Making the Darkness Conscious

Prophetic transmissions and systemic design flaws

I wanted to share, authentically, about my reasons for launching Building Our Regenerative Future, my first online course, with the hope that you will join us for our inaugural launch at the end of this month.

Many of you know my past work and career. For my first book, Breaking Open the Head (2002), I investigated psychedelic shamanism, undergoing initiations in Gabon, the Amazon in Ecuador, Oaxaca in Mexico, and elsewhere. That book helped to change cultural perceptions around psychedelics at a time when they were still taboo in the mainstream culture. 

My second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006), explored the prophecies of indigenous and ancient cultures around the world. These prophecies point toward our time, now, as a threshold of tremendous transformation. 

The traditional media distorted my ideas, calling me a “doomsday prophet.” This was depressing to me, as my focus was entirely opposite: I promoted our chance for transformation. Sadly, many people fixated on the exact date. This was never my interest. 

Today, I remain convinced we are undergoing the transformation that was foreseen and prophesied by many cultures — cultures who preserved the visionary, intuitive, and psychic capacities which modern civilization forfeited. 

While finishing 2012, I felt it wasn’t enough just to write philosophically about the crisis. I wanted to help bring about the positive change — not just conceptually, but tangibly and materially. 

This led me to start a company, Evolver, and a nonprofit, The Evolver Network. With The Evolver Network, we created a template for local community groups to self-organize around what we defined as the elements of the new paradigm. This included permaculture, shamanism, visionary experience, local currencies, bioremediation, renewable energy, new approaches to health, relationships, and so on. 

At its peak in 2011, we had perhaps sixty active local groups, but we couldn’t find a sustainable financial model. I now realize that something was missing at the foundation of that initiative. So I went back to the beginning of my own journey, to see if perhaps something was missing in my own foundation.

And I came to an important realization, which I will share with you now:

Back in 2003, while in the Amazon in Brazil, drinking ayahuasca with the Santo Daime religion, I had a dramatic experience where I directly received a prophetic transmission that seemed to come from a kind of super-intelligence beyond my own consciousness. 

This transmission was simultaneously humbling — almost humiliating — and ego-inflating. It fueled my sense of mission and drove me a bit crazy. I felt I was meant to sacrifice myself, become a kind of messianic martyr. 

So I poured myself into my efforts to build a company and organization, abandoning my writing career. I believed it was necessary to build a global movement. 

But I pushed too hard. I burnt myself out. As a result, my unintegrated shadow material erupted in my personal life and intimate relationships. 

It took me years to see my unconscious blind spots, to realize I had never recovered from early childhood trauma. I was continuing hurtful patterns, sometimes acting with women in ways I now regret. Someday — hopefully soon — I intend to write about this dark passage in more depth. 

I believe I have gained painfully hard-won knowledge — a more comprehensive understanding of the human condition — through this reckoning, and I’m composting this hard-won knowledge and pouring it into this online course.

There is a tendency in the consciousness or spiritual community to focus on peace and presence, love and light. But our world is moving in a different direction right now. As much as we try, we cannot escape or evade it. 

Carl Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” 

The only way to make the “darkness conscious” is by first recognizing it and confronting it within ourselves. 

This is a difficult, sometimes agonizing process that requires humility, ongoing learning, taking responsibility for one’s mistakes, and surrendering.

Humanity has unleashed tremendous forces of destruction that threaten to cause our extinction along with many if not most other species on our planet. 

Where previous epochs of mass extinction happened through asteroids, right now we are like the meteorite bombarding our own home. 

We have to find a way to reckon with the forces we have unleashed. These forces include neo-Fascism, technological control, racist hatred, biological and nuclear weapons, hyper-consumerism, repression of the feminine, and heedless ecological ruin. They reflect the destructive forces within each of us — since, as Goethe wrote, “the phenomenon is not detached from the observer, but intertwined and involved with him.”

In 2017, I published my third book, How Soon Is Now?, which gave an overview of the ecological crisis and proposed a systemic design solution. 

I thought this book would be a huge hit. I was certain that everyone knew we needed a radical overhaul — a new operating system to relaunch our civilization — but nobody had defined it yet. 

But somehow, while some readers loved it, the book didn’t connect with a large audience as I had hoped. My ideas were too big and abstract. They didn’t illuminate most people’s immediate, lived experience in a way they found useful. 

In retrospect, I now think the problems with How Soon Is Now? went deeper than that. It didn’t fully connect because it reflected the tentative place I had reached in my own life journey — my own initiatory process. 

I was trying to envision a systemic alternative and create it through companies and nonprofits. But I hadn’t healed myself from my own traumatic past. While I understood the validity of shamanism, I hadn’t taken care to protect myself from various kinds of psychic attacks. 

So with both Evolver and How Soon is Now? I made a quixotic dash to the front lines, before I had addressed the “systems design” flaws in my own soul and spirit.

I realize now, in order to make a real impact, we need to simultaneously implement a systems design in our own thinking, our own heart, as well as out there in the world.

As above, so below. As within us, so outside of us.

So now, I am creating a course to address both of these urgent needs: The urgent need to create a systems overhaul in ourselves, and in our world — our social and physical environment — both at the same time.

But surely you can understand (and forgive) my urgency. Surely you can understand why I rushed out into the fray, determined to alter the trajectory.

At this point, we possess brutally overwhelming evidence that our industrial and commercial activities threaten the continuity of almost all life on Earth. I still struggle with a crushing sense of urgency. 

Until the interruption caused by Covid-19, we have lived as if this system could go on forever. In fact, it is very likely that we only have a few more years left before it collapses on us. 

If we can agree that this is our situation, then the question is: 

What is the best thing we can do in the time we have available to us?

The lockdown and shortages caused by Covid-19 as well as the surging Black Lives Matter protest movement give us the first presentiments of what is coming. 

I admit I feel unprepared. New York City is my home. I have never grown my own food. I am an urban bohemian. I feel most comfortable when writing in cafes in the middle of a dense city. 

We are entering a time of rapid transformation. 

Survival may depend on us becoming more self-sufficient and interdependent in new ways. 

We can embrace this as a great adventure rather than a hardship. 

But we need a program of education to guide us through this adventure in a way that empowers us, connects us, and gives us the point of contact with actual implementation.

That is the mission of “Building Our Regenerative Future”.

Increasing numbers of people are feeling this as their calling, which is great. 

One thing we will explore in the course: 

The practical steps to starting and designing such a community, for those who want to move in this direction.

We certainly need many more practical examples of functional alternatives, at various scales. 

At the same time, in the course we are going to focus on how to develop, design, and rapidly implement exponentially scaleable regenerative solutions for the world’s population. 

Just as we saw with the pandemic, things that are literally impossible to conceive of, let alone execute, suddenly become do-able during an emergency. 

The good news is that, as the inevitable crisis deepens, there will be many potential careers opening up in the regenerative industries of the future. 

Capital will inevitably move in this direction, whether or not it is mandated by governments, because it will be a matter of life or death. 

So we will explore the new economic opportunities on the horizon in a variety of fields, ranging from psychedelic psychotherapy to sustainable architecture to renewable energy systems.

In Breaking Open the Head, I proposed that modern humanity has been on a voyage of initiation since the 1960s. 

Over the last decades, many millions of people have broken open their heads and hearts through ayahuasca, vipassana, yoga, and so on. 

Now we need to move into the next phase of the initiation process, which leads us from separation to reconnection — with the natural systems of the Earth and one another. 

I am composting all my experience since the publication of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl in order to provide meaningful and practical guidance for you, in your own life, on how to use your precious time and energy for your own benefit and as part of this collective voyage toward realization and communion. 

So have a look at the course right here, or go here to sign up for it now.