Tag Archives: Daniel Pinchbeck

Crop Circles as a Portal to Personal and Planetary Transformation

August 2, 2011 admin 1 Comment

This is a wonderful opportunity for people to get tuned into the ramifications of the crop circles. I was thrilled to be invited to help to conceive and to host this 4 part webinar that will start August 20. I think it will be dynamite! Check it out for yourselves, and then, if you would, please spread the word.

For cut and paste ease in your social networking world:

“Crop Circles as a Portal to Personal and Planetary Transformation” http://evolverintensives.com/upcoming/personal-planetary-transformation.html

Shortened for Twitter:

“Crop Circles as a Portal to Personal and Planetary Transformation” http://tinyurl.com/4xdaefd

Here’s the mailing from Evolver Intensives, the sponsor:

What messages are crop circles trying to communicate to us, and are they an invitation for us to shift our worldview?

Join filmmaker Suzanne Taylor and her line-up of guests for the live interactive video course, “Crop Circles as a Portal to Personal and Planetary Transformation” — 4 potentially awareness-shifting sessions, starting August 20th, produced by Evolver Intensives.

The spiritual aspect to the circles often is ignored in discussions about how they are created and whether they are “real.” Not so for our host, Suzanne Taylor. For more than two decades, Suzanne has been captivated by the circles, so much so that she was the force behind CROP CIRCLES: Quest for Truth, the first feature documentary ever made about the circles, which she served as Executive Producer. She went on to produce and direct the award-winning documentary, What On Earth?, which continues to bring the message of the circles to a worldwide audience. Suzanne sees the phenomenon as a spur to humanity to see ourselves as part of a bigger picture, which would help free us from the small-mindedness that leads us to be so destructive to one another and to the planet.

In this course, you will discover how crop circles offer a doorway for you to find yourself in an interconnected universe that is far more miraculous, mysterious, and beautiful than most people imagine.

* Discover the connection between historic Native Americans spiritual practices and crop circles in the United States.
* Observe the sacred geometry that guides the circle design and see how it relates to the design of the universe.
* Learn about the science that proves crop circles are creations beyond any technology known to humanity.
* Get insight into how the circles are calling humanity to move away from its materialist worldview.
* Feel the call of the circles to live in harmony with nature.

In this interactive video series, you will engage with well-respected, fascinating individuals who have had profound involvements with the crop circles. Featured presenters include:

* John Martineau: sacred geometry expert, publisher of Wooden Books and author of QUADRIVIUM: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music and Cosmology
* Daniel Pinchbeck: author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
* Nancy Talbott: President of the BLT Research Team, Inc., established in 1991 to carry out scientific evaluation of crop circle plants and soils.
* Gary Bobroff: Jungian psychologist, author of Jung, Crop Circles & the Re-Emergence of the Archetypal Feminine
* Jeffrey Wilson: leading researcher of US circles, Director and Co-Founder of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers’ Association

This will be a live, dynamic experience in which you become part of a community sharing real time with thought-shapers who have been closely involved with the crop circle phenomenon.

It all starts on Saturday, August 20th. To learn more, visit: http://evolverintensives.com/upcoming/personal-planetary-transformation.html

Evolver Social Movement members will receive a special discount in a separate mailing. For more about the Evolver Social Movement, please click here: http://www.realitysandwich.com/esm/join-evolver-social-movement-esm

Evolver Intensives are a project of the Prophets Conference and Reality Sandwich.

We hope you join us for this remarkable chance to explore the mysteries of crop circles.

Daniel Pinchbeck: From Psychedelics to Consciousness to Saving the World

March 21, 2011 admin 1 Comment

Daniel Pinchbeck is a quintessential bridge figure — between the shamanic opening to a larger reality (his first book was Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism), the crop circles as another opening to what’s beyond our Earth-bound awareness (his second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, is a metaphysical epic that binds together not only crop circles, but quantum theory, psychedelic drugs, and the contention that 2012 portends a global shift in consciousness), and solutions to our global challenges (his movie, 2012: Time for Change, and his newest book, Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age, deal with the sustainable future we must achieve if humanity is to thrive).

These lines got dropped from the masthead in a conversion of this blog to a new platform. They describe my intention with all that I do, for which this post is an emblematic example:

“Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.”
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

To take the looming here one step further, here’s Daniel in an exchange with Graham Hancock, another superstar whom you find me speaking about these days (do a search to find posts about him):

“Retelling the Past, Reimagining the Future: A 2012 Dialogue with Daniel Pinchbeck & Graham Hancock” brings together two leading counterculture thinkers, Daniel Pinchbeck author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age, and Breaking Open the Head, and Graham Hancock author of Fingerprints of the Gods, Supernatural, and most recently the fantasy adventure novel, Entangled.

Pinchbeck and Hancock discuss the implications of the Mayan Calendar “end-times” date 2012 which Hancock first drew to the attention of his readers in Fingerprints of the Gods published in 1995. Hancock’s evidence for a great lost civilisation wiped out in a global cataclysm 12,500 years ago is explored in depth together with his suggestion that the survivors of that civilisation may have sought to pass down a message to the future and indeed specifically to us in the twenty-first century — a warning that the next great lost civilisation may be our own.

From the geology of the Sphinx and the Pyramids of Egypt to the mysteries of the Ark of the Covenant, from ancient maps showing the world as it looked during the last Ice Age to out-of-place artifacts indicative of high technology in ancient times, the discussion ranges widely across some of the most intriguing evidence for an immense forgotten episode in human history, and moves on to consider the spiritual crisis of the modern age. Could a new paradigm emerge from our present state of chaos? Hancock and Pinchbeck see hope in efforts by people all around the planet to reclaim sovereignty over their own consciousness, and identify a powerful role for shamanistic visionary plants such as Ayahuasca and Psilocybin in ushering in a gentler, less toxic, more nurturing state of mind. “It does seem like when you ingest them,” says Pinchbeck, “you get a lot of messages about how to reintegrate into the larger community of life.”

Says Daniel about Breaking Open the Head:

While psychedelics are demonized and repressed in the US today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the Bwiti in Gabon to the Secoya in Ecuador, the psychedelic plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness. They are gateways to a spiritual – or multi-dimensional, or holographic – vision of the universe.

Breaking Open the Head is a passionate inquiry into this deep division. The book follows two tracks. On the one hand, I tell the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these visionary sacraments – by thinkers and self-proclaimed avatars such as Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Allen Ginsberg, and Terence McKenna. This culminates in an analysis of the psychedelic chaos of the 1960s, which I describe as a failed mass-cultural voyage of shamanic initiation. But interest in psychedelics did not vanish with the 1960s. Outside of the mainstream, the psychedelic gnosis has been pursued into the present by brilliant botanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers.

The second track of my book is a scrupulous recording of my own investigations into these outlaw compounds. For the book, I went through a tribal initiation with the Bwiti, a tribal group in the small West African country of Gabon. The initiation involved eating iboga, a psychedelic which lasts for thirty hours. I visited the master shamans of the Secoya Indians in the Ecuadorean Amazon, who sing to the spirits throughout all-night ayahuasca ceremonies. I found a psychedelic utopia in the barren Black Rock desert of Nevada, where the Burning Man festival draws 25,000 people each year for a shamanic revival crossing the Ancient Mysteries with Pop Art spectacle. I visited a Mazatec shaman in Oaxaca, Mexico, and tried the super-potent hallucinogen DMT at a conference in Palenque. In the process, I had experiences that convinced me, beyond any doubt, of the limitations of the current paradigm of “rational” materialism.

Thus, Breaking Open the Head charts my personal transformation from jaded Manhattan journalist to grateful citizen of a multi-dimensional cosmos. Today, I strongly suspect that mysticism – the archaic “spiritual technologies” lost to the West – will be the applied science of the New Aeon.

Crop Circles

Daniel Pinchbeck Nails Reality

October 28, 2010 admin 2 Comments

????Perhaps some walls are tumbling down. For Daniel Pinchbeck, a fine writer and excellent speaker, who deals with shamanism and 2012 and crop circles, to turn up on the Business Insider website, is noteworthy. Although Daniel usually tells me he doesn’t agree with me — could it be love spats? — in fact I am very much in agreement with him. When I listen to him, I feel like I am at the core of my perceptions that have me stoked on the circles. We need a shock to the gears of our tightly meshed system, and the circle phenomenon could give us a jolt that would have us reexamining the unworkable world we have moved into that Daniels is so articulate about.

Here are excerpts from a “fascinating interview” with him, “The 2012 Mayan Collapse May Crush your Portfolio,” which expand on things Daniel talks about in What On Earth? .

Question:

If an alien race were to make itself known to us, what would they have to say about American capitalism in its current form?

Answer:

I think that a star-faring alien race, based on their survey of many worlds, would recognize our form of capitalism as a transitional system. It is the type of system that develops once a species establishes rational scientific inquiry and attains limited ego-based consciousness, but before it transcends that level of development to reach a truly holistic and planetary level of consciousness. With its tremendous dynamism, capitalism has meshed the world together through trade routes and communications technology. Soon we will need to supersede it to create a regenerative planetary culture where the rights of nature are protected, where manufacturing is redesigned to become zero waste, as William McDonogue describes in Cradle to Cradle, and where maximum efficiency is used in a systemic redesign of our built environment and our social institutions. We will also develop alternative instruments to exchange value, as the economist Bernard Lietaer describes in The Future of Money, or Tom Greco explores in The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.

As I discuss in my new book, Notes from the Edge Times, capitalism in its pure form has reached the limit of its usefulness and has become a destructive force. This is because the logic of the system forces the constant creation of new markets and turns all sorts of human relations into monetary exchanges. Nature has no rights under this system, and it is to the benefit of market calculations to turn natural reserves into economic producers – for instance, a forest has little economic value in itself, but when the trees are taken out and it is converted into a parking lot or soybean farm, it creates a series of economic transactions that feed the GDP. Since we have reached the resource limits of the earth, a system that runs on the ideology of endless economic growth and infinite material progress can no longer function and will soon self-destruct. The aliens in their silver ships would know about this, and would feel great concern that in the approaching chaos, horrific and meaningless destruction may be unleashed.

Other pithy comments Daniel made:

It does seem that many indicators point toward the inevitability of a global financial collapse, and this meltdown may very well occur around 2012. The global financial system is built on a debt pyramid. As long as there were new markets to penetrate and new resources to exploit, it was possible to ignore this, but now that the planet has been fully globalized and resources are declining, it is becoming impossible. According to many geologists, we are now facing “peak oil,” the point at which the annual amount of fossil fuels we are able to extract first levels off and then begins to decline, even as global demand for oil continues to grow. Personally, I hope the collapse of the financial system leads to a mass awakening as we recognize we have been focusing on virtual abstractions and profit-driven calculations that have nothing to do with the actual health and biodiversity of the earth or the resilience of our communities, and threaten our prospects for long-term continuity as a species...

I am not particularly concerned about the date. It is quite clear that we are in the crucible of a transformation, and either humanity will make a transition to a different form of civilization and a new awareness, or we will most likely not survive, at least in anything close to our current state. According to current estimates, 25% of all mammalian species – perhaps all species in general – will be extinct in 30 years. The melting of the glaciers and ice caps will eventually lead to coastal flooding and also deprive hundreds of millions of people of fresh water. The pollution of the global environment is rebounding negatively on human health, leading to epidemics of cancers and new mysterious syndromes that affect more and more people. We are all part of an uncontrolled scientific experiment, as nobody knows how much of the web of life on earth can be torn apart by our heedless behavior before the eco-system no longer supports the existence of large mammals such as ourselves. The collapse of bee and butterfly species that work for us as pollinators is one unambiguous warning signal…

I had a wide range of psychic, paranormal, and visionary experiences that ultimately convinced me there were other levels or dimensions of psychic life, that it was quite probable that the soul continues after death in other worlds, and so on. From my perspective, when you encounter these other aspects of reality, the goal of acquiring personal wealth and succeeding in the rat race doesn’t really make much sense. There is so much more happening in the cosmos, and it is the evolution of your soul and spirit that is ultimately important, not the numbers in your bank account.