Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
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.
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.
A Conscious Choice column from March 2009 stating a hypothesis directly: that humanity may be moving from the biological to the psychic phase of its evolution, which would require a transformed planetary culture and a different relationship to technology. Pinchbeck does not claim it will happen, only that nothing prevents it.
A Conscious Choice column from February 2009 organised around the phrase ‘I don’t know.’ Pinchbeck lists what he is unsure of — whether the species survives, what Obama is, what the UFO sightings mean, how much of the warming is ours — and treats the admission as a discipline rather than a failure.
A Conscious Choice column from January 2009. Taking the Mayan idea, via Ian Lungold, that intention is as fundamental to navigation as position in time and space, Pinchbeck asks what intention a post-consumer society would be built on, and argues the collapse could induce either mass despair or a deliberate redesign.
Written for Reality Sandwich in July 2008 as an abstract for a lecture at the Prophets Conference in Glastonbury. Pinchbeck proposes that orbs, crop circles, UFOs and spirit encounters are neither simply real nor simply imaginary: the Other is coming to presence within the human psyche, in stages, as a co-creative initiation.
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.
A Conscious Choice column from June 2007 on the exhaustion of the future as an idea. Reading Children of Men and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as avoidance mechanisms, Pinchbeck argues that the interlocking crises may not be solvable by rational means, but might dissolve if approached from a different level of consciousness.
An extended assessment of Richard Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche, published on Reality Sandwich in May 2007. Pinchbeck reads Tarnas’s thirty-year case for archetypal astrology as a serious challenge to the modern cosmology of accident, and values it less as a crystal ball than as a way of reconceiving the relation between psyche and cosmos.
Published on Reality Sandwich in February 2007. Pinchbeck describes losing his appetite for the novel and finding the same charge in Rudolf Steiner, Jung, Edward Edinger, Jean Gebser, Teilhard de Chardin and Gerald Heard, and takes up Heard’s argument that evolutionary pressure may push the species past individuation into a collaborative mind.