A solo essay in which Pinchbeck argues that scientific materialism is an exhausted hypothesis and that idealism is the better one. He recounts the research behind Breaking Open the Head, a Bwiti initiation with iboga in Gabon, ayahuasca with an indigenous community in Ecuador, and time among Mazatec people in Oaxaca, as the experiences that moved him from hardcore skepticism toward animism and Jung. He sets the hard problem of consciousness against analytic or monistic idealism, cites Amit Goswami's Physics of the Soul, Ian Stevenson's cases of children recalling past lives, and Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner on reincarnation and the earth's successive incarnations. He closes by arguing that psychedelic research has become a safe investment for wealthy progressives, and recalls his own attempt at an alternative through Evolver and How Soon Is Now.
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues that scientific materialism is only a hypothesis, developed from Descartes onward, and that its account of consciousness emerging from matter remains the unsolved hard problem.
- Pinchbeck says repeated experiences of telepathy, psychokinesis and synchronicity, not argument, forced him out of skepticism and into a shamanic, animist and Jungian frame.
- Pinchbeck presents analytic idealism, in which consciousness is the underlying reality and the physical universe a transitory projection requiring separate containers of subjective awareness, as consistent with quantum physics.
- Pinchbeck treats reincarnation as an open question supported by Ian Stevenson's research and by Tibetan Buddhist practice, and notes Steiner's claim that the West lost this knowledge with the rise of monotheism.
- Pinchbeck argues psychedelic research became a safe space for wealthy progressives because it promised eventual consciousness change without requiring any confrontation with late-stage capitalism.
- Pinchbeck says he tried to build a psychedelically inspired social practice through the Evolver network and his 2016 book How Soon Is Now, and invokes Beckett's fail better as reason to try again.
Full text
So maybe the only good thing we can say about our current situation in the US is that it is incredibly clarifying at this point. We know that our financial and corporate elites have demonstrated kind of total collapse and feelalty to profit. Um they haven't just like bent the knee of the current regime, they've crumpled to the ground in like pathetic feely. And I guess also if we were ever wondering how authoritarian populist regimes or fascist regimes get going, how they take over and ruin countries, well, now we know. Um, yeah, I mean, I I found myself, you know, thinking a lot, writing a lot about politics, I guess, whatever that is recently.
I never meant to be a political commentator or a political thinker. Uh my lifelong interests were art, the avanguard, consciousness, mysticism, the occult, and I guess also systems change, social transformation. When I was young, that was New York in the 1970s. Uh I had a profound sense that there was something sort of like deeply broken, deeply wrong with my society. And you know, this was beyond any Marxist or Freudian or Frankfurt school analysis of our situation. But it wasn't until I really started to explore psychedelics seriously in my late 20s that I felt like I really began to understand what exactly was wrong. So my first book breaking open the head I started writing in my late 20s was published when I was 35.
And uh as I was researching that book I went to visit you know West Africa. I went through a bui initiation in Gaban taking a bogga. I worked with an indigenous community in Ecuador with Iawaska and visited the Massitec Indians, indigenous people in in in Mexico and Waka and I had all these crazy experiences that really showed to me there were these sort of visionary and transcendent aspects of reality and that actually indigenous sheetic practices, even modern chemicals can can lead us into these other other dimensions of reality and these other realms. You can also find they unleash paranormal, psychic and supernatural phenomena that sort of like breach the boundary between the psychic and the physical. And this for me uh challenged and eventually it forced me to change my whole paradigm away from scientific materialism um from sort of skepticism to kind of an acceptance of um shamanism, animism, kind of a yian philosophy.
Uh I started as a hardcore skeptic and uh for me I had to really be convinced by many repeat experiences all sorts of phenomena telepathy psychokinesis even synchronicity and that was combined with very careful study and reflection of people like Carl Young and yeah like a whole a whole range of of of literature and so on. So then I was like okay well you know scientific materialism where did it come from I mean it's just a hypothesis right it developed in you know maybe the 17th century deart then the 19th century and materialism argues that consciousness is something that emerges from the physical from matter in some way that we still really don't understand that's called the hard problem of consciousness okay so after sitting with that for a long time and studying and researching I discovered this alternative paradigm of idealism which is sometimes called analytic or monistic idealism and this posits that consciousness is actually the underlying reality. The physical universe is a kind of transitory projection of this field of consciousness, this innate primordial field which um you know needs to create in a way separate containers of subjective awareness such as beings like ourselves if it's going to know anything. if it's going to explore, create or feel or discover or build anything because otherwise it's just this sort of like imminent uh non-dual state. Um and yeah, there are certain psychedelics which really help you experience this directly, particularly 5o DMT or BUFFO.
And now there's a number of contemporary thinkers who agree that idealism is actually the better hypothesis. uh and it meshes with what we've learned about the deep structure of reality from quantum physics. And uh idealism also in theory would allow you know us to imagine or to begin to hypothesize around other aspects of our being aspects that exist before we are born and continue after we die. The physicist Amit Swami developed a provisional model model for how all of this works in his book physics of the soul. So if we look at things like quantum non-locality and action at a distance, we can develop this model that there could be patterns of thinking, feeling, and willing that we kind of like that become coherent as we're alive and they remain linked and they seek to continue their kind of like inertia or their momentum by moving into by taking over another physical body through incarnation.
And there's actually quite a lot of good evidence supporting some form of reincarnation. Although of course our understanding remains very provisional and rudimentary and it's very hard to prove anything like that scientifically with the knowledge we have now doesn't mean we won't know more in the future have different ways of understanding things so some of this evidence is presented in the works of Ian Stevenson who wrote where reincarnation and biology intersect um he found children all around the world who had spontaneous recall of their past lives also if you go deep into Tibetan Buddhism or if you're lucky enough to speak to some llamas It becomes evident that the Tibetan Buddhists really have a highly refined spiritual science around reincarnation. Then you have western occult thinkers like Madam Levatsky and Rudolfph Steiner who proposed that we in the west actually lost this knowledge of reincarnation or the transmigration of souls with the rise of Judeo-Christian monotheism. uh Steiner claimed that it was the mission of his life on earth to reintroduce an understanding of reincarnation to the modern western world and the modern consciousness and he actually explored how from his perspective this works in a really pretty amazing series of books called karmic relationships and for Steiner it's not only that we as individual human beings incarnate again and again in in in some way or other the earth itself reincarnates and in his cosmology which I'm not saying it's like the the you know the absolute truth but it's a very interesting kind of vector or way of understanding or thinking about reality. Uh we're currently in the fourth incarnation of the earth.
Um moving into the fifth incarn incarnation and humanity changes as well as animals and plants. Everything changes minerals with each new stage uh of this evolutionary incarnational journey. Anyway, it's quite a fascinating perspective. I've been doing some online seminars about at liinal. news. You can check them out. And um yeah, I'm got one coming up that I'm doing at the Steiner Foundation in New York. So in my past writing, I explored what seems to me an obvious relationship between this idealist paradigm which understands consciousness as this sort of onlogical primary, the basic underlying nature of reality and a leftist utopian social ideology which would recognize the value in all human beings and all subjective perspectives as aspects of this underlying field of consciousness which is ultimately unitary and and non-dual.
And so I believe that the left has sputtered out and failed over the last centuries actually because it lacked this idealist or or non-materialist ontology and instead um yeah we have like communism, socialism, anarchism have been linked very much with scientific materialism and atheism. you know Karl Marx was a scientific materialist Rosa Luxembourg and the idea was you know progress was towards kind of like you know unflinching atheism but the problem is it's it's actually very difficult if not actually maybe ultimately impossible to to build and to sort of hold a coherent ethical framework when you have a purely materialist worldview when you think that life you know the end of the end of our individual lives is the annihilation of any experience this is inherently nihilistic And um this is partly why over the last decades the American and European left lost their way and they got mired in this kind of identity politics. Um so the left got sort of stuck on those elements of our kind of human beingness that divide us and separate us. things like race and gender and so on instead of kind of honing in on our intrinsic unity since we're all subjective expressions of this underlying field of consciousness itself. Yes.
So um you know we've also seen how sort of scientific materialism leads to this focus on the technology and the technological singularity and and the hope that yeah maybe we could create immortal bodies which is what a lot of the tech oligarchs are now hoping to to to do and why they're so focused on artificial super intelligence at all costs. So another extremely valuable aspect of idealism is that it allows us to give the different world religions their their proper due and understand them better. It provides a context for understanding all these different religions properly without getting sucked into these kind of obsolete doctrines. you know, so um the biblical or Quranic revelations make sense and they can be read as authentic expressions of the completely authentic meaningful communion with the divine or with the transcendent realm. And this impulse to commune with the divine or get messages or revelations is absolutely essential to our humanity and and basic to it.
But at the same time the various religions need to also be understood as historical artifacts and cultural constructs. The the revelation comes through but the expression it has is related to the to the the local knowledge the sort of parochial knowledge of a particular people at a certain time and a place in history. So when we understand idealism and we see the reality of this transcendent domain, then we can acknowledge that the big mistake made by all these religions is their attempts to sort of freeze knowledge or, you know, quote unquote truth or absolute truth in certain scriptures that were written, you know, really at this point a long long time ago. Divine revol revelation and and sacred communion, you know, it's not going to end with any musty old book. We need to kind of reaccess and re understand that our understanding that our relationship with the divine is actually an ongoing ever evolving process.
Uh we're actually consciously participating in this ongoing revelation. You know to the extent that we that we want to and you know psychedelics for many people prove that you know you have the direct visionary experience. You don't need to just read about it in the Bible or you know because Muhammad or Moses had this experience. uh the poet Rilka uh noted you know although we may not like it God is growing and if God is growing it's growing through us it's growing through our evolution through our through our development of deeper capacities for for love for care for wisdom and so on so then we can ask ourselves you know why did this happen why did these you know archaic books you know that obviously are very beautiful in part but are not really so relevant to who we are now how did they become so charmed charged with meaning that they ended up determining the arc of human history in such a profound way from you know thousands of years ago up until this moment up until today. So I have some theories about this that I want to like offer to you.
So yeah, I mean we know that the New Testament required a massive amount of editing and revision and this involved throwing out other scriptures from that maybe were even earlier from the first centuries after after Christ lived assuming that he did live which you know I tend to think he lived. Um so some of these uh scriptures were discovered accidentally by farmers in Egypt in 1945 and they were eventually published as the Gnostic Gospels and they show that like the early Christianity there was actually yeah a lot of kind of contention over over how to interpret you know Christ and the scriptures and so on and it was it was there was more like a lot of variance on on certain ideas but almost universally the spiritual practice of indigenous communities involves you know kind of rights of initiation. Um candidates for initiation when they were young often would undergo an ordeal. They would have to attain the visionary state for themselves. In alchemy they talk about this as dying before you die.
Okay. So this is for instance what h o occurred as far as we know at elusis. The mysteries of elus in Greece which went on for about 2,000 years before they were ended by the church of the 4th century AD. every year all the greatest uh kind of uh figures in Greece would come and they would probably ingest a psychedelic potion together that might have involved arrog fungus uh that was called the kaikian although we don't know this for certain quite yet um but so as societies became more complex and populations grew and became more settled due to agriculture the purpose of spirituality and ceremony seems to have undergone a big change religions became more hierarchical And they became focused on indoctrinating kind of the the mass people into a rigidly controlled structure of morality and and hierarchy and so on instead of helping people to undergo initiation for themselves so that they would be sort of equals that everybody would have attained the same direct revelation or nasis for themselves and they would they would share that understanding. So religion ultimately became an essential part of the apparatus of the monarchy and the state evolving into a social and ideological program for elites to maintain their dominance control over everybody else and their control over resources over what type of sexuality could be expressed over access to God or even over the possibility of salvation or redemption in the afterlife.
And we see this today with evangelicals, you know, where they think like if you if you allow for abortion, you know, they based on some ancient biblical scripture, then you're not going to make it into heaven, you know, but this is just interpretation of of very old texts, you know. So another factor that I think has kept people enthralled or fixated by these ancient scriptures like the Bible or the Quran is the sort of power of the written word at a time when writing in literature was scarce. And you know over a long period civilization shifted from an oral to a writing based culture. And when you have writing a culture's legacy is no longer just contained in memory and recitation alone. It gets stored in these kind of external prosthetic devices.
these books or or scrolls at that point which maintain cultural stability and coherence over a long time. I think this was like a very profound experience in the human psyche and you know it's still we're still wrapped up in that in the in this history of of these documents and the impact the sort of morphaggetic field created around these documents and and the belief in them. So those initial revelations which shape a society or civilization continue to hold a particular force like an electrical charge you know whether it's like Moses or Muhammad or whatever and the the the scriptures are like a source code that perpetuate a culture's legacy and its traditions over time and over many many generations people invest so much of their belief in these books. They're seen as article they're taken as articles of faith as divine revel revelations never to be questioned. And of course these scriptures themselves are often full of admonitions and warnings that were kind of aimed at the people at that time telling them they the faithful that they never should question them that these are the absolute truth and that was a way of keeping everybody you know kind of under the under the control of of the priest class.
So from this idealist perspective, we can see how these religions of the book ultimately led to cultures that were based on, you know, blind faith, indoctrination, and obedience. And we don't need to scorn or reject the transcendent power or divine inspiration of the original scriptures as scientific materialists often do. We can recognize and acknowledge that those revelations were real. There is this transcendent domain of of non-dual illumination and so on. But its social expression is historically and culturally determined. From the idealist perspective, we can see that the religious worldview of a society, its ontology also always shapes its politics, its its economic uh conditions as well as its rel relationship to its uh local ecology or to the planetary ecology as a whole.
And we see this with scientific materialism which I think in a way once we understand that it's just a hypothesis or theory that developed over a historical period it became in a very real sense you know although non-religious it became kind of the religion of modern secular society scientific materialism offers a hypothesis about the nature of reality just as Christianity or Judaism or Islam does those those religions have their idea of what reality means and what forces govern it and what's what's important uh to maintaining it and so on. Uh in the default faith of the secular world, scientific materialism, this also produced a range of effects on the consciousness of people in in in in a modern society and on civilization as a whole, just as Christianity or Islam impacted people in traditional European and Middle Eastern societies. So we could say that you know scientific materialism finds its natural social expression in you know bourgeoa capitalism, consumerism and materialism where people really only value what they can physically possess or what they quantify let's say as you know digits or numbers in their bank accounts and so on. You know any anything that can be tabulated or quantified becomes real to them and other things are dismissed. And this is what Renee Gwynan talked about as the the reign of quantity um as the sign of kind of modern decadence and so on rather than quality uh as you know quality of experience, quality of consciousness, intensity of consciousness and so on.
So I wanted to take some time to really reflect on this today because I'm seeing a lot of people I know actually turning back toward traditional religious structures because this we're in this confusing and dangerous time. They're grasping for Christianity or Judaism and so on. Personally, I think this is a mistake that we need to take a step forward instead. We need to step forward toward a new worldview that integrates idealism. This sort of consciousness first kind of paradigm as a metaphysical stance rather than going back and taking a regressive return to traditional faith which requires this doctrinary belief in obsolete scriptures that were definitely appropriate for their time and definitely were an outgrowth of of you know transcendent vision and revelation but they don't make sense for us now.
we we we've reached a different place. And this is kind of the problem with evangelical Christianity in the US and Orthodox Judaism and even Islam and so on. So from where we are now, we could actually think about constructing or shaping a new kind of like universal religion around our contemporary post secular ethos. And if we were going to try to do this, we'd make it non sectarian, uh, phenomenological, investigative, creative, open-ended, tentative, playful, collaborative, collaborative. So I think this would be really a great project as long as we can, you know, rigorously avoid, you know, guroitis, uh, doctrines, dogmas, u, any any system of indoctrination or control.
And I think from this perspective, we can also see the error error in the modern psychedelic renaissance which kind of started after breaking open the head and my my first book and you know led to all this money going to psychedelic companies and something uh and stuff like that. But I think that you know we can see that the rediscovery the rediscovery of cyclic compounds and visionary plants was a revelation a new revelation for many of us now and in our very western way we have hyperfocused on these chemical catalysts and the individual experience you know the individual healing journey or the the you know capacity to to get more creativity or entrepreneurial ideas and so on but we've ignored the larger social political and ideological context text in which we have these experiences. Psychedelic research became a safe space in a way for wealthy progressives to invest in as it vaguely promised some kind of eventual societal change or consciousness change without requiring any inquiry or any kind of confrontation with the exploitative structures of late stage capitalism, you know, or what would be a psychedelically inspired practice that we could develop to address this. So I I had already kind of understood this years ago and I tried to create such a practice with uh this evolver network we created the evolver social movement and in my 2016 book how soon is now I I tried to look into it and yeah I mean I'd love to try again um remembering Samuel Beckett's uh dictim which I often think about which is um I think I don't remember which novel it was from but it was basically try fail try again fail better and at this point. Yeah, we really need to um come up with a different paradigm to address this kind of runaway train of our society uh and this sort of new Christian um kind of madness uh where people are sort of like looking for a contemporary moral structure in these very obsolete uh moral codes from these ancient scriptures uh because they don't really know where else to turn.
Anyway, thanks for listening. I hope you found this interesting. If you enjoy my ideas and my work, please like, please subscribe to um this You Tube channel. Please share it and uh read my articles on my Substack, which is daniel pinchbecksubstack. com. And yeah, I appreciate your time today. Thank you.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.