Apocalypse Now (or Not?)

A SECT OF enlightened individuals lives among us.Their beliefs encompass shamanism, a 2012 doomsday scenario, obscure psychedelic drugs, mysticism, yoga, UFOs, crop circles, occasional communication with Mayan deities and the lingering suspicion that Obama is part of a robot conspiracy. You know, the usual.

Writer Daniel Pinchbeck headlines the movement, known as Next Age. He sells hundreds of thousands of books and travels around the world, lecturing at festivals and countercultural conferences. I met him a few months ago at his favorite East Village hang, a pirate-themed espresso bar on East Ninth Street and Avenue C to discuss the movement, drug use and what it will be like when the “end of the world” approaches.

Pinchbeck is tall and thin and slightly wizardly (think Gandalf minus 200,000 years and replace the robe with giant corduroys). He carries a blue-and-green Peruvian-type woven man-bag with a mushroom patch sewn on it. A pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses peek through graying, shoulder-length hair. In the midst of all this calculated flair, I couldn’t help but note his bright purple pants.

Before we begin our discussion, Pinchbeck leans over and glances at my notebook. “I see you already registered my purple pants. That’s good.” He is skeptical of interviews, and has every right to be. The majority of his writing has been subject to less than rave reviews.

Two of Pinchbeck’s three books have 2012 in the title. Pinchbeck’s most recent release, Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age, co-edited with Ken Jordan, is a collection of essays from the Reality Sandwich blog, ranging from titles like “Xenolinguistics I: Aspects of Alien Art,” to the standard “Yoga as Spiritual Activism.” In a mocking, dismissive New York Times review, Dwight Garner wrote, “The essays in Toward 2012… are patchouli-scented and divinely inane; they’ll tempt you to set your yoga mat on fire and permanently avoid certain aisles at all-natural stores like Whole Foods.”

Now that Roland Emmerich’s Hollywood disaster movie, conveniently titled 2012, opens far and wide this week, we can expect even more mindless chatter about the impending doomsday date.

After all the hype that helped sell those 100,000-plus copies, Pinchbeck admits, “Yeah, I mean it could be 2014 or something.” In a recent Reality Sandwich post, Pinchbeck admitted, “I don’t know. I don’t know if anything special will happen on December 21, 2012…” But that doesn’t mean Pinchbeck hasn’t been traveling, along with fellow 2012ologists, to help Sony promote the film. It’ll also help Pinchbeck sell a few more books.

Pinchbeck and his fol lowers preach the need for enlightenment and transformation, sometimes through the use of psychoactive substances, believing that there will soon be a revolutionary shift in consciousness and we all need to be prepared for this potentially cataclysmic event. But the date of this universal transformation is becoming increasingly ambiguous as it draws closer, suggesting that it functions more as an advertisement for Next Age ideals than a pending disaster warranting mass attention.

Events found on Souldish.com, a website for “cultural pioneers” that functions as a Next Age party planning committee, range from yoga sex workshops to high-priced “shamanism” seminars. There seems to be enough people invested in this scene to justify an occasion every night of the week. In addition to the constant array of parties, the Next Agers behind Reality Sandwich, an online forum to explore radical issues from radical points of view, have recently launched an online social networking site called Evolver.

Evolver promises to build “a global network of collaborators, secret agents and public provocateurs working together for innovation, higher consciousness and funky frivolity.” It also promotes “sexy sustainability, yoga glamour and shaman chic.” Evolver commoditizes shamanism by associating it with the very ideas that seem antithetical to it. If shamans are so intimately connected with the Earth, are they really concerned with being fashionable? This late-capitalist, bourgeois interpretation of sacred cultural practices has spawned much of the criticism directed at Next Age, leading many to write its participants off as New Wave phonies.

As Pinchbeck explains, “Facebook and MySpace have attracted hundreds of millions of people, but in a way their intention is not very deep. They are trying to make money and people can, like, poke each other and share stuff, advertise… Our question is how can you create a network that is really shaped and oriented towards getting people to collaborate on the process of social transformation.”

Things lose their idyllic shine, however, when Pinchbeck explains the thought process behind Evolver. “We wanted to take the same energy but give it a more mainstream branding so more people can step into these ideas,” he says. “But, you know, on the other hand, Reality Sandwich is fairly intellectual. But most people, apparently when they do studies, believe in UFOs and extraterrestrials. Most people believe in the validity of psychic phenomena. Our pop culture is full of it, from Harry Potter to the Lord of the Rings to the X-Files. Ya know, all these ideas kind of permeate the mainstream; it’s just that there’s a blockage in terms of actually looking at them seriously, or as data, instead of entertainment.”

Pinchbeck is the heir of a considerable countercultural legacy.The son of beat writer Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s former girlfriend, and little-known abstract painter father Peter Pinchbeck, he spent the bulk of his youth in cavernous lofts and in the presence of Allen Ginsberg. After dropping out of Wesleyan University because of “this combination of being intellectually ahead of the game and emotionally/psychologically behind the game,” Pinchbeck returned to New York and co-founded the Open City literary magazine, frequenting the Manhattan social circuit—and the beds of young girls.

After his friend Robert Bingham died in 1999 due to a heroin overdose, Pinchbeck decided it was time for a change. “I had a spiritual crisis that I talk about in the books, and I went back—I tended to be very skeptical and had grown up with a kind of materialist, scientific world view—so, I sort of went back and thought about my past and remembered my psychedelic experiences in college being interesting, so I decided I would make that the focus of exploration, particularly how they were still used by indigenous cultures with shamanic practices and I started to get assignments. I took ayahuasca and wrote about it for the Village Voice, I went down to West Africa for a magazine, and went to the Amazon for Men’s Journal and took ayahuasca with a tribe in Ecuador.” And so Pinchbeck the guru was born.

A diverse assemblage of New Yorkers have been in the (psychedelic) spotlight since the 2002 release of Pinchbeck’s first novel, Breaking Open the Head:A Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. I admit: I am no stranger to psychedelics or Pinchbeck’s work.The majority of my high school years were spent investigating their effects. After I stumbled across Breaking Open the Head, I was fascinated by Pinchbeck’s ability to cohesively ascribe philosophical resonance to hallucinogenic substances and was especially interested in his exploration of ayahuasca.

Pinchbeck frequently wrote of this powerful hallucinogenic from South America and its enlightening effects on the modern psyche. “Sometimes when people take it the first time, it barely has an effect in terms of the visionary aspect,” Pinchbeck explains. “It’s often purgative, which means that people throw up, which a lot of people resist. I think it feels very healing and grounding and you feel like there’s almost a level of earth intelligence, guiding intelligence communicating through you.”

Pinchbeck was my first introduction to this mucky brown brew, a combination of the B. caapi vine and a plant containing DMT, the psychoactive component of the mixture.According to most accounts, it yields vivid hallucinations when ingested and a sense of harmony with nature.

My three freshman dorm-mates and I became obsessed with Pinchbeck’s ideas, excited to have discovered someone to justify what we had been speculating. We believed that psychedelics changed you for the better. But that was a little more than a year ago, when I was just 18. And I was probably hallucinating way too much.

Pinchbeck has become the pop philosopher for a post- Millennial generation, our very own Timothy Leary (though Pinchbeck refutes Leary’s tactics regarding LSD promotion). Pinchbeck’s most-publicized shtick, however, is the approaching revolutionary shift in consciousness.

The 2012 theory is based on the structure of the Mayan calendar. Here’s a quick primer: The Long Count calendar was created as a culturally based system of time measurement. The future was divided into several cycles, the last of which will end three years from now.The end of the Mayan calendar will mark the conclusion of a 5,125year era and, for the first time in 26,000 years, the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way.

In Pinchbeck’s second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, he reveals how, after multiple days of tripping on ayahuasca, he suspected that he was a prophet transmitting ominous messages about the economy from the Mayan deity Quetzalcoatl. He also recognized that he might have gone mad.

“In the book I was careful not to make a belief out of it and to be open to the possibility that I was completely cracked,” he explains to me. “And I’m still open to that possibility. However, the actual text of that transmission was only amplifying and essentializing all these ideas and things that I was exploring in the book anyway… For instance, there was one line where the spirit talked about how the global capitalist system is about to self-destruct, leaving many people broken. And that was 2003 when I had that experience, so I mean, now that seems to be coming to pass.”

Among those familiar with the Mayan prophecy and Pinchbeck’s theories, some perceive the possible shift in the apocalyptic sense, some as a rebirth for our decaying social structure and some people just laugh it off as another alarmist reason to stockpile toilet paper. “I always say I’m not a fundamentalist about 2012, even though I wrote a book about it,” he says. “But I do feel that there’s no doubt that we’re in this kind of accelerating process of transformation and one way to think about it, potentially, is it might be a shift from a biological or physical stage of our species to a psychic stage of evolution.”

He pauses and looks out the window, straightens his glasses, then continues. “If we keep in this direction, we’re probably not even going to make it ourselves as a species, or we’ll end up getting kind of degraded like a Road Warrioresque gangster kind of scenario. So the alternative to that would be going from competition to collaboration and cooperation as a paradigm and getting out of this kind of trap of the ego. So my hope is that that could happen very quickly as people recognize this as a dead end.”

In the introduction to Toward 2012, Pinchbeck writes: “The severity of the crises may be devastating for modern people who believed their technology had shielded them from brute survival. Some, perhaps many, will not survive.” For a group utilizing technology in hopes of spreading their message, however, it appears hypocritical to condemn those dependent on technology. Most of these enlightened Manhattanites aren’t growing vegetable gardens in their lofts and collecting rainwater from their gutters. They are sitting at computers writing blog posts and constructing an online social network.

While their theories refute our capitalist structure and technologically based society, their tactics of selfpromotion do not.They are essentially using 2012 as a way to focus attention on their ideals and as an advertisement for the Next Age ideology. Using apocalyptic fear to urge people into adhering to what is at its base a set of valid and constructive ideas sounds a lot like a religion.

Jonathan Phillips, described by Pinchbeck as a “radical activist turned Gnostic visionary,” is the community director of Reality Sandwich and the executive editor of Souldish.com. He contributed an essay, “Gnosis:The Not- So-Secret-History of Jesus” to Toward 2012 and also hosts “Electric Jesus” podcasts and workshops discussing energy and the essence of the early Christian mystery schools.

“There are numerous ideas of what this signifies,” Phillips told me over the phone, regarding his 2012 predictions. “I have no expectations for that date, whether it’s 2012, 2013 or 2020. It’s a powerful way of getting people to focus on how we can treat each other differently and consider these new perspectives, helping us view reality in a very different way, not so materialistic and linear.”

After leaving the coffee shop, Pinchbeck and I make our way back to his East Village apartment. Floor-toceiling bookshelves and tribal ornamentation fill what is otherwise a minimal space. His daughter’s crayons were scattered on the hardwood floor (he had just dropped her off Uptown with her mother), and Sun Ra-esque noises sputtered from the speakers. I sit down on the futon as he shows me a dramatic Burning Man photography book for which he’d written the introduction.

“I think the idea that you can get 50,000 people together in the barren area and give them a new set of rules about how to interact and what’s of value and they follow it and they’re actually happier… It remains an extraordinary model,” he says. He flips the page to reveal a stark blackand-white photo of a massive birdhouse constructed from tiny, thin wooden dinosaur model parts.

Just before leaving, I ask Pinchbeck to sum up his ideology in a few sentences. He replies simply: “A kind of pedantism. I believe that we’re having a dream right now, that the universe is a projection of an infinite source of consciousness that’s actually like just enjoying itself and playing through its projections. So we’re like fractal expressions of that universal source of consciousness that’s discovering its own potential and learning about itself. Yeah, so I think that the universe is a kind of art project.”

But his explanation confounded me. Despite the rationale that advertising a pending doomsday will shake people from their egotistical slumber, change is prompted by actually helping the people in need, not by just writing about what will happen if we don’t. Not by theories so unbelievable that people are immediately turned off, and not by escapism through the use of obscure drugs.