Anu Bonobo’s email interview for Fifth Estate, October 2007. Pinchbeck rejects the New Age label, calling belief the enemy of knowledge, and presents 2012 as a hypothesis rather than a prediction: that the Classic Maya were wizard scientists who calculated a shift in World Ages. He calls for permaculture, local currencies, and a spiritual revolution renewing Emerson’s Transcendentalism.
A Conscious Choice column from June 2007 on the exhaustion of the future as an idea. Reading Children of Men and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as avoidance mechanisms, Pinchbeck argues that the interlocking crises may not be solvable by rational means, but might dissolve if approached from a different level of consciousness.
An extended assessment of Richard Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche, published on Reality Sandwich in May 2007. Pinchbeck reads Tarnas’s thirty-year case for archetypal astrology as a serious challenge to the modern cosmology of accident, and values it less as a crystal ball than as a way of reconceiving the relation between psyche and cosmos.
A Conscious Choice column from May 2007. Pinchbeck sets the projections on species extinction, tropical forest loss and fishery collapse against a culture that seeks its drama at the cinema, and argues that the real thriller is whether humanity wakes from its trance of material progress in time.
Published on Reality Sandwich in February 2007. Pinchbeck describes losing his appetite for the novel and finding the same charge in Rudolf Steiner, Jung, Edward Edinger, Jean Gebser, Teilhard de Chardin and Gerald Heard, and takes up Heard’s argument that evolutionary pressure may push the species past individuation into a collaborative mind.
The first of Pinchbeck’s monthly columns for Conscious Choice, from February 2007. Writing from a New York where spring flowers bloomed before Christmas, he argues that the ecological and psychic disturbances of the moment are one disturbance, and that defining the zeitgeist has become harder precisely as it has become more urgent.
Rolling Stone’s 2006 profile of Pinchbeck as the figurehead of a new psychedelic elite. It follows him through DMT sessions in an East Village apartment, weekends with Sting and Moby, and Burning Man, and sets his account of ayahuasca against William Burroughs’s, while noting Alex Grey and the Johns Hopkins psilocybin study.
An interview and book profile from Catalyst Magazine, 2006, conducted during a visit to Salt Lake City. It presents 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl as a work drawing on Jung, Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser, and Jose Arguelles, and reports Pinchbeck’s claim that Quetzalcoatl’s return is an archetype signaling a shift in the psyche rather than a literal event.
Anthony Swofford’s review of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl for The New York Times Book Review.
Reported for The Guardian in 2003. The piece follows ibogaine from Howard Lotsof’s 1962 discovery of its anti-addictive effect through its US criminalization to treatment clinics run by Martin Polanco in Rosarito, Mexico and Marc Emery in Vancouver, and recounts Pinchbeck’s own Bwiti initiation with iboga in Gabon.