Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
A Dazed & Confused interview with Sergio Magana, a Mexican healer trained in the Nahuatl lineage and author of 2012-2021: The Dawn of the Sixth Sun. Magana says the Fifth Sun ended in 1991 and the Sixth Sun, a Sun of Darkness, arrives in 2021, requiring mastery of the dream state and the nagual. He ties the shift to the work of Jung and Freud.
Written for Reality Sandwich as the Mayan Long Count ended in December 2012, the essay concedes that predictions by Graham Hancock, Jose Arguelles, Terence McKenna and David Wilcock did not materialize, while maintaining the date marks a hinge in planetary consciousness. Pinchbeck cites climate tipping-point research from Fred Pearce and Mark Lynas and quotes Donella Meadows on nonmaterial needs.
Notes from a TEDx talk delivered at the La Calaca Festival in San Miguel de Allende in November 2012, published on Reality Sandwich. Opening with Hurricane Sandy flooding his New York block, Pinchbeck frames the ecological crisis as a species-wide initiation, drawing on Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman’s Spontaneous Evolution, James Lovelock, and Bernard Lietaer’s currency proposals.
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.
Collected from Pinchbeck’s October 2010 guest blog for Powell’s Books, written around the release of Notes from the Edge Times and the documentary 2012: Time for Change. The entries cover an asthma attack that sent him to Beth Israel, a rebuttal of Neil Genzlinger’s New York Times review of the film, and the question of what a post-Enlightenment culture would look like.
Reading the Deepwater Horizon disaster as the unfolding of indigenous prophecy, this June 2010 Reality Sandwich piece relays D. K. Matai’s scenario in which a methane bubble beneath the Gulf ruptures the seabed. Pinchbeck attacks BP’s use of the dispersant Corexit and CEO Tony Hayward’s conduct, quoting Chris Hedges’s essay BP and the Little Eichmanns.
Written for Reality Sandwich in December 2009, after Roland Emmerich’s 2012 turned the date into a disaster spectacle and, as the New York Times observed, put a version of Pinchbeck on screen played by Woody Harrelson. He describes being folded into the film’s publicity while arguing against everything it proposed.
A short Reality Sandwich piece from August 2009 on Drunvalo Melchizedek’s video series presenting Don Alejandro Cirilo Perez and the Maya council of elders on 2012. Pinchbeck is candid about finding Melchizedek’s earlier book of dubious value, and equally candid that these videos left him unsure what to make of them.
A Conscious Choice column from March 2008. Besieged by questions about December 21, 2012, Pinchbeck argues the date is useful only as a meme that catalyses change, and turns his criticism on the spiritual materialism of writers such as Eckhart Tolle, whose emphasis on presence sidesteps the social and political struggle.
Published on Reality Sandwich in November 2007. A reader in Portland asks how the argument of 2012 bears on contemporary poetry; Pinchbeck answers at length, defending literature’s role in intensifying consciousness while suggesting that individual artistic ambition may need to wait on the collective work of the moment.