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.
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.
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.
How Soon Is Now, published by Watkins Press, took ten years to write and carries introductions by Russell Brand and Sting. This 2019 post restates its thesis: initiation serves a neurological function tied to the prefrontal cortex, and its disappearance from modern Europe produced what Pinchbeck calls Kidults. The book addresses infrastructure, social systems, and consciousness.
Pinchbeck announces How Soon Is Now in 2016, framing ecological collapse as an initiation and an opportunity for a self-willed evolutionary leap. He argues that centralized institutions built in the 19th century cannot manage the crisis, and points readers toward a How Soon Is Now group on the HyLo network, a Salon interview with Carrie Sheffield, and his Burning Man writing for Artsy.
A February 2016 newsletter reporting on a six-hour Sydney workshop called Reconnecting, organized by Gary Gorrow of the Conscious Club, and previewing a London talk, the OuiShare Festival in Paris, and a Croatian lecture cruise run by Bridging Heaven Earth. Pinchbeck rejects the label of expert and notes that How Soon Is Now is due from Watkins Press.
Two claims drive this excerpt from How Soon Is Now: that social and technological development extends biological evolution, and that ecological catastrophe is a collective rite of passage. Pinchbeck draws on Robert Wright’s Non-Zero, Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere, Lynn Margulis on microbial cooperation, and Rupert Sheldrake’s Science Delusion to argue humanity is becoming a planetary super-organism.
An excerpt from How Soon Is Now, then forthcoming from Watkins Press. The passage sets the literary city of Kafka, T.S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg against Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, then calls for cities rebuilt as what designer John Todd terms scaffoldings for living systems, where food is grown, energy produced, and waste recycled.
Speculative notes linking Lanza’s biocentrism and Amit Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe to Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin. Pinchbeck argues that consciousness builds ever more complex vehicles for experiencing itself, that 5-MeO-DMT from the Bufo toad gives direct access to the undifferentiated void, and that ecological crisis accompanies Gebser’s mutation into integral consciousness.
A brief note introducing video of Pinchbeck’s closing talk, Psychedelic Initiation and the Ecological Crisis, delivered at Breaking Convention 2015, the third International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness, held at the University of Greenwich that July. A question-and-answer session with Russell Brand followed. The talk belonged to the Beckley Foundation’s Transformations with Psychedelics symposium.