An interview conducted by Xerxes Cook for Purple Magazine, Fall/Winter 2012. Pinchbeck describes leaving Open City after Robert Bingham’s death, his iboga and ayahuasca initiations, and his argument that psychedelics surface at moments of civilizational crisis. He reads Albert Hofmann’s 1943 LSD synthesis against the Warsaw Ghetto, and links Jung’s synchronicity to Terence McKenna’s cosmic giggle.
A feature written for Origin magazine in June 2012 describing why Pinchbeck founded Evolver Editions with North Atlantic Books, and surveying its first titles. He traces the imprint back to the volume of reader mail his own books generated and the absence of any forum where those readers could speak.
Appearing on Reality Sandwich in May 2012, this rereading of Dieter Duhm’s Eros Unredeemed argues that no political revolution will succeed without a prior revolution in love and sexuality. Pinchbeck connects Duhm’s case against exclusive fidelity to Gerald Heard’s Pain, Sex, and Time, and notes his visit to Tamera, the community Duhm founded in Portugal.
An interview from Dazed & Confused, republished on Reality Sandwich in May 2012, with the historian Richard Dolan, author of the two-volume UFOs and the National Security State and of A.D. After Disclosure. Dolan describes how a doctoral dissertation turned into a career documenting official secrecy.
An argument for the legalization of ayahuasca, published in Dazed & Confused in 2012. Pinchbeck describes the brew’s pharmacology, the syncretic churches Santo Daime and Uniao do Vegetal, the Brazilian Ministry of Health study finding no harm, Gilberto Gil’s campaign to declare it cultural patrimony, and US court rulings, against arrests in England and Spain.
A March 2012 Reality Sandwich response to a reader, Henry Baum, who charged that Pinchbeck’s ideas lacked practical application. In answer he sets out a program: redesigning corporations away from shareholder-value maximization, replacing debt-based money with Bernard Lietaer’s Terra and Charles Eisenstein’s commons-linked currency, and applying Buckminster Fuller’s design science and William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle to industry.
Written for Dazed & Confused in 2012, the year completing the Maya Long Count. The column reads Occupy Wall Street, alongside the Arab Spring and the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, as an immune response by a collective human organism to ecological and financial crisis, citing James Lovelock’s forecast of population collapse, the BP spill in the Gulf and Fukushima.
Published in Dazed & Confused in 2012. Starting from William Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles, the column argues that the worst threat facing humanity is not climate change but the low level of human consciousness, with belief systems from religious fundamentalism to scientific materialism holding people in place. Buckminster Fuller’s utopia-or-oblivion and Teilhard de Chardin supply the case for a new planetary myth.
The opening installment of Pinchbeck’s monthly Dazed & Confused countdown to 2012, published in 2011. He separates his position from the disaster-movie version, Woody Harrelson’s doom prophet in Sony’s 2012, recounts his iboga initiation with the Bwiti in West Africa and ayahuasca with Secoya shamans in Ecuador, and reframes the Maya Long Count as an evolutionary threshold.
Reporting on the October 2011 global day of action in more than 600 cities for Reality Sandwich, Pinchbeck defends Occupy Wall Street against the charge that it lacks specific demands, arguing that no reform of the present system is possible. He urges the consciousness movement to join the encampments and links the moment to Mayan and Hopi prophecy.