from the New York literary world after Robert Bingham’s overdose, and his reading of the Mayan Long Count end date of December 21, 2012 as an initiation rather than an extinction.