I am a New York-based writer, considered a "thought leader" in some circles for my past books, Breaking Open the Head, on psychedelic shamanism, and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, on prophecies of indigenous cultures like the Maya and Hopi. I am excited about the potential of Steemit and hope to be able to contribute actively to this community.
Now I have a new book coming out: How Soon Is Now? (www.howsoonisnow.info). This book is the product of a decade of thought, research, and reflection. Of course, I may be biased, but I believe it is an important contribution to our historical moment - this perilous precipice upon which we are collectively teetering. For me, personally, the book completes a trilogy that absorbed twenty years of my life. I hope it helps to inspire planetary awakening and the social evolution we need now.
My background and career followed a unique trajectory that led me to this point. My first book, Breaking Open the Head, was the product of a spiritual crisis - an existential emergency in my late twenties - that sent me on a desperate quest for meaning or gnosis. I grew up in New York City as a scientific materialist - the closest thing to a “religion” for me was modern art and literature. Both my parents were artists: My father was an abstract painter and my mother was a novelist and memoirist. They had abandoned the religious beliefs of their ancestors, which seemed absurd to us.
In my twenties, I worked in glossy celebrity and art magazines as a journalist and editor. I wrote some freelance articles related to global ecological problems (I wrote a feature for Esquire Magazine on the decline of the sperm count, finding it was linked to pesticides and plastics which were degrading our endocrine system). I learned we were rapidly accelerating toward destruction. I also realized people couldn’t focus on this subject. When I tried to understand why, I realized it was linked to the culture’s underlying belief system of scientific materialism or nihilism. Many people believed there was no possible existence of a “soul” or “spirit” or any form of consciousness after death. Therefore, life was meaningless - the best and only thing you could do was "Get it while you can." People didn’t discuss this much - but this sense of emptiness caused by the materialist worldview was hanging over our world like a grey cloud.
In my depression, I recalled a handful of psychedelic trips with mushrooms and LSD from college (I went to Wesleyan in Connecticut but dropped out after 2 years) as incredibly powerful subjective experiences. They seemed to suggest there was “something else” - some other dimensions of consciousness or of being that we didn’t understand as of yet. I was surprised these substances were so universally reviled and culturally repressed. I decided to go on a quest to understand the deeper meaning of the psychedelic experience, following in the footsteps of writers like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsberg.
That first book led me to Gabon in West Africa, where I went through a Bwiti initiation eating Iboga, a psychedelic root back that lasts for 25 hours. Iboga is now becoming well-known as an anti-addiction treatment. My spirit started to awaken during this initiation (I can explain what I mean by that if anyone wants to know!). In the Ecuadorean Amazon, I sat in ceremony with the Secoya, a tribe that had preserved a beautiful, ancient tradition with ayahuasca. I also visited the Mazatec Indians in Oaxaca, where mushrooms were rediscovered by the modern world in the 1950s. I made the pilgrimage to the Burning Man festival in Nevada, which seemed the epicenter of a postmodern psychedelic counterculture, and wrote about LSD, MDMA, and other chemical substances.
Along the way, I had a series of powerful psychic experiences, telepathic and synchronistic encounters, that ultimately convinced me we had not yet scratched the surface of what consciousness was or what our ultimate potential as a species might be. I discovered that the shamanic worldview possessed by indigenous people across the world was based on legitimate phenomena. We had suppressed knowledge of the visionary realms - intuition and magic - and paranormal experience that traditional cultures saw as invaluable.
When I fully understood that the indigenous shamanic cultures possessed very crucial knowledge that our modern industrial civilization had lost or forfeited, I realized I had to write a second book exploring the prophetic understanding of people like the Hopi in Arizona and the classical Mayan civilization of the Yucatan. While writing Breaking Open the Head, I discovered Terence McKenna and Jose Arguelles, two visionary thinkers inspired by their psychedelic journeys. They believed humanity was approaching a phase-transition, which they described using concepts like the Eschaton or the Noosphere. They believed this process was linked to the Mayan Long Count calendar, which ended a 5,125 year cycle in December, 2012.
My second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006), tells the story of my long, labyrinthine quest to understand the nature of prophecy. I never proposed that the end of 2012 would be either a sudden Rapture or a collective cataclysm. As also expressed in a documentary film made on my work, 2012: Time for Change, I saw the Mayan end-date as an invitation and an opportunity for humanity to wake up and change our direction. I believed the prophecies were linked to the rapid evolution of mechanical civilization, post-industrial Capitalism, which was unifying the world as one global market and bringing the world’s esoteric knowledge systems together - even as we degraded our natural environment, threatening our continuity.
While researching 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, I had profound visionary experiences that transformed my sense of my own being as well as my understand of the very nature of reality. While in the Amazon in Brazil, in ceremony with the Santo Daime, a religion that uses ayahuasca as its sacrament, I experienced a voice speaking in my head that announced itself to be Quetzalcoatl - the feathered serpent, a Creator Deity of MesoAmerican cultures like the Maya and Aztecs. This voice seemed to be a level or frequency of consciousness outside of my own. I was told that I was a vehicle for its message - that we were in the time of Revelation, Apocalypse, and a transition from one space-time “dimension” to the next one.
In my book, I was careful not to accept this powerful visionary experience on face value,. However the subjective experience was overwhelmingly convincing. From it, I gained the sense that our reality is actually orchestrated from a higher dimensional realm. Free will is a paradox: It exists in a sense, but in another sense, events unfold according to a pre-set plan or script, as many indigenous cultures, such as the Hopi, believe. The new science fiction film Arrival offers a beautiful, humane perspective on this atemporal viewpoint.
2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl was a densely philosophical tome that explored thinkers like Heidegger, Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and Jean Gebser, as I also chronicled my personal journey seeking the esoteric meaning of prophecy - which included a study of the crop circles that appear every summer in Wiltshire, alien abductions, psychic phenomena, the mathematical structure of the Mayan Calendar, and my visit to the Santo Daime in Brazil. After finishing it, I felt I had defined a new understanding of the nature of time and consciousness that encompassed psychic experiences, inter-dimensional beings, astral realms, and so on. However I realized there was another task that needed to be accomplished - in some sense, even a more difficult one.
Many people who resonate with New Age, Eastern or Amazonian mysticism, or believe we are entering the Aquarian Age, tend to think that this will just happen because of the good intention of our spiritual thoughts or because we have raised our “frequency.” Much contemporary spiritual and mystical thought is characterized by a jarring “spiritual bypass” which ignores the severe political and economic reality that confronts us. If we actually want to bring a world into being that fits our highest ideals and intuition about what we - our human family as a whole - could become if we liberate ourselves, we have to take this project on as our mission and our initiation. We have to recognize it as a political act that requires willpower and focus.
With How Soon Is Now?, I set out to define the new “operating system” for human society we must launch to overcome the suicidal direction of our current civilization. There are three main areas we need to consider: The first is the technical infrastructure - areas like energy, industry, and agriculture. The second is our political and economic system. And the last is consciousness itself - our consciousness is shaped by beliefs, values, ideologies, by our education and the media we consume. The book explores all three areas and seeks to offer, as Russell Brand writes in his introduction, “a blueprint for the future.”
I propose that those of us who have the privilege to contemplate and understand our world systemically now have a great opportunity: We can take on the ecological and geopolitical emergency confronting us as an initiation, a spiritual mission, and an adventure. In fact, it is apparent we don’t have any choice. From a metaphysical perspective, I tend to believe many of us chose to incarnate onto Earth at this time to bring about the transmutation of what seems to be a very dire situation. We do this by learning how to work together, applying our our creativity, cunning, as well as our psychic and magical abilities to the task at hand. To do this properly, we need a strategic and tactical action plan: That is what I have put together with my new book, though some may quibble over the details.
One area that I think is crucial for the potential for an evolution of consciousness and society is media, the Internet, and the future trajectory of the Internet. I am truly fascinated by Blockchain as it seems it could provide the basis for a transparent political and financial system. I will write more thoughts on this at another time.