050 - Cancel the Apocalypse

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck

Daniel Pinchbeck brings us up to date with his current thinking about mythical cycles, the Mayan calendar, time as aquality, psychic evolution, and a wide range of other topics that he investigated while researching his new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Among other things Daniel discusses in this, his 2006 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man, is “a massive upsurge in synchronicities” and “reality becoming more psychically malleable”.

Transcript

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3-Dimensional Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects

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Delta Shades

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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I know that a lot of you who couldn’t make it to Burning Man this year are out there wondering how long it’s going to take me

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to get all of this year’s Palenque Norte lectures online,

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and I wish I could answer that,

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but let’s hope that the fact that it’s only been a few days

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since I podcast Eric Davis’ talk,

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that it’s a good sign that I’m going to get them out to you

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a little faster than

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in previous years.

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And another reason I want to get Daniel’s talk online so soon after my last two podcasts

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is that if you paid close attention to them, you heard Mark Pesce and Eric Davis talking

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about 2012 in a way that may not be as revolutionary as some of you have been hoping for.

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As Mark said, Berner Vinge accused him once of being a gradualist,

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and Eric warned us about letting the combination of psychedelic medicines

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and indigenous teachings become a pseudo-religion.

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So how do these two concepts square with the new research

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involving all the Mayan and Hopi prophecies that’s been published lately?

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Well, that’s a very good question, and it’s also a hot topic around my house right now as well.

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So let’s take a listen to what Daniel Pinchbeck had to say in his 2006 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man.

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His talk is titled, Cancel the Apocalypse, and it came immediately after Eric Davis’

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lecture that I featured in my previous podcast.

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So let’s join the audience in the big tent at Intheon Village, which was overflowing

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out onto the playa late on Friday afternoon as Daniel began his talk.

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We’ll pick up on my introduction where I was telling a

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story about how Daniel and I had just bumped into one another in center camp at Burning Man in 2002

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after not having seen one another since the Entheobotany conference in Planque a year before.

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It was at the 2002 burn and I think we were probably both coming in from the night and having a cup of morning coffee.

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I sat down, and all of a sudden we looked up, and there was Daniel.

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I said, well, what have you been up to lately?

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And he said, I’ve got this little book I finished called Breaking Open the Head.

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How many of you have read that book?

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A classic.

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How many of you have read that book?

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A classic.

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I get e-mails from people that listen to our podcast all the time,

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and they just can’t get enough of Daniel.

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Daniel has a new book out, 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl.

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And it’s a dynamite book.

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I have to admit I started and read the last two chapters first, and now I’m about halfway through it.

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I got it only a couple of days before I left for the playa. But it’s a real page-turner, and I heartily welcome, and I hope

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you will welcome, our good friend Daniel Pinchbeck.

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Hey there. It’s very, very wonderful to be speaking at Burning Man again.

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The last year, my talk here was really one of the high points of my life, I think.

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It was just really nice to be communing with this community

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and talk about the stuff that I’ve been thinking about and writing about.

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And it was really wonderful also to hear Eric’s talk, or at least some of it.

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And we have a lot of creative tension around these subjects.

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We’ve actually been working on a project together, Evolver.

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We did a prototype of a magazine.

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There’s kind of a larger business model behind it that we’ve helped develop.

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And in the magazine, we also kind of worked through our tensions

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around these questions of, like, prophecy and transformation.

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And it’s kind of an ongoing dialogue that we have,

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which I imagine a lot of us are sort of having right now.

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We’re trying to figure out what’s happening in the world, and there seems to be this accelerated

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process of change and transformation, and we’re trying to sort of get a handle on that

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in our own lives and what that means and where it might be going.

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So, I mean, when I – I’ll go back and – since probably not everybody here knows

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my work, I’ll go back a little bit and talk about how I sort of arrived at where I’m at.

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And then I’ll talk about the title of the talk, Cancel the Apocalypse,

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why I came up with that title, which is my Saul Williams poem.

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And then I really want to open it up to have time to have discussion and questions.

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And when I open it up, there’s another mic.

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People can come up, maybe make a line and ask questions and have a discussion.

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But I really am going to ask people to not go on tangents because I know this material is highly charged and people

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often want to express their own experience and things that they’ve gone through. But

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because there’s a limited time and it may be that a lot of people want to express themselves,

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I want to keep it pretty short and curt. And if people go on for too long, I’ll probably cut them off as nicely as I can. So basically, yeah, so my sort of trajectory was that I was a journalist in New York,

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and I was working for different magazines, New York Times Magazine and Esquire,

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and editing a literary magazine, and I’d grown up in this kind of secular materialist culture.

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My parents were artists.

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My mother was part

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of the B generation and a book editor. My dad was an abstract painter. But they’d been

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very secular. They had no kind of spiritual or mystical belief at all. So I grew up with

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this kind of materialistic understanding of reality, this kind of scientific materialist

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understanding, including the idea that death was sort of the end of everything and there

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wasn’t any potential for a kind of reincarnating soul or other aspects of consciousness or other aspects of being.

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And I was in my, I think I’m going to sit down. Would you rather I stood up or I’m going

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to sit down? Okay. Yeah. So I was in my late 20s. I just began to get very, very depressed

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and kind of disconsolate because I felt if this reality that I was

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in was all there was, I just was really losing interest. And I began to think to myself,

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had I ever experienced another aspect of consciousness or something that pointed in another direction?

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So I remembered my psychedelic experiences in college and I decided to go back in a very sort of scholarly and participatory way

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and discover the psychedelic experience for myself.

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And because I was a journalist, I was able to get some great assignments.

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Like I took ayahuasca downtown for the Village Voice,

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and I went to West Africa for Vibe magazine

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and went through a buidia initiation, taking iboga,

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which is a long-lasting psychedelic,lasting African psychedelic from the equator in Africa.

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And then I went down to the Amazon, worked with the Sequoia Indians,

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taking ayahuasca down there, visited the Mazatec Indians,

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which is where I went to Huatla,

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which is where the magic mushrooms were discovered by Gordon Wasson in the 1950s.

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And sort of put myself on this initiatory relay race, you know,

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where I was trying to really understand what these things opened up and what they meant.

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And I began to have a lot of very shamanic experiences.

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I mean, starting from West Africa, these shamans told me things that seemed beyond their capacity to know about my life.

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And I had this holy boga experience where I had kind of prophetic hints about my future,

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but also sort of felt like a guiding intelligence took me back through my early childhood and really my life up to that point,

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like showing me memories from when my parents were breaking up.

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And also it was really like I was just being shown how I’d been constructed as a person

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and all these different forces, positive and negative, creative and destructive,

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that had been acting upon me.

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I saw my use of alcohol at that point.

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I was part of this kind of literary cocktail scene and drank too much

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and how it was affecting my relationships and my writing

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and really pulled back from alcohol after that initiation.

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And yeah, it was just a very, very profound experience.

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So breaking open the head ended up chronicling my shift in worldview.

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I went from this secular materialist worldview to step-by-step kind of accepting that there

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was this shamanic or psychic reality and even occult kind of dimensions to it.

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I had an experience with DPT, which is a kind of chemical cousin to DMT, where I felt there

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was this poltergeist sort of unleashed in my life.

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And actually, my friend Charity, who’s in the room, had the experience with me.

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And she ended up doing an exorcism in my house

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because I began to have all this poltergeist phenomena,

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like mirrors falling off walls and strange bugs appearing.

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And I had no belief in the occult.

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I had no matrix for understanding this stuff.

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So in a way, I was playing this amazing game of catch-up.

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I would have these experiences,

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and then I would really go deep into studying the Kabbalah and Crowley.

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And then Rudolf Steiner was very, very helpful,

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and tried to create a kind of foundation for seeing how these things could be possible.

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And so the first book really charted my shift from this secular materialist worldview to accepting this shamanic worldview.

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And that opened up huge questions.

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I mean, for me, I think that my investigation has been a very sensible, rational one. It’s just like been following this line. You know,

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so it was like once I had accepted that the modern Western psyche, the modern Western

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consciousness had shut off these other dimensions of being, had cut off the intuitive realm and the mystical

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realm and, you know, to sort of focus on this rational, scientific way of knowing, and that

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those other dimensions of being had validity, then I had to take, I felt like it was necessary

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to take seriously these other knowledge systems and what they said on many levels, including their prophecies or what we can

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understand because they speak these indigenous and mythical cultures in a kind of symbolic or mythological

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language. So that really led me to 2012, which was really an attempt to understand this kind of collision in worldviews and to kind of see how you could anchor a different knowledge system

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that would really incorporate the Western trip that we’ve been on and this kind of shamanic dimension of being in reality.

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And I found I also, because I’d accepted the shamanic worldview,

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sort of key to shamanism is this concept of synchronicity.

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And the idea that somehow there’s this relationship between the inner world, the psyche,

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and the real world, the physical world, that there’s actually,

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it’s not just a kind of separate dualism that what’s going on in your inner psychokosmos somehow is reflected and refracted in events that happen in the outer world.

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So I began to have a number of really interesting synchronicities around 2012, which is the end date of the Mayan calendar.

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One of the ones that really stayed with me, which I discuss in the book, was I decided to edit

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a book by a friend of mine. I had a small publishing company. And he’d written this

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book. It was like a ranting, frothing, book-length poem about corporate globalization and this

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kind of apocalyptic vision of where our society is going and how it’s torn apart, the physical

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world. And he also had his ayahuasca visions in there,

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and he also discussed 2012, which in this poem, this book-length poem,

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he was seeing as kind of the collapse, like we would go into this kind of road warrior

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or desperation at that point.

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And, you know, I kept putting off, and I read the book, I accepted it to publish,

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and then for like a month or two I just couldn’t deal with opening it

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because it was so depressing.

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And he also quotes a lot of amazing thinkers.

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I mean, it’s also a good text sort of foundationally for thinking through this stuff.

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So finally I was like, all right, I said I would edit Michael’s book. I got to do it.

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So I opened it up. I started marking it up. And about half an hour later, there was this

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hideous sound out the window. And we opened the blinds. I lived down in Manhattan. And

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there was the flaming crater in the side of the World Trade Towers, and it was 9-11.

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And Michael’s book was already titled World on Fire.

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So stuff like that kept happening.

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That seemed to be like signals to me that I had to really pay attention to this

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and go through it.

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And I also began to read deeply about the sort of ecological crisis that we’re in

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and really just trying to think about all the dimensions of the situation.

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And so, yeah, so I think the book ended up being very hopeful

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in that I do feel that we are going through this transformative process

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and that we are moving.

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I mean, the book is a hypothesis.

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I can’t say for a fact that this is the truth.

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It seems to be my truth.

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It’s the best that I could put together from judging,

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from using my empirical consciousness,

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from paying attention to my intuition,

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from studying what’s been going on in my life

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and the lives of people around me.

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And for me, I do think that we are moving into another phase of human consciousness

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and that this is a timed evolutionary process,

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much like fetal development is a very timed evolutionary process.

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And it’s a kind of – we’re in this kind of non-dual situation where all these things

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that almost seem like random manifestations or chaotic manifestations of our situation

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are actually necessary aspects of this process.

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So you have, on the one hand, you have this kind of rapid destruction of the biosphere,

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which I’m going to talk about a little bit more.

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So we really have to get over our blockages and our defense mechanisms to really understand how critical that situation is

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and how immediate that crisis is.

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And then you have this accelerated evolution of technology,

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which is an aspect of the human psyche in evolution,

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and how that technology is actually, I think, changing our understanding of the self.

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It’s changing our relationship to the self.

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You know, through the 19th and mid-20th century,

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we became very isolated and alienated

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in our kind of individuality. And I think what’s happening with the development of these

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social networks on the internet, it’s like we’re beginning to have a more relational

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sense of the self, that the self is, as an individual, we feel more permeable. It’s more

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like we’re made up of our network of

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relationships, personal relationships, media information. So we’re having more and more

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of a sense of how there isn’t that alienated, individuated self that was sort of the construct

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of the modern world, and that the self itself is this kind of relational process.

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And then, for me, a very crucial aspect of this acceleration is what’s

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happening on a psychic level. And here again, there’s no way to quantify this. There’s no

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way to say for a fact that this is happening. But what I am experiencing is a massive upsurge

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in synchronicities and kind of manifestations. You know, like you think about something

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and it seems like it almost immediately takes place.

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And the way I end up describing it in the book

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is it’s almost as if reality is becoming, in subtle degrees,

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more psychically malleable or psychically available

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and less materially dense.

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So there’s actually a kind of change happening in the nature of reality.

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And it seems to be a process that is developing and accelerating over time.

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And what’s very interesting, so I began to study this Mayan calendar material.

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And I would say that one of the big gaps in my book is that I didn’t have the money or the time

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to go back to the Mayan land and really hear it for the Mayans

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and understand the indigenous Mayan relationship to all of this.

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So the book, what I end up doing is looking at it more intellectually.

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I mean, I interviewed Jose Arguelles and synthesized his ideas with John Major Jenkins

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and Carl Johan Kalamann, who have been kind of like these three visionary scholar prophets

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who have been looking at this Mayan calendar material

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and really trying to understand what it means.

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And basically, like, you know, we have developed this understanding that, you know,

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we are the most advanced civilization that ever existed,

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and our knowledge system is, you know, what is, you know, is the best.

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And these other civilizations had less knowledge than we do.

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But it may actually be that they possessed more knowledge in certain respects

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and in some ways a higher knowledge system.

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And it may be that the Mayans really, really were kind of, in their own way,

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kind of scientists, sort of shamanic scientists.

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And for about 1,000 years, the Toltec and the Mayan civilization

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was very much focused on figuring out what this date in the future would be,

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which it seems to be indicated is a kind of transition

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from either the fourth world to the fifth world or the fifth sun to the sixth sun.

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And they did it through ritual, through using psychedelics, downloading transmissions.

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They did it through astronomy.

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They were totally focused on the movements of the planets.

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And what seems to be the 2012-December 21st date is this conjunction where the sun rises on the winter solstice in the center of the dark rift, which is at the center of the Milky Way.

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in the center of the dark rift, which is at the center of the Milky Way.

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And the Mayans apparently refer to this dark rift as the cosmic mother or even as a black hole.

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And it’s only in the last few years that our scientists, astronomers,

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have found there is a huge black hole there.

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So it’s sort of like they had this privileged information about this conjunction.

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What’s that?

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Yeah, yeah, can you all hear me?

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Sorry.

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Can you hear me well?

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Is this better?

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Okay, cool, sorry.

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Yeah, just tell me if I drift away from the mic

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and I’ll pull it right up.

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Okay.

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So what does this conjunction mean?

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I mean, John Major Jenkins suggests that

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there’s this kind of cosmic crossing that takes place

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and it’s like we’re crossing the galactic equator

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and they had this image of this kind of cosmic cross

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and it might be that just in the way, if you look at the north and south poles like we’re crossing the galactic equator, and they had this image of this kind of cosmic cross.

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And it might be that just in the way,

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if you look at the north and south poles of the Earth,

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when you go below the equator,

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magnetic fields operate in a different, you know, in the opposite,

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they spin in the opposite way.

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There might be a kind of reverse spin that takes place when you transition across this galactic equator.

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It might be from physical to psychophysical or something.

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We don’t really have a language for it.

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And I found Jose Arguelles’ work

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really incredibly interesting and magical.

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He was one of the most complex figures

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that I deal with in the book,

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because on the one hand,

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I think that he is absolutely extraordinary

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and is transmitting information that’s very valuable.

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But then I also feel that he somehow lost his plot and got sort of possessed by the kind of archetypal forces that he was working with.

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He kind of believes that he’s an incarnation of Pakalvottan.

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And I completely support that that might be the case.

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I completely support that that might be the case.

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However, he’s identified with that figure,

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and he sort of speaks as if he’s in that sort of magical,

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almost like pharaonic consciousness.

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And, you know, I’m very interested in the idea of the archetypes.

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And sort of one thinker who’s very important in the book is Carl Jung.

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And Jung talks about how this kind of archetypal material,

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that the archetypes have this kind of reality,

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and they constellate in the human world over time.

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They wait for the right moment to constellate.

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And often there’s kind of like phases in their constellation.

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So, for instance, this whole concept of the apocalypse is an archetype that’s been constellating in the Western psyche over the last 2,000 years.

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And, you know, I do offer the hypothesis that we’re in that time of the apocalypse,

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but that also has to be understood properly.

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It’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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I’ll come back to that in a second.

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So for me, José Arguelles somehow got taken by this archetype and went too far

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into this kind of intuitive, magical reality, and offered this system, this channeled system of a calendar, the 13-moon system,

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and basically suggested that, I think a very brilliant concept,

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that if you think about what’s wrong with our civilization, what the basic problem in it is,

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we think it’s patriarchy, we think it’s capitalism,

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but what he ended up considering was that it’s actually,

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we have a wrong relationship to time.

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We’ve become alienated from natural time.

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And before 5,000 years ago, you know, cultures,

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tribal cultures were linked into the lunar calendar and the lunar cycles.

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And then when there was this kind of rise of patriarchal dominator,

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hierarchical civilization, roughly in Egypt and Babylon and so on,

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they switched from a lunar calendar to a solar calendar.

00:21:14 ►

So instead of following the natural rhythms of the planetary motion,

00:21:19 ►

they divided the year into an arbitrary circle and made arbitrary months out of it.

00:21:24 ►

So now the Gregorian calendar that we’ve inherited has no connection to the moon cycles.

00:21:28 ►

So what Jose argues is that the calendar is a kind of subliminal metaprogramming device for consciousness,

00:21:36 ►

and we don’t really recognize it, but it’s holding us in this kind of frequency.

00:21:40 ►

And if the calendar is artificial and alienated, it actually sort of alienates us from the rhythms

00:21:47 ►

of the natural world and the real world

00:21:49 ►

and we end up becoming more and more out of balance

00:21:52 ►

until everybody in the culture goes crazy

00:21:54 ►

and it’s very interesting I think

00:21:57 ►

so a lot of the book became this investigation of different ways

00:22:01 ►

of looking at time and how the tribal cultures had a different time and the aboriginal cultures had a different time and then

00:22:07 ►

you know the for the aboriginal cultures its

00:22:10 ►

Means of the origin so every every day is the origin point there was never a fall of man and their rituals are designed to

00:22:18 ►

Use a maintain harmony maintain maintain reality and its proper balance

00:22:22 ►

Then when you went into these mythical cultures,

00:22:25 ►

it became more about cycles.

00:22:26 ►

So you have the cycle, the Hindus have the cycle of the yugas

00:22:29 ►

that were now in perhaps towards the end of the Kali Yuga.

00:22:32 ►

The Egyptians have the procession of the equinoxes,

00:22:34 ►

which is this 26,000-year cycle.

00:22:37 ►

So they saw time as cyclical.

00:22:41 ►

And then we went into, starting really with kind of the Greeks and so on, we went into this more like linear model of time, where time was a linear progression.

00:22:50 ►

And finally, where every moment of time was the same as every other moment.

00:22:54 ►

Like Newtonian time is like time is equivalent to space.

00:22:57 ►

Absolute time is equivalent to absolute space.

00:22:59 ►

So what Arguelles is offering, and this philosopher who I discuss in the book, who’s absolutely amazing, Gene Gebser also discusses,

00:23:07 ►

is that time might actually be qualitative rather than simple quantitative.

00:23:11 ►

And our whole model of thinking about time, it’s like we got so obsessed with matter,

00:23:17 ►

we became total materialists, so we tend to think about time as a spatial quantity.

00:23:22 ►

So we talk about having enough time, wasting time, spending time,

00:23:27 ►

and all of those ways of thinking about time as a spatial quantity

00:23:30 ►

that you can somehow chase after and kill time or whatever

00:23:34 ►

has nothing to do with the actuality of time.

00:23:37 ►

The time is actually a qualitative domain that operates really differently.

00:23:42 ►

And that seems to be what the original Mayan calendar

00:23:45 ►

has imprinted in it.

00:23:47 ►

There are these kind of cycles

00:23:47 ►

that are almost like harmonic patterns

00:23:50 ►

where days have kind of harmonic resonance

00:23:53 ►

with other days in the cycle.

00:23:55 ►

And your birth date kind of places you

00:23:57 ►

in this kind of harmonic matrix.

00:24:00 ►

So although I ended up critiquing the dream spell

00:24:04 ►

and his certainty that it’s the only answer for humanity, I definitely found that he was an amazing thinker and very, very powerful and useful.

00:24:13 ►

And then the person who probably amazed me the most was Carl Johann Kalamann.

00:24:17 ►

He wrote a book called The Mind, Calendar, and the Transformation of Consciousness.

00:24:20 ►

And so this is a lot of information.

00:24:22 ►

Can you guys sort of follow?

00:24:24 ►

Okay, cool.

00:24:26 ►

So Kalaman basically looked at the main pyramids in Maya land

00:24:31 ►

were these nine-step pyramids

00:24:32 ►

and he began to come up with this thesis

00:24:37 ►

that they were presenting this nine-stage process

00:24:39 ►

in the evolution of consciousness.

00:24:41 ►

The Zulcan, which is the sacred sort of day count of the Mayas,

00:24:44 ►

is this 13 by 20 matrix.

00:24:46 ►

So what he ended up putting together

00:24:48 ►

was this model where these nine

00:24:49 ►

stages is an acceleration

00:24:51 ►

where each stage is 20 times faster

00:24:53 ►

in linear time and has a 13

00:24:56 ►

part kind of energy cycle

00:24:57 ►

where there’s light and dark energies that are related

00:24:59 ►

to different Mayan gods.

00:25:01 ►

And it’s absolutely mind-blowing

00:25:04 ►

work. And it works so well. So the

00:25:06 ►

bottom stage goes back 16 billion years, roughly Big Bang time. And then you get the next stage is

00:25:13 ►

800 million years, I guess, and then 20 million years, 40 million years. I mean, I have it in the

00:25:20 ►

book. My math skills are mediocre. But until we’re now in these much more accelerated phases.

00:25:26 ►

So there was a phase that began like 5,120 years ago.

00:25:31 ►

And that was when we sort of stepped into law and civilization.

00:25:36 ►

I feel like I’m competing with like some kind of sound.

00:25:39 ►

All right.

00:25:40 ►

Anyway, I guess that’s Burning Man.

00:25:42 ►

What’s that?

00:25:43 ►

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:25:44 ►

Okay. So and then the next phase after that began in 1755. Anyway, I guess that’s Burning Man. What’s that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:25:49 ►

Okay, so, and then the next phase after that began in 1755,

00:25:51 ►

which is right when the Industrial Revolution started.

00:25:54 ►

And now we’re in a phase that started in 1999,

00:25:57 ►

which is right when the sort of Internet got going,

00:25:59 ►

and we had this meshing together of this planetary mind.

00:26:01 ►

And then there’d be another phase.

00:26:05 ►

So this phase that we’re in now is just roughly 12-point-something years,

00:26:08 ►

and there’s one final phase, which I think is just 260 days.

00:26:12 ►

So what he’s basically arguing is that in each of these cycles,

00:26:15 ►

the same amount of development is happening,

00:26:19 ►

the same amount of evolution of consciousness, novelty, new information is taking place, and it’s just happening on these much faster scales.

00:26:22 ►

So what we’re now experiencing in roughly one year what people were experiencing before 1999 in roughly 20 years

00:26:30 ►

in terms of change, development, creation, destruction,

00:26:35 ►

and what people were experiencing before 1755 in roughly 394 years or something.

00:26:43 ►

So, you know, once again, it can’t be quantitatively proved,

00:26:46 ►

but you have to really think it through.

00:26:48 ►

And for me, it feels very legitimate.

00:26:50 ►

And one interesting concept is in the 50s through the 70s,

00:26:56 ►

there was this big idea of a generation gap,

00:26:58 ►

of being roughly 20 years.

00:26:59 ►

And it was like people who were 20 years

00:27:01 ►

distance from each other in age

00:27:03 ►

literally couldn’t understand each other.

00:27:05 ►

They were like at a different frequency of consciousness.

00:27:08 ►

And now I think that that doesn’t exist anymore,

00:27:10 ►

that really the division, the divide now

00:27:12 ►

is really just between people

00:27:13 ►

who are kind of staying up with new ideas,

00:27:17 ►

staying open to what’s happening,

00:27:19 ►

and people who are kind of retrenching

00:27:20 ►

and closing down in older belief systems

00:27:24 ►

because they’re too scared or uncomfortable with what’s happening.

00:27:28 ►

So I think the Kalamans thing is a very powerful tool

00:27:31 ►

for thinking about the situation.

00:27:34 ►

I don’t know, and there’s also a lot of kind of bickering

00:27:38 ►

between Kalaman, Jenkins, and Argylis.

00:27:40 ►

I discussed that in this handout that I gave.

00:27:42 ►

It’s a chapter from the book.

00:27:43 ►

And there are things about Kalaman’s system which seem a little bit off too, but it seems like an

00:27:47 ►

incredibly interesting model. And in this kind of model that he puts out,

00:27:52 ►

there’s energies. There’s a positive period, positive

00:27:55 ►

periods of development, then more like destructive periods, which are

00:27:59 ►

the most destructive period. There’s sort of a period associated with Quetzalcoatl

00:28:04 ►

where the new form of consciousness is formed. Then there’s the

00:28:08 ►

next period is associated with Tezcatlipoca, who’s Quetzalcoatl’s

00:28:12 ►

nemesis. Quetzalcoatl is the feathered serpent, and I’ll talk about him

00:28:16 ►

a bit more in a bit. Tezcatlipoca is the smoking mirror. He’s the god

00:28:20 ►

of black magic and the jaguar. And so in the previous

00:28:24 ►

phase, the Quetzalcoatl phase was like 1913 to 1931.

00:28:28 ►

The Tezcatlipoca phase was 1931 to 1950.

00:28:32 ►

So during the Quetzalcoatl phase, we had the First World War,

00:28:35 ►

but we also had the spread of modernism, cubism, quantum physics,

00:28:39 ►

Dadaism, surrealism.

00:28:40 ►

And then in that next phase, we had the Final Solution, the Holocaust,

00:28:48 ►

the breakdown of the old order.

00:28:55 ►

So Kalman, in this next phase that we’re in, the year 2007 is the sort of Quetzalcoatl phase,

00:28:58 ►

and roughly the year 2008 is the Tezcatlipoca phase.

00:29:06 ►

So Kalman ends up arguing that 2008 might see a kind of dramatic system meltdown of the current system that we’re in.

00:29:12 ►

And all of these crises that we can sort of see kind of burbling on the horizon whenever we look at the news or really think about what’s going on are going to come to a head at that point.

00:29:16 ►

And for me, that gives us, who are beginning to understand this material,

00:29:20 ►

if we are willing to sort of take it seriously, at least, you know,

00:29:24 ►

that it gives us a grave responsibility

00:29:26 ►

in this short term that’s ahead of us

00:29:28 ►

to really not only understand the situation

00:29:34 ►

but act at a much deeper level

00:29:36 ►

in terms of our responsibilities for the situation.

00:29:42 ►

The new book ranges over a lot of material.

00:29:45 ►

I talk about the crop circles in England,

00:29:48 ►

which I spent a couple summers in England studying

00:29:52 ►

and ended up feeling that when you look at all the evidence,

00:29:56 ►

it’s not possible that they’re only human-made

00:29:59 ►

and that, therefore, there’s some other kind of messaging going on.

00:30:04 ►

And although it’s very, very indeterminate,

00:30:06 ►

and the deeper you go in trying to understand any of the formations,

00:30:09 ►

the more kind of counter-information you get.

00:30:12 ►

And what I ended up sort of suggesting is that these crop circles

00:30:16 ►

are somehow a manifestation of a galactic intelligence, a higher intelligence,

00:30:20 ►

and that they’re very much geared to this prophetic time frame that we’re in,

00:30:24 ►

and they’re a teaching on the nature of reality that’s geared specifically to help us negotiate this shift.

00:30:31 ►

And part of the teaching, a lot of the crop circles use kind of minglings of sacred symbols and fractals,

00:30:39 ►

symbols from different mystical traditions.

00:30:40 ►

So they seem to be suggesting this integration between science and mythological

00:30:46 ►

thought. The crop circles are also centered around Ava Berry and Stonehenge in England.

00:30:52 ►

And those are sort of, they were temples and calendars of solar-lunar integration. Stonehenge

00:30:58 ►

was actually used to predict lunar eclipses. And it was built in such a way that it would

00:31:02 ►

sustain itself to this time, perhaps

00:31:05 ►

intentionally. Perhaps the people who built Stonehenge, the Neolithic culture, recognized

00:31:09 ►

that their kind of intuitive relationship to the cosmos was being diluted, like this

00:31:15 ►

other energetic was coming into the planet. And so they left this behind as an exemplary

00:31:21 ►

sort of form of their knowledge system, which was really about this very, very precise understanding of planetary dynamics

00:31:30 ►

and the relationship of the Earth to the solar system.

00:31:34 ►

So once again, that links to what I was saying about the calendar,

00:31:37 ►

that there might be a shift that we could make as a tool, as an instrument,

00:31:42 ►

like a new calendar or a new timing frequency that would help us get through this transition.

00:31:47 ►

Although, for various reasons,

00:31:48 ►

I don’t think it’s going to be Arguelles’.

00:31:50 ►

And the other thing that the crop circles really taught me

00:31:54 ►

was that they’re very much about the nature of consciousness.

00:31:58 ►

And what I discovered as I spent time with the phenomenon,

00:32:00 ►

it’s, first of all, an incredible synchronicity vortex.

00:32:08 ►

People have amazing experiences. When you go into new ones, there’s a huge energetic charge. You basically want to sink to the ground and just sit there and meditate

00:32:12 ►

for a long time. But I noted that when people came into the phenomenon, whatever their kind

00:32:20 ►

of belief set and setting was is what sort of came refracted back to them.

00:32:28 ►

So if they came in as skeptics, they would find they would meet people who claim to make all the formations.

00:32:29 ►

They would find broken stems and boards.

00:32:32 ►

You know, if they came in as new agers, they would see, you know, they have light body

00:32:38 ►

activations and see balls of light.

00:32:40 ►

If they came in as kind of UFOlogists, they would see UFOs, they would see black

00:32:46 ►

helicopters chasing them and stuff like that. So I began to recognize that the phenomenon

00:32:51 ►

was a teaching in how consciousness somehow co-creates reality, that it’s a very participatory

00:32:56 ►

situation. And what your sort of belief set and setting is, is what you’re allowed to

00:33:01 ►

kind of get back from the cosmos.

00:33:06 ►

So that was part of that.

00:33:08 ►

And the book also covers the alien abduction phenomenon,

00:33:11 ►

I think in a really useful way.

00:33:12 ►

I talk about different philosophers.

00:33:17 ►

I really try to mesh together aspects of the Western philosophical tradition with this shamanic understanding.

00:33:21 ►

And, for instance, Heidegger talks about how his definition of a

00:33:26 ►

world is a whole way of relating to, you know, time and space and the earth. And so a world is

00:33:33 ►

actually a state of consciousness. So when the Hopis talk about this transition from the fourth

00:33:37 ►

world to the fifth world, they could be talking about a change in the nature of consciousness.

00:33:42 ►

about a change in the nature of consciousness.

00:33:45 ►

So let’s see.

00:33:51 ►

Yeah, so that sort of brings up a little bit of where I got to in this book.

00:33:57 ►

I mean, I also had this very complex experience in the Amazon in Brazil.

00:34:02 ►

I was working with the Santo Daime, and I had a transmission experience where Santo

00:34:06 ►

Daime is a religion that uses ayahuasca as its sacrament and it started in the 1920s

00:34:08 ►

it’s a kind of

00:34:09 ►

integration of Christianity with these kind of

00:34:12 ►

rubber tappers and so on who went down to the Amazon

00:34:14 ►

began to take ayahuasca with

00:34:16 ►

the natives and they began to

00:34:18 ►

receive songs and transmissions

00:34:20 ►

and basically

00:34:21 ►

created this religion which is a kind of integration

00:34:24 ►

of the Christianity and sort of tribal culture.

00:34:29 ►

So they have the mother of the forest is also the Virgin Mary.

00:34:33 ►

And how many people here know about the Supreme Court decision

00:34:36 ►

that happened recently with ayahuasca?

00:34:41 ►

I think that this might be one of the most significant

00:34:44 ►

and extraordinary things that’s happened in our recent time.

00:34:48 ►

Basically, there’s two Brazilian religions that use ayahuasca.

00:34:52 ►

One is Unio de Vegetales, and their American leader was this guy Jeffrey Bronfman.

00:34:57 ►

He was one of the heirs to the Seagram’s fortune, and he was busted bringing ayahuasca into the country

00:35:01 ►

because it contains DMT, which is illegal.

00:35:03 ►

busted bringing ayahuasca into the country because it contains DMT, which is illegal.

00:35:09 ►

So he had the resources to fight this case and find powerful allies.

00:35:12 ►

And he’s basically, he won at the Supreme Court level.

00:35:16 ►

And I think he even got the support of Catholic groups and traditional religious groups. So basically, ayahuasca is now available legally as a sacrament with the UDV and I think now

00:35:23 ►

or very, very shortly with Santo Daime also.

00:35:26 ►

So it’s a very, very powerful and important container for having that experience

00:35:32 ►

and for really doing a lot of amazing work on astral levels and personal levels.

00:35:41 ►

So anyway, I was lucky enough to get this trip, go down to visit

00:35:46 ►

the sort of head, one of the headquarters of the Santo Daime, way deep in the Amazon. And we were

00:35:50 ►

doing this kind of initiation process where we actually learned how to make the medicine, to

00:35:54 ►

take care of the vine and the leaves and clean them and sort of process them. And all the while

00:36:00 ►

you drink ayahuasca during the day while you’re doing this initiation. And you sing songs that are prayers.

00:36:08 ►

And during this process, I also began to receive, I actually really started in Brasilia,

00:36:13 ►

a kind of transmission that I was almost compelled to write out that informed me

00:36:18 ►

that I was a sort of vehicle of the Aztec and Mayan god Quetzalcoatl,

00:36:23 ►

who was making his return at this time

00:36:25 ►

and that this was actually this apocalyptic moment.

00:36:29 ►

And in the book I really leave it up to the reader

00:36:31 ►

to decide if this is something that seems

00:36:34 ►

plausible to them or meaningful to them.

00:36:38 ►

And I don’t claim to know the truth validity of it.

00:36:41 ►

It felt intuitively very powerful.

00:36:45 ►

And it also was, as I described with Jose Arguelles,

00:36:48 ►

it was like this struggle with this archetypal energy,

00:36:50 ►

which wanted to almost like annul my ego, you know,

00:36:54 ►

or I could have easily seen being possessed by it.

00:36:56 ►

But luckily, the shaman I was traveling with was also a Jungian psychoanalyst.

00:37:00 ►

And so we worked through this sort of relationship to the archetypes.

00:37:04 ►

And really, when this archetypal material constellates,

00:37:08 ►

your ego has to be kind of supple and strong enough so that you can

00:37:11 ►

mediate the experience so that it doesn’t overtake you, so that you maintain

00:37:15 ►

your normal, goofy human person while this

00:37:20 ►

archetype is happening to you. So that was a very

00:37:23 ►

powerful and interesting process that I went through.

00:37:27 ►

And then it was interesting, too, because when I wrote the first draft of the book,

00:37:31 ►

I was still very attached to this experience, this kind of moral urgency.

00:37:35 ►

And that draft absolutely sucked.

00:37:36 ►

My editor rejected it.

00:37:38 ►

And I had to then sort of go through this process of, like, despair, nihilism,

00:37:42 ►

feeling like it was totally impossible to write the book,

00:37:44 ►

until I was able to just detach from any importance of that transmission and come back to it just

00:37:50 ►

as a writer writing something aesthetic, sort of poetic.

00:37:54 ►

And then I was able to do it at a different octave or a different level.

00:38:00 ►

So yeah, I mean, basically, I know, the book, I really offer the book as a thought experiment. And I just, because I’m an experiential writer and I come partially from the beat tradition,

00:38:10 ►

I really believe in the necessity of presenting things through your personal window, your personal experience.

00:38:16 ►

And, you know, that’s just what I did.

00:38:18 ►

And this experience happened to me.

00:38:19 ►

I couldn’t have not written about it.

00:38:21 ►

It would have been deceptive, you know.

00:38:29 ►

So that was one aspect of the book. And let’s see, what else did I want to talk about?

00:38:32 ►

Oh, so I was going to talk about, yes, so Quetzalcoatl for me,

00:38:36 ►

as an archetype, so it’s the integration of the Quetzal bird,

00:38:39 ►

which apparently is this beautiful, long-feathered bird

00:38:42 ►

in the Amazon, with coat, which is the serpent.

00:38:45 ►

So it represents the union or integration of spirit and matter, heaven and earth, what flies and what crawls.

00:38:53 ►

And what I see in this symbol is the idea of integrating these kind of knowledge systems,

00:39:00 ►

the materialist, scientific, empirical consciousness that we’ve developed in the West is not to be

00:39:08 ►

rejected, it’s to be used and integrated, but then bringing back and integrating this intuitive, mystical,

00:39:15 ►

mythological, psychic realm. And I think that that integration is one of the most profound things that’s happening

00:39:21 ►

right now, and it’s a very, very difficult process.

00:39:25 ►

And by no means do I think that my book completes the process.

00:39:28 ►

I mean, in the book I also talk about quantum physics

00:39:31 ►

and how quantum physics kind of, you know, if you read like the Tao of physics

00:39:34 ►

or Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe,

00:39:37 ►

some of this stuff was kind of banalized in what the bleeps we know.

00:39:40 ►

But there seems to be this relationship where you could say that quantum physics

00:39:43 ►

supports certain ideas in, oh, that’s much better, right? Certain ideas

00:39:48 ►

in, you know, Eastern religion, that actually consciousness is fundamental

00:39:52 ►

to reality rather than matter. So it gives us

00:39:56 ►

this whole shift in our perception.

00:39:59 ►

So then the question is, we’re at 2006 now. How could such a massive

00:40:04 ►

transformation happen so quickly?

00:40:08 ►

And I think that it’s a very interesting situation.

00:40:13 ►

So I also wanted to note that even if you didn’t pay attention to the Mayan calendar,

00:40:18 ►

there are a lot of people, I’m reading this book called The Chaos Point by a scientist,

00:40:22 ►

and he says that the next five years are absolutely critical,

00:40:24 ►

that it’s either a breakdown or breakthrough for the human species.

00:40:27 ►

You know, he has no mystical reference to a Mayan calendar.

00:40:30 ►

If you look at the species extinction crisis,

00:40:33 ►

25% of all mammalian species are going to be extinct in the next 30 years.

00:40:37 ►

So if we’re somehow going to, you know,

00:40:40 ►

and we can see what’s happening with climate change and that acceleration,

00:40:43 ►

we can see what’s happening with the forests. You acceleration. We can see what’s happening with the forests.

00:40:46 ►

There’s all these feedback loops are now being triggered in the system.

00:40:49 ►

So the forests are burning, releasing more carbons, more forests burn.

00:40:53 ►

Polar ice caps are melting.

00:40:55 ►

They keep melting faster.

00:40:56 ►

I’m sure a lot of you saw the Inconvenient Truth.

00:40:59 ►

So we somehow have to face this sort of disaster we have in our hands.

00:41:07 ►

And we have to do it very quickly.

00:41:13 ►

I think basically, if the human species is going to survive in any decent form, it really is going to have to take place in the next two to three years. There’s going to have

00:41:16 ►

to be a very, very deep transformation of consciousness and perspective. And one way

00:41:23 ►

I talk about it in the book is we’re going to have to go from looking at

00:41:26 ►

ourselves as kind of individuated egos out for our own gain in this kind of capitalist

00:41:32 ►

game to really thinking about ourselves as sentient aspects of a planetary ecology and

00:41:38 ►

transformation and how do we use the skills and the knowledge base and the technical capacities that we’ve developed to really help that process

00:41:47 ►

and to ameliorate the damage that we’ve done

00:41:52 ►

up to this point.

00:41:57 ►

It’s a little bit like a Hollywood movie in a way. I think it’s like

00:41:59 ►

Mission Impossible, how there’s always these down-to-the-wire endings. It may be that

00:42:03 ►

God is just a great film director,

00:42:06 ►

and he wants us to just get it right at the last second.

00:42:11 ►

And the other aspect that interests me is,

00:42:16 ►

okay, so we’re going to need to deal on a sort of technical,

00:42:20 ►

meta-strategic level with the global situation.

00:42:23 ►

We’re going to need a new kind of rational

00:42:25 ►

organizing principle for the planet.

00:42:28 ►

And we’re going to need to make that happen pretty quickly.

00:42:31 ►

But then there’s this other level, which is the psychic level,

00:42:34 ►

which to me is equally crucial.

00:42:35 ►

And that’s where most of the people who are part of the liberal establishment,

00:42:38 ►

like Gore’s film The Inconvenient Truth,

00:42:41 ►

just don’t even have the capacity to address that.

00:42:44 ►

And I see that this psychic evolution is taking place and these synchronicities are happening.

00:42:49 ►

So the way I think about it is if you look at the 1750s, people had seen lightning and

00:42:56 ►

had seen shocks and so on, but they had no idea that you could bring electricity into

00:43:03 ►

the planet and make it into a transformative power for the whole planet.

00:43:07 ►

And once they understood that and managed to do it,

00:43:10 ►

and at first it was just a very weak trickle,

00:43:12 ►

and then suddenly in a century and a half,

00:43:15 ►

which is absolutely nothing in terms of evolutionary time,

00:43:18 ►

the whole planet got transformed,

00:43:20 ►

and we absolutely transformed the planet through electricity and industrialization.

00:43:25 ►

So what if we’re at that same moment with this psychic energy, psychic phenomena,

00:43:31 ►

and there’s going to be this tipping point where we’re going to learn how to access it for transformation

00:43:37 ►

on a very visceral level, maybe through global psychic ceremonies or concentrations of energy.

00:43:43 ►

maybe through global psychic ceremonies or concentrations of energy.

00:43:45 ►

At the end of the book, I go to visit the Hopi Indians

00:43:48 ►

and hear their prophecies from one of their elders.

00:43:52 ►

And that was amazing,

00:43:55 ►

but I sort of knew all of that already.

00:43:57 ►

I was reading this Cambridge anthropologist

00:44:00 ►

who went down and lived with the Hopis for a few years.

00:44:03 ►

This guy was a total secular materialist,

00:44:04 ►

and in his book he was like, look, I’m really embarrassed to say this, who went down and lived with the Hopis for a few years. This guy was a total secular materialist.

00:44:05 ►

And in his book, he was like,

00:44:07 ►

look, I’m really embarrassed to say this,

00:44:10 ►

but sometimes I would go to these rain dances,

00:44:11 ►

and they would work.

00:44:13 ►

It would be 120 degrees, clear blue sky.

00:44:15 ►

They would dance for 20 minutes.

00:44:17 ►

Clouds would gather. Rain would come.

00:44:20 ►

And he also said that sometimes he would go to these Hopi elders,

00:44:22 ►

and he’d have a whole list of questions for them,

00:44:24 ►

and they would just answer the questions without him asking them,

00:44:25 ►

one after another.

00:44:27 ►

To me, I take that seriously.

00:44:30 ►

If the potential is for these indigenous, magical, tribal cultures

00:44:35 ►

to have had a real relationship with elemental forces,

00:44:38 ►

that they could influence weather patterns,

00:44:40 ►

how fascinating is that when you think about the climate change situation that we’re in?

00:44:45 ►

And maybe we could reverse that. And maybe this kind of critical threshold that we’re being pushed

00:44:53 ►

into is the only way to force us to access those latent psychic powers. Because as long as people

00:44:59 ►

are relatively comfortable, they’re relatively asleep. It’s only when people are forced into crisis

00:45:06 ►

that they become super inventive and super experimental.

00:45:10 ►

So maybe that’s one of the things that’s taking place

00:45:12 ►

at this point in time.

00:45:15 ►

So before I’m going to open up to questions in a minute,

00:45:19 ►

but I just wanted to also talk about this title of the talk,

00:45:22 ►

which was Cancel the Apocalypse.

00:45:22 ►

It’s from a Saul Williams poem.

00:45:25 ►

And what occurred to me over time, and I still feel there’s a little too much of it in this book,

00:45:30 ►

is that a lot of us who seem to be in this process of moving, emerging into this new consciousness,

00:45:37 ►

have a lot of anger against the civilization that we’ve come out of.

00:45:40 ►

We hate it, really, in a lot of respects.

00:45:44 ►

And there’s this kind of cathartic desire, really, in a lot of respects.

00:45:47 ►

There’s this kind of cathartic desire for a flame-out of that civilization. We almost want to see it

00:45:51 ►

go to hell and have a road warrior scenario where it all breaks down.

00:45:56 ►

I think that we really need to look at that, because I think that’s another

00:45:59 ►

shadow projection. We have to somehow deprogram ourselves from that

00:46:04 ►

shadow projection. Really have to somehow deprogram ourselves from that shadow projection.

00:46:10 ►

And really we do not want the system that is existing now to break down at all.

00:46:13 ►

We actually want it to be more like a super session.

00:46:19 ►

We need to actually create a different infrastructure as this current one supports us.

00:46:30 ►

It could be, you know, I mean the Berlin Wall is one amazing example of a gentle revolution. Like nobody had a concept that the Berlin Wall could just fall without a shot being fired.

00:46:31 ►

And then suddenly it did.

00:46:34 ►

Suddenly the consciousness of those people was just prepared for that,

00:46:36 ►

and it was just necessary that that happened.

00:46:40 ►

So it might be that we could reach a point where there would be a very quick and gentle supersession of this present order.

00:46:42 ►

And one way I’m thinking about it, I think is a useful metaphor,

00:46:46 ►

is the idea of a snake shedding its skin.

00:46:48 ►

So if you think about a snake shedding its skin,

00:46:50 ►

that old skin has to hold together until the new skin can form itself.

00:46:55 ►

Otherwise you’ll have a dead snake.

00:46:57 ►

So it’s just like that energy, that almost cathartic desire

00:47:01 ►

to see a flame out of the current civilization

00:47:03 ►

is I think one that we have to look at and address

00:47:06 ►

and actually move away from.

00:47:20 ►

And one other thing that’s come up that I just wanted to put out there

00:47:22 ►

is a lot of us have now learned, you know, I mean, a couple of years ago, synchronicities would happen.

00:47:28 ►

Everybody like, wow, that was a crazy synchronicity.

00:47:30 ►

Now a lot of us are just in that flow of recognizing that there’s a total aspect of the psychic kind of field forming itself.

00:47:37 ►

OK, so if that’s the case, I mean, what I’ve had in certain downloads and psychedelic experiences is that now we’re at the next level. It’s like, okay, it’s like, you know, the cosmos

00:47:48 ►

is almost saying to us, okay, you’ve learned that, you know, now make use of it. You know,

00:47:53 ►

how do you intentionalize that? How do you, you know, what tools can you use to, you know,

00:47:58 ►

to operate at a much higher level because we’re being really challenged here. And I

00:48:04 ►

think like magical think some magical tools

00:48:06 ►

may become really useful,

00:48:07 ►

like visualization,

00:48:09 ►

having really setting a proper intention

00:48:11 ►

and then visualizing it

00:48:13 ►

and using different techniques

00:48:16 ►

to bring it into manifestation.

00:48:19 ►

So that’s another aspect.

00:48:21 ►

Cool.

00:48:22 ►

So I’m going to open this up to questions.

00:48:24 ►

And that was really fun to talk with you about this stuff.

00:48:26 ►

Yeah.

00:48:38 ►

So anybody who wants to ask a question, maybe just come up and hang out over here.

00:48:42 ►

You want to start?

00:48:43 ►

Cool.

00:48:44 ►

Hi.

00:48:44 ►

So I came to your talk last year, and I really enjoyed it.

00:48:48 ►

Thank you very much for that.

00:48:50 ►

You had mentioned that you said after examining a lot of the evidence around crop circles

00:48:55 ►

that you thought that it just wasn’t possible that humans could have done it all.

00:49:00 ►

And then it opened you up to a lot of things,

00:49:03 ►

and I was just hoping that you could speak a little bit more about that.

00:49:07 ►

Yeah, well, I mean, there was, in the book, I described my own synchronistic experience.

00:49:12 ►

Like, I’m not going to go over that one. But there’s basically scientific evidence that

00:49:16 ►

there’s been papers published in peer-reviewed science journals, which basically discuss

00:49:21 ►

what happens or analyze what happens to the plants in these formations.

00:49:25 ►

And there’s this kind of node lengthening takes place, first nodes,

00:49:29 ►

that according to these scientists, these biophysicists,

00:49:32 ►

there’s no way that just pushing them down would do that,

00:49:36 ►

and that it has to be some kind of sort of energy, electromagnetic or microwave coming from above.

00:49:41 ►

And so those papers are now in peer-reviewed science journals,

00:49:44 ►

and they have not been refuted in any way.

00:49:48 ►

And then there’s the whole question of laying out these formations,

00:49:52 ►

the landscaping of them, the kind of perfection of them.

00:49:55 ►

But it is really fascinating and really tricky.

00:49:58 ►

But it’s clear to me that, like, if this is not being made by people,

00:50:02 ►

if it’s being made by higher intelligence, they could make their intentions clear.

00:50:06 ►

So the fact that they don’t is, I think, part of the process,

00:50:10 ►

that we’re really being challenged to discriminate for ourselves what we think of this phenomenon.

00:50:15 ►

And it’s a sort of, you know, when you get into it, it’s like an individual process.

00:50:19 ►

The other thing that I think this phenomenon really reveals is that we,

00:50:23 ►

since we’ve come from this scientific, rational culture, we’ve got this sort of fixed idea of alien or higher intelligence as

00:50:30 ►

being very technological. That, like, when I talked to this guy from SETI, he was like, oh, if they

00:50:34 ►

were really aliens, they would just leave an encyclopedia galactica on our doorstep, and they

00:50:38 ►

would give us a new, like, warp drive and stuff. You know, but actually what seems to be indicated

00:50:42 ►

is totally different. It’s almost like the higher intelligence is more playful. It’s more like art and it is

00:50:48 ►

like science. It’s more like Shakespeare or the Marx Brothers or Bach.

00:50:52 ►

It’s more like these paradoxes and puzzles that keep opening up.

00:50:56 ►

And that for me is a very nice concept of higher intelligence.

00:51:00 ►

And then with the Maya, there’s similar kind of

00:51:04 ►

pranks. I mean, even the word

00:51:05 ►

Maya, Aguelas pointed out, is in the Hindu tradition or Buddhist tradition has a meaning.

00:51:11 ►

And it’s very important. It means the illusion of the physical realm, or it means the magical

00:51:16 ►

creative power of the gods in creating the illusion of the physical world. So it’s almost

00:51:22 ►

like a hint to us that the civilization is kind of like these master

00:51:27 ►

puzzlers who came in to do this magic for us.

00:51:32 ►

My question is, in terms of 2012 and December 12th or December 21st that it almost seems like a singularity, like

00:51:45 ►

an opening or like the fitting through

00:51:48 ►

the eye of a needle, that it’s almost

00:51:50 ►

like an ultimate healing for

00:51:52 ►

mankind.

00:51:53 ►

So where does the line

00:51:56 ►

draw, or what’s the relationship

00:51:58 ►

in your view

00:52:00 ►

between the healing that happens

00:52:02 ►

in the human family

00:52:04 ►

on an actual level that’s outside of time,

00:52:08 ►

outside of any measuring that humans might come up with,

00:52:11 ►

which is viable in that it may actually become a new story

00:52:16 ►

and an actual healing compared to what seems to be

00:52:20 ►

the prediction of that healing with 2012.

00:52:23 ►

Yeah, I mean, I recently went and got,

00:52:26 ►

I took my daughter to get a hug from Ama, Amachi,

00:52:30 ►

who’s the hugging saint from India, the divine mother.

00:52:33 ►

And, you know, the Mayans called this black hole

00:52:37 ►

the cosmic mother.

00:52:39 ►

And so we’re lining up, you know,

00:52:40 ►

to get in the relationship to the cosmic mother.

00:52:43 ►

And going to see Ama, it was like

00:52:45 ►

you get there, you dress up, you get your stuff

00:52:48 ►

together, you wait in line.

00:52:50 ►

Finally, you’re up in this moment where you

00:52:51 ►

move towards Ama and you’re on your knees

00:52:53 ►

and she gives you this wonderful hug

00:52:55 ►

and then you move off. I almost think that this

00:52:57 ►

December 21st, 2012 thing is like

00:52:59 ►

getting our cosmic hug from the mother.

00:53:01 ►

I don’t know.

00:53:01 ►

our cosmic hug from the mother.

00:53:11 ►

And the other thing is that I’m really not fixated on that date.

00:53:13 ►

I mean, for me, it’s really about, I don’t, you know,

00:53:16 ►

who knows, our reality may be so shifted by that point.

00:53:19 ►

It’s this next few years which are so critical,

00:53:22 ►

and we really have to think about, you know,

00:53:25 ►

how to really be strategic and cunning.

00:53:33 ►

And when I’m at Burning Man every time, I’m just struck by this paradise that we’ve created here.

00:53:34 ►

And the art is so extraordinary.

00:53:42 ►

And how the genius of the people here and how if there was a platform for that to be fully expressed through the media, it could cause a very fast shift in human consciousness

00:53:46 ►

and really give us a much more positive vision of what’s possible.

00:53:51 ►

And that’s sort of what I’ve been trying to manifest through this attempt to start this company, Evolver,

00:53:55 ►

which has been, for me, a very interesting process in learning about the business world

00:53:59 ►

and really thinking – my thinking was if you think about the business culture

00:54:03 ►

as being the most destructive force on the planet,

00:54:07 ►

alchemically, the poison is the medicine.

00:54:11 ►

So we have to actually use those tools that are so efficient and hierarchical and organized to create a different system.

00:54:20 ►

And for me, I see a lot of the hope could be the Internet. I mean, one idea is every time there’s a profound new media technology,

00:54:28 ►

it creates a new form of social organization.

00:54:31 ►

So you could never have had mass democracy until you had the Gutenberg printing press.

00:54:35 ►

So now we have the Internet, and it’s pointing us towards an incredible new form of social organization.

00:54:41 ►

Like, you know, we could have a gift economy through the internet. We could really, really

00:54:46 ►

create whole different systems and structures for how people relate on a social level, on

00:54:51 ►

a societal level. And then you see things like MySpace, which is basically nothing.

00:54:55 ►

It’s just a toy, but they have like 100 million people on it. People are so urgently desiring

00:55:00 ►

these new forms of connectivity, but they really haven’t, there’s no tool yet that’s fully manifest what’s possible.

00:55:07 ►

So that’s something that I’m hoping, and I put that out there because I know so many people at Burning Man

00:55:11 ►

are visionary computer database digital types, and if they want to talk to me about how to activate that,

00:55:18 ►

I definitely have some ideas, and I’m working with friends who’ve got a lot of ideas about it.

00:55:22 ►

Thank you.

00:55:22 ►

and I’m working with friends who’ve got a lot of ideas about it. Thank you.

00:55:28 ►

I was hoping that you could comment on this kind of, I don’t know,

00:55:33 ►

it’s like a collective rumor, the idea of intention,

00:55:36 ►

putting intention out into the world to create a crop circle

00:55:41 ►

that is the street map of Burning Man.

00:55:43 ►

Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess you could give it a shot.

00:55:45 ►

I do know, I have a friend, Mark Healy.

00:55:48 ►

Is he here? He’s maybe going to come to Burning Man.

00:55:51 ►

I gave a talk with him at the Boom Festival in Portugal,

00:55:53 ►

but he did a bunch of guided meditations with friends in Glastonbury,

00:55:56 ►

and they did have, he said, crop circles pop up.

00:55:59 ►

So, you know, I think that it would be interesting to,

00:56:06 ►

if we really took that phenomenon seriously,

00:56:10 ►

to then think about what kind of interaction is possible with that intelligence.

00:56:17 ►

Yeah, so I find a bit of a paradox in 2012 that perhaps you could elucidate,

00:56:20 ►

illustrate it just with two brief sentences here.

00:56:25 ►

One is how could you anticipate qualitative time with quantitative time? How is it that we can have a quantitative – how do we have two, three years, six years before we all of a sudden don’t have quantitative time or consciousness of that?

00:56:36 ►

The other is – and I think these are both symptomatic of the same essential source.

00:56:40 ►

So I don’t know what this 2012 transition is going to be. I mean, I can’t say what it’s going to be like. But I got

00:56:47 ►

very interested in this philosopher, Gene Gebser. And his thing is, he’s a German philosopher.

00:56:52 ►

There’s a whole really good chapter about him in the book. And he talks about how

00:56:55 ►

there’s this aboriginal time, which is this origin point time, where you’re always at the origin

00:57:00 ►

point. Then there’s this magical time, which is kind of like instantaneous telepathic

00:57:04 ►

time. Then there’s this mythical, mythological time, which is cyclical. Then we went into this

00:57:07 ►

modern, rational, spatialized time, where we made time linear. And he says that basically

00:57:13 ►

the next level of consciousness, the next relationship to time, would not be negating

00:57:18 ►

those previous forms. It would actually be seeing them all as simultaneous kind of veils,

00:57:23 ►

like diaphanous veils. So we would still be in that linear progressive time,

00:57:27 ►

yet we would also be fully in that cyclical time and in that origin time and in that instantaneous time.

00:57:34 ►

So his book was called The Ever-Present Origin.

00:57:37 ►

And so for me, it’s not necessarily – we may have a very different relationship to time,

00:57:40 ►

instrumentalized differently, but it may not be that we forfeit linear progressive time.

00:57:45 ►

That’ll just be one kind of vector with which to think about time or which to

00:57:50 ►

be in time.

00:57:51 ►

Does that make sense?

00:57:54 ►

It doesn’t make sense.

00:57:55 ►

It’s just that it’s not that I thought we would forfeit the quantitative aspect.

00:57:58 ►

It’s just that where’s the qualitative aspect now because I sort of think that it’s here

00:58:02 ►

now.

00:58:03 ►

Sure.

00:58:04 ►

Okay.

00:58:04 ►

So I’ll go on to the second version of the same thing.

00:58:06 ►

If consciousness is the ground of all being,

00:58:09 ►

as you sort of deal with in the Amit Goswami, Rudolf Steiner chapter,

00:58:13 ►

then how is it that as you bring conscious awareness

00:58:16 ►

to the possibility of eschatological sort of like 2012,

00:58:20 ►

you’re not actually contributing to the singularity

00:58:23 ►

as opposed to what it feels like you’re trying to do

00:58:29 ►

is different than contributing to the singularity

00:58:33 ►

I think you understand

00:58:35 ►

right, well since it’s all about consciousness

00:58:38 ►

it’s all about awareness

00:58:38 ►

so the book itself is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy perhaps

00:58:42 ►

where it’s by raising awareness,

00:58:46 ►

the synchronicities keep growing

00:58:47 ►

and the mesh keeps happening.

00:58:50 ►

And it’s just about the articulation

00:58:53 ►

actually shifts the nature of the reality.

00:58:58 ►

But we need better tools for articulating

00:59:00 ►

on a lot of different levels.

00:59:03 ►

Another whole aspect of the book, at the end of the book,

00:59:06 ►

is about sexuality and consciousness and relationships.

00:59:10 ►

And probably the part that’s worked out the least successfully

00:59:14 ►

in certain respects in the book was part of my own process.

00:59:17 ►

But for me, that’s one of the really interesting aspects of Burning Man

00:59:20 ►

is that there’s this incredible renegotiation of energy

00:59:24 ►

between the sexes taking place.

00:59:26 ►

And it’s both a beautiful dance and often a kind of battle zone.

00:59:31 ►

But it’s a really fascinating aspect of what seems to be happening here.

00:59:36 ►

I’m just wondering if you can speak a little bit on what your thoughts are

00:59:40 ►

between the U.S. government, which right now is a leader of war

00:59:46 ►

and some very dirty economics and, you know, various other things,

00:59:52 ►

and the peoples of the world and how you imagine in this very short amount of time

00:59:56 ►

those two entities addressing one another to go towards an era of a more inlatent time?

01:00:06 ►

I don’t totally know.

01:00:08 ►

I mean, I don’t know how it’s going to work out.

01:00:12 ►

I think there might be a collapse of the global financial system.

01:00:16 ►

There may be a desperate attempt for the current ruling elites to hold power.

01:00:20 ►

But I also think that there may be a mass defection from the current paradigm

01:00:23 ►

because it’s more and more overtly obvious that it’s just stuck.

01:00:28 ►

It’s like a snake eating its tail.

01:00:33 ►

And as I said, it’s going to require very skillful means for those people who, like us,

01:00:39 ►

and us particularly, are representing this new consciousness.

01:00:42 ►

We’re going to have to go out into the field, just the way people from Burning Man went to New Orleans.

01:00:46 ►

We’re going to have to go to Africa and China and the Middle East

01:00:50 ►

and be the peacemakers and represent the new consciousness

01:00:54 ►

and sit down with these factions and these ancient hatreds

01:00:59 ►

and work through them.

01:01:02 ►

We’re going to have to take full responsibility for the situation

01:01:05 ►

or we’re not going to get it done.

01:01:17 ►

In your first book, you talked about,

01:01:21 ►

I want to ask a practical question and a philosophical question.

01:01:24 ►

The practical question

01:01:25 ►

had to do with your vision

01:01:28 ►

about what we can reasonably expect to happen.

01:01:29 ►

You’ve talked today about new business strategies and

01:01:32 ►

new media technologies coming to bear.

01:01:33 ►

In your first book, you mentioned the possibility

01:01:35 ►

of a world gathering of experts or

01:01:37 ►

people who had ideas about how

01:01:39 ►

to do this.

01:01:41 ►

In the second one, you expanded on those ideas in certain

01:01:44 ►

essential ways. I just want to give you an opportunity to share more of those thoughts into your

01:01:47 ►

recent thinking about what we can reasonably expect to see with the corporate

01:01:51 ►

structures and with how these meet. Just more discussion about that.

01:01:56 ►

There’s going to have to be some breakthrough in terms of the

01:02:00 ►

progressive and liberal arena, which has been very factionalized and fragmented.

01:02:04 ►

It’s sort of the natural state of people who are more progressive and liberal

01:02:08 ►

to be non-hierarchical.

01:02:10 ►

And so, you know, you have like, you know, even things like simple exams like the

01:02:14 ►

Sierra Club and the Rainforest Action Network kind of competing for the same

01:02:17 ►

members, throwing fundraisers on the same days, rather than really there being

01:02:21 ►

councils where you get everybody together and just be like, look, how do we

01:02:24 ►

efficiently separate out what everybody is doing and sort of apportion it out?

01:02:29 ►

And it’s really about sort of overcoming the certain negative aspects of postmodern individuality.

01:02:36 ►

I’m very interested in What is Enlightenment magazine, the Andrew Cohen, Ken Wilber magazine.

01:02:42 ►

They’re doing a lot of work about the concept of natural hierarchy.

01:02:45 ►

So we somehow have to go from what Wilber calls a postmodern flatland to accepting a kind of natural hierarchies,

01:02:54 ►

which is basically every human soul is completely equal in the aspect of the totality and on its own soul’s journey,

01:03:01 ►

yet people have different skill sets, different capacities,

01:03:07 ►

and somehow that has to be honored. You know, some people, you know, I mean, Ken Wilber talks about how, you know,

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nobody would want to see him play basketball.

01:03:14 ►

You know, nobody would want to see Shaquille O’Neal, you know, think philosophically, you know,

01:03:18 ►

so that we really need to somehow move towards a way of developing natural hierarchies in a self-organizing system.

01:03:27 ►

And once again, I think that sort of Internet platform could make that really possible on a lot of different levels.

01:03:33 ►

We could create kind of like trust-based networks.

01:03:36 ►

So somebody’s actions, activities in this network over time would then have a trace.

01:03:41 ►

Then you would see like, oh, this guy is really cool.

01:03:43 ►

He does what he says.

01:03:45 ►

He’s manifested this and that.

01:03:46 ►

You know, and there’s the record of that, you know.

01:03:49 ►

And hopefully, you know, as this sort of critical nature of the situation, you know,

01:03:55 ►

continues to just become more and more glaringly apparent, you know,

01:03:58 ►

it’s going to force a much deeper collaborative mentality on the part of people

01:04:01 ►

who are sort of holding this aspects of this new paradigm and new consciousness,

01:04:05 ►

whether they’re ecological designers or economists or, you know, mystics, you know.

01:04:12 ►

Yeah, I did want to mention one thing which I, when I was talking about the

01:04:14 ►

apocalypse, I mean, as I said, I think this time is the apocalypse.

01:04:17 ►

But if you look up the meaning of that word, one meaning for it is uncovering or

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revealing. So it’s not necessarily a destructive process.

01:04:23 ►

It’s a time when everything that was hidden becomes known, becomes manifest.

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And so, you know, in a way, like if you have more and more beautiful and amazing,

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you know, if you’ve got beautiful and amazing things in you,

01:04:35 ►

more and more of that is going to come out.

01:04:36 ►

If you’ve got horrible demons and anger, more and more of that is going to come out.

01:04:41 ►

And that really seems to be part of the process that’s going on right now,

01:04:44 ►

this revealing is happening so quickly.

01:04:47 ►

Like nothing can be, no conspiracy can be hidden anymore.

01:04:51 ►

Things just come to the light of day so quickly.

01:04:54 ►

I think that the fear is what holds us back from thinking through scenarios.

01:04:59 ►

And on so many levels, what this time is,

01:05:03 ►

is a training ground in learning to confront and overcome fear. And that’s why the whole

01:05:08 ►

shamanic experience is so critical. Because basically the shaman, the shamanic

01:05:12 ►

experience takes you through the death and rebirth process.

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You know, where you sort of have this symbolic dismemberment and these other realities.

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And you come back and you recognize that you can have that process.

01:05:23 ►

That there’s still continuity.

01:05:29 ►

I mean, I argue in the book, I think there’s good evidence for reincarnation also.

01:05:34 ►

So you have to overcome your fear.

01:05:36 ►

And it’s a training.

01:05:40 ►

And I think all of us are going through that training on different levels.

01:05:45 ►

And the society that we’re in is so focused on maintaining that fear of frequency, because that’s really the only way it can hold things in check, you know.

01:05:51 ►

Yeah, I mean, you know, and I do think that we can go through a much more rational reordering

01:05:56 ►

of our systems and look at the ideas of Buckminster Fuller or Herbert Marcuse. You know, Marcuse

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talked about how, you know, we could have created a global leisure society post-Second World War, but we instituted this insane work

01:06:08 ►

culture instead. You know, industrialization should have freed people’s time up to play,

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you know, but instead they created this whole structure that enmeshed people in this kind

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of nightmare. And Buckminster Fuller said that in the future, the right thing to do

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would be to pay most people not to work. You know, you just want them living in their home communities and playing with their kids and telling stories

01:06:28 ►

and doing whatever they wanted to do because it’s so much more destructive for the planet

01:06:32 ►

for people to be driving cars, going to work, using toner cartridges

01:06:36 ►

and all these gadgetry.

01:06:40 ►

So I think ideas like that are still, I mean a lot of the 60s ideas

01:06:43 ►

need to be rephrased and re-looked at right now.

01:06:48 ►

And for me, like I talk about the 60s as being, in breaking open the head,

01:06:51 ►

as being a kind of first stage in a process of shamanic initiation on a collective level,

01:06:56 ►

and that it wasn’t able to complete itself at that point

01:06:58 ►

because there weren’t enough kind of people in place to hold that energy.

01:07:02 ►

There weren’t enough old wise men and shamans.

01:07:04 ►

But now we’re perhaps going through a second stage of that process,

01:07:07 ►

and we have enough wisdom on an individual and collective level

01:07:13 ►

to kind of hold that energy of that birthing process.

01:07:17 ►

You’re often talking about or emphasizing the shamanic experience

01:07:22 ►

and its importance, especially with psychedelic drugs.

01:07:26 ►

And I’m wondering what your thoughts are on how important it is for the individual

01:07:32 ►

or for each individual to go through this, this whole mystic, you know, direct experience,

01:07:38 ►

or how much or how far just like, you know, a certain amount of shamans going through this

01:07:43 ►

and then kind of transmitting that is sort of like what we need.

01:07:48 ►

That’s a great question.

01:07:50 ►

My answer would be the second.

01:07:51 ►

I mean, if you look at the tribal cultures,

01:07:54 ►

it’s only like one out of 15 or 20 people wants to go through the shamanic process.

01:07:58 ►

And it’s also interesting because we’ve kind of like new age kind of whitewashed shamanism in a way.

01:08:03 ►

Like we made shamans into these culture heroes and these healers.

01:08:06 ►

But actually in tribal societies, they tend to be deeply ambiguous figures.

01:08:10 ►

They’re often kind of in a liminal zone, like off to the edge of the tribe.

01:08:13 ►

They can heal, but they can also curse and kill and destroy.

01:08:17 ►

So, you know, we have to look at that too.

01:08:19 ►

You know, I mean, and there I think there’s, you know,

01:08:21 ►

I incorporate the kind of Christianity into my thought system

01:08:25 ►

and that I think that that sort of ethical evolution,

01:08:30 ►

that we haven’t really been able to hold that frequency yet either is part of what’s coming.

01:08:35 ►

You know, and that’s very much the Daimé idea is that the second coming of Christ is, you know,

01:08:40 ►

entering a kind of heart-based consciousness.

01:08:43 ►

It’s not an individual, you know, Schwarzenegger-like messiah, as the fundamentalists think.

01:08:50 ►

So I think that it’s a threshold of individuals go through that shamanic transformation process,

01:08:57 ►

and they hold that frequency for the collective.

01:09:00 ►

But the mainstream culture at this point is not allowing,

01:09:05 ►

is trying not to fight against that kind of realization or recognition.

01:09:09 ►

How did Rudolf Steiner influence your thinking and work?

01:09:15 ►

Yes, Steiner became incredibly important to me.

01:09:17 ►

I think he’s absolutely amazing.

01:09:20 ►

And at so many levels.

01:09:21 ►

When I had this occult experience with this kind of genie or poltergeist or whatever,

01:09:29 ►

after that I ran into a friend who’d been studying Rudolf Steiner for years,

01:09:33 ►

and he laid out this whole Steinerian cosmology in one night.

01:09:37 ►

And part of it is that Steiner takes the devil, which in the Christian tradition is just this unitary kind of entity,

01:09:44 ►

and splits it up into these different forces that are working on humanity all the time.

01:09:48 ►

And he talks about them as Ahriman and Lucifer.

01:09:51 ►

And Ahriman is the evil earth spirit of the Persian Zoroastrian tradition.

01:09:57 ►

So it’s the sort of spirit of the demon of kind of materialism and materiality.

01:10:01 ►

It kind of pulls us down towards, you know, sterility, technology. And then the other one is Lucifer.

01:10:08 ►

Lucifer literally means light bringer. So Lucifer

01:10:11 ►

draws us up towards beauty, glamour, art,

01:10:16 ►

but it’s also haughtiness and pride

01:10:20 ►

and arrogance. So I think that Burning Man and

01:10:23 ►

the psychedelic illumination in general

01:10:26 ►

is a very Luciferic phenomenon. But we need that. And Steiner actually talked about that

01:10:32 ►

we were in this age of Ahriman, that Ahriman was ascendant, and that we were going to have

01:10:36 ►

to rediscover the Luciferic inspiration to get through this threshold. And I think that

01:10:42 ►

Steiner would have very much recognized

01:10:46 ►

what we’re doing here in the time that we’re in.

01:10:49 ►

I think there may have been one or two more questions for Daniel,

01:10:52 ►

but unfortunately we reached the capacity of the mini-disc we were recording on,

01:10:57 ►

and I didn’t notice it in time to put in a new disc.

01:11:02 ►

Also, I’d like to point out that the poet Michael Brownstein,

01:11:06 ►

who Daniel mentions in this talk,

01:11:09 ►

also gave a Plank and Orte lecture at the 2004 Burning Man Festival.

01:11:14 ►

And I podcast that talk in our ninth edition of the Psychedelic Salon.

01:11:18 ►

You can find a link to that program

01:11:21 ►

if you follow the podcast link on the homepage at matrixmasters.com.

01:11:26 ►

And if you haven’t yet read a copy of Michael’s book, World on Fire, you may want to give it a read.

01:11:32 ►

I highly recommend it.

01:11:35 ►

Well, I’d better wrap this up for now since this program has already gone way past our normal time limit.

01:11:42 ►

But before I go, I want to thank Daniel once again

01:11:45 ►

for his continuing support of the Planque Norte lecture series at Burning Man.

01:11:50 ►

He’s been one of our featured speakers since the beginning,

01:11:53 ►

and I’m speaking, I’m sure, for all of us here in the salon

01:11:57 ►

when I pass along our sincere thanks for his inspirational talks, books,

01:12:02 ►

and great conversations.

01:12:04 ►

Also, my thanks go out to Darren, Mark, Michael, Brian,

01:12:08 ►

and the rest of the In Theon Village crew and supporters.

01:12:13 ►

You all really came through under some difficult circumstances from time to time,

01:12:17 ►

and our lecture series was a success in no small measure due to your efforts.

01:12:23 ►

And Chateau Hayuk, thanks again for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

050 - Cancel the Apocalypse

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