The Seeker Academy Bookblog

Just before a bookstore reading I attended by Daniel Pinchbeck, author and the founder of the online magazine Reality Sandwich, Pinchbeck had fought (during a radio interview) with Whitley Streiber. Pinchbeck’s current book is “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”; Streiber, who writes best-selling horror novels and who claims to have been abducted by aliens, has written “2012: The War for Souls.” I’d not heard of 2012 or Streiber; I’d found Pinchbeck via his magazine (its coda: “Evolving Consciousness, Bite by Bite”), whose themes include Psyche, Eco, Tech, Commons and Art. The reading packed the bookstore, with people and with hardware made by Apple Computer and RIM. I recognized an actor, whose name I didn’t know.

It was the kind of crowd where everyone despised the current government, for the best of reasons. The world is a mess and Dubya is at best the King of Fools.

2012 refers to the year prophesied for an apocalypse by the old Mayan priesthood. In the fight, Streiber says that the prophecy must lead to mass human “die-offs.” Pinchbeck says that we can let this insight of the spirit world provoke us into saving the world.

Pinchbeck cross-posted a piece about the fight to his Amazon Blog and to Reality Sandwich. The latter has received well over a hundred comments and the back and forth has sometimes gotten nasty. Psyche, eco, tech, commons, art–the subject touches everything. There is a consensus belief that the prophecy (perhaps because others has made it) will come true. A faction sees, on Dec. 21st, 2012, a sudden end, the other faction sees a sudden change.

Writing to Daniel, I pick at this consensus:

I base this criticism on two points of agreement I have with you. One is your call for a sustainable society, another is your belief (as I sense it) that the Western liberal world view must be re-spiritualized. And I criticize not your argument with Strieber about evil spirits (it doesn’t interest me), but two of your underlying assumptions.

1. “We in the West are obsessed with free will - with individuality… free will on an individual egoic level is not possible”
2. “…we are now learning that consciousness and intention have actual effects on physical reality”

Individuality is a Western tradition that sprouted nervously in Greek and Hebrew societies, flamed out amid Greco-Roman cynicism, and then after 1000 years reappeared (in a beautiful, integrated way, to the people witnessing it) in Dante and Giotto, etc. It is a tradition, and only secondarily an obsession; and it is to be approached with wonder and caution–not dismissed as impossible using pseudo terminologies that date to the last century, a period of high confusion we obviously remain in now.

Claiming knowledge that mind effects matter directly, instead of through human activities, may or may not misuse or even misunderstand the quantum model in physics. It does, though, unleash a wide platform for fantasy. To say that negative thinking can breed negative outcomes and so be harmful in itself is to forge a chain of fantasy. It argues ultimately for a kind of mandated happy talk that Orwell illustrated in 1984. It argues against the kind of “Jeremiad” or harsh criticism and warning that began with the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah and extends in the romantic reaction to William Blake, Dostoevsky and Orwell himself. See what will happen (these Jeremiads say) if we keep BEHAVING this way. Here’s some negativity:

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

Here is Pinchbeck’s post on his Amazon blog; here is the extended discussion (including other comments I make, and some reactions) on Reality Sandwich.