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.
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.
A 2011 Dazed & Confused column on what Pinchbeck calls conspiranoia: the Bavarian Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, vigilantcitizen.com’s readings of Lady Gaga and Beyonce videos, and Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara’s Dark Mission. He argues the pastime is disempowering because it negates personal responsibility, and proposes a counter-myth of prospiracy, transparent efforts to transform society.
Appearing in Dazed & Confused in 2011, this column argues the financial system is collapsing because growth has exhausted both markets and resources, and that money issued into existence as debt by private bankers manufactures artificial scarcity. It backs Bernard Lietaer’s negative-interest currency and community-issued alternatives, noting that biologists find mature ecosystems develop through cooperation.
Pinchbeck’s 2011 Dazed & Confused column asks what freedom means as climate change and species extinction accelerate. It argues that inner freedom pursued through yoga, meditation or ayahuasca shamanism is hollow unless matched by external action, and reads the Egyptian revolution against the end of the Maya great cycle on December 21, 2012 as the first note of a wider liberation.
This 2011 Dazed & Confused column recounts a trip to Colombia to meet Kogi shamans in the Sierra Nevada. The mammos, trained as children in years-long dark retreats, hold that cataclysms follow from humanity neglecting its payments to the earth, and Pinchbeck connects their view to psi research by Dean Radin and Russell Targ and to Gurdjieff’s principle of reciprocal maintenance.
From Pinchbeck’s 2011 Dazed & Confused column. It argues that the hipster is an exhausted construct whose detachment is manufactured by the media industry and serves corporate control, and traces cool from enslaved Africans and jazz musicians to Che Guevara T-shirts. Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated supplies the blob; Antonio Negri supplies the reminder that capital is only a social relation.