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.
A prose poem in the first person plural, imagining humanity becoming God and God falling into matter across innumerable incarnations and universes. Eternity appears as astral light, endless lovemaking and limitless patience, before the piece narrows to a single appointment on Mulberry Street with a woman in a blue coat, an appointment that required inventing hydrogen, carbon and gravity to keep.
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.
Starting from the British political scandal over decades of child sexual abuse and its cover-up, this piece argues that profit-driven systems select for sociopaths and that elite universities train what Herbert Marcuse called irrational rationality. Pinchbeck describes an occult control system, links Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati to Rudolf Steiner’s Ahriman, and notes that Egypt and Central America gave Set and Tezcatlipoca a ritual place.
A short post releasing the position paper Towards Regenerative Society: A Rapid Transition Plan, dated October 2014, as a downloadable PDF. The quoted opening argues that humanity has reached one of the rare junctures requiring a thorough transformation of society, culture, and consciousness, and that activating the prefrontal cortex allows a new planetary civilization to be envisioned and designed.
The first newsletter of the Center for Planetary Culture, dated July 2014. Pinchbeck, its executive director, distinguishes the think tank he started with Jana Astanov from RAND, Brookings, and the Project for a New American Century, describes research toward a regenerative civilization, and cites Buckminster Fuller on utopia or oblivion and Joseph Beuys on social sculpture.