(I gave a talk last weekend at Caravan of Dreams in NYC. The recording of that talk is attached, but I also rewrote it and expanded on my thoughts to create what I hope is a much better version, below).
I was asked what I wanted to talk about today. Of course, my thoughts jumped to the political, social, ecological, spiritual, philosophical metacrisis that pervades everything at this time.
To provide a bit of background, I have written a number of books. My first book was Breaking Open the Head (2002), on psychedelic shamanism. When I started that book, I was a scientific materialist and a skeptic, but in the depths of an existential crisis. As I researched, I underwent a number of transformational, psychic, and even supernatural experiences. These ultimately broke open my fairly hard and stubborn head. That book charted my eventual shift to a Jungian, animist, and shamanic perspective.
Today, when I seek to define my ontology, I call myself an analytic idealist. This is the philosophical thesis that consciousness is our foundational, baseline reality, instead of anything material or physical. Just as Tibetan Buddhists speak about “the nature of mind” and the ultimately dreamlike nature of reality, idealists understand everything as arising out of the primordial ground or field of pure, instinctive consciousness. As Bernardo Kastrup has noted, we are differentiated “alters” of that underlying, immanent field of consciousness, outside of time and space.
For my second book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006), I studied ancient and indigenous prophecy: The Hopi prophecies, the Mayan and Aztec prophecies, and examined those in relationship to Judeo-Christian ideas of the apocalypse—a word that means “revealing”, “uncovering”, or “unveiling”, a time when all the hidden things become known. I believe we are in that apocalyptic threshold, that archetype, right now.
In 2012, I focused on the Mayan calendar. I was fascinated by the ideas of Jose Argüelles and Terence McKenna, related to the Mayan calendar or Tzolkin. McKenna talked about what he called “Time Wave Zero,” and the “Singularity” or the “Eschaton.” He had an extremely powerful experience in the 1970s in the Amazon. Over the course of a week, he believed the psilocybin intelligence or “entelechy” downloaded massive amounts of information into him.
The mushroom’s alien sentience (he believed it was an extraterrestrial) predicted an upcoming metamorphosis – a transformation in the nature of time, consciousness, and human civilization. This was destined to happen in the near future. A bit later, McKenna discovered the Mayan calendar. He found that what he had seen in his visions—beamed from the hyper-dimensional mind of the mushroom—indicated this threshold would be in 2012, the ending of the Maya’s 5,125 year “Long Count.”
Jose Argüelles had similar visionary experiences. As an art historian, he wrote The Transformative Vision about art and consciousness in 1975. After LSD revelations, he also beamed into the 2012 archetype, focusing on the Mayan calendar and the Tzolkin, their 13×20 “sacred matrix.” Argüelles passed away in 2011. I edited and published his last book, Manifesto for the Noosphere.
Argüelles optimistically believed we were on a trajectory to activate the “Noosphere,” the collective psychic field of the Earth, and graduate as a “post-technological” species. We would remove a lot of our technology to rebuild as a garden planet where smaller communities practiced telepathy. McKenna envisioned a “Singularity,” melding technology and consciousness into some ultimate tool. He also thought we might prefer to live as hunter-gatherers with neural implants.
Many people felt that “nothing happened” as we passed the 2012 threshold. I believe it has happened and it is still happening: we are meshed in these prophetic cycles and we are crossing over, reaching the other side of something still very difficult to define or name. Reality is undergoing a progressive transformation. The world feels very different than it did thirty years ago, with a destabilizing pace of social change, technological innovation, and ecological destruction. Time feels different. I admit this transformation does not feel as glorious or epiphanic as I once hoped it would be.
From a shamanic perspective, we find ourselves in a liminal zone. I tend to think of it as a collective initiation for the human psyche. In indigenous societies, initiation involves integrating the visionary or transpersonal experience to overcome the grip of the ego-centric perspective and attain maturity as a member of the community. We find ourselves in-between worlds.
What is happening here, now, in the United States—this massive projection of our civilization’s shadow through the Trump regime—clearly plays a role in this prophetic unfolding. It feels like there is nowhere left to hide. There is no dodge, diversion, or distraction that can keep us from seeing and feeling the destructive forces we have unconsciously unleashed.
Let’s reflect on this idea of the apocalypse as a revealing or unveiling. In 2012, I looked at this idea from a Jungian perspective. Carl Jung’s student Edward Edinger wrote The Archetype of the Apocalypse. Jungians understand the Apocalypse as, ultimately, a psychic event, and a positive one.
The Apocalypse represents the eruption of the Shadow and the integration and assimilation of all the suppressed contents of the psyche, the darkest parts, the taboo material, which needs to come out so we can integrate all of it, integrating the conscious and unconscious mind. Edinger called it: “The coming of the Self into conscious realization.”
What we are seeing with the Epstein files feels, to me, like an inevitable part of this apocalyptic unveiling. We are now well aware of the corruption and the malevolence—the psychopathic disregard for conscience, culture, and humanity – that our ruling elite has for the world and for the vast majority of human beings. Those who work amorally to amass vast hoards of wealth while so many are suffering and the Earth itself is under threat represent a certain psychological type. Psychopaths triumph in hierarchical systems like corporations and government where conscience and empathy costs you. There are “concentric circles” of psychopathology that ripple out from the top levels of wealth and power, deforming all of our society and our culture. That was always the case, but now the mechanisms are laid almost mathematically bare.
It is almost as if part of the ritual for the Epstein class is to unveil their darkest secrets at a time when they believe they have attained unassailable power, possessing the military force, the nuclear weapons, the drones, the thermobaric bombs, the sound weapons, and, of course, the total surveillance system so they can watch everybody. Also, they have gained power over so much of the media that they can manipulate the beliefs and the nervous systems of their many millions of mind-controlled followers, like playing an instrument. They can let us know what they have been doing because they believe we do not have capacity to do anything about it anymore.
We are at a threshold for humanity—it does seem, unfortunately, we’re currently failing what Buckminster Fuller called our “final exam” as a species. Yet there are other forces at play. For my book on prophecy, I studied the crop circles in England and aspects of the extraterrestrial and UFO phenomenon, which I am currently revisiting for a series of video essays.
What is happening now, as terrible as it is, feels like it was inevitable. We are undergoing a transmutation, an initiatory process where, as a species, we are crossing through the Abyss. Hopefully, eventually, we come out the other side, into healthy maturity. What the timeframe for that is, whether things get incredibly horrible here over the next ten, twenty, or fifty years, or whether there is a change in direction sooner than that, I don’t know. Quite honestly, I haven’t been pursuing speaking opportunities as much as I used to because I don’t feel I have a wildly optimistic or easily relatable message at this point.
One book that came out many years after my 2012 book, which stayed with me, was Christopher Bache’s LSD and the Mind of the Universe. An academic, Bache underwent perhaps the most high-dose LSD sessions of anyone I have ever heard of, with his wife acting as his guide. Over a series of sessions, what came through for him was a coherent vision of the near future. He saw things getting much worse at first, with profound ecological and social breakdown. But in this process, he saw new authentic communities springing up, gaining force, and developing into a mycelial meshwork of connection that would form the basis of a new planetary culture as the old system collapsed. The new planetary culture would be much more authentic, truthful, and transparent. This resonates with me as plausible.
It seems this domination, exploitation, Wetiko Empire complex has to reach its full manifestation and final expression before it consumes itself, hopefully allowing humanity to go on a different journey beyond that threshold. The other option is human extinction, which seems not just possible but probable at this point, as we pile up existential threats.
Although I have done a lot of reading and reflection, I am not clear, right now, on what a great message for the world is. In 2003, I visited the Hopi in Arizona, who gave me dire warnings about how they saw the near future of the United States. The Hopi are thought to be among the oldest continuously settled peoples in North America. The Hopi elder told me there would be concentration camps and “death camps,” where many millions of people would be killed. That felt farfetched at the time, but not that implausible. Now, it seems imminent.
When I see ICE being given seventy-five billion dollars to build detention centers and warehouses, and when I read about the possible use of thermobaric and high-temperature weapons in Gaza that can vaporize people, basically leaving no trace of them, it feels like we are entering a new stage of technological civilization where the psychopathic power elite has decided that human life outside their immediate interest is basically worthless. I believe this is very much correlated with the intensification of the ecological crisis.
The Right Wing constantly says they do not believe in global warming, but their corporations and intelligence services have all the research. They know resources will become very scarce very soon, and that disruptive climate change is arriving much faster than anticipated. This is why the US intends to take over Greenland and may invade Canada: They know people will be pushing from the global south as warming reaches critical levels and parts of the U.S. become uninhabitable. The North also has tremendous natural resources such as fresh water. Current projections say many regions will reach 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures by 2060, which will be devastating for the Global South.
My third book, How Soon Is Now, was a sincere effort—ten years in the making—to envision a framework for a new planetary culture that directly confronted the planetary emergency. I proposed how we could redesign our technical and social systems to allow everybody to survive and thrive decently as we shifted to regenerative practices and ecological stewardship while gently, humanely, reducing the global population over time. Unfortunately, we now have a federal government in the U.S. run by an international crime syndicate who are not only extremely dangerous but also pathetically short-sighted. It seems like their response to deepening crisis will be to amass power for themselves while huge populations suffer and die.
AI experts and CEOs believe that, within a year to eighteen months, every form of white-collar work—administration, programming, customer service, and knowledge work—is going to be assimilated by AI. Power and wealth will concentrate even further as a result. This is almost hard to believe, as we are already at the point where three individuals possess more wealth than half the US population.
Yet, in this disruptive transition, there are opportunities for liberation. If all the people who spent hundreds of thousands on advanced degrees, anticipating stable careers, are suddenly cut loose by the technofeudal system, that represents a massive reserve of intelligent and well-resourced people who could undergo a political awakening to oppose what is happening. If the middle class in the U.S. realize their interests align with the working class—as well as the landless peasant movements in the Global South, and other movements of solidarity around the world—then this threshold of disruptive change becomes an opportunity. It could lead to fascism, or it could lead to socialism, or some new redistributive and regenerative paradigm we can’t even imagine, as of now.
As someone who has studied shamanism, animism, and magic—who has direct experience of the psychic and paranormal—I recognize that things can seem very dark and dire just before some magical eruption or unanticipated transformation occurs. Over the last half century, we were not able to resolve the contradictions of liberalism and our post-industrial society in a reasonable way. Secular materialism led to cynicism and nihilism, feeding the general sense of dystopian despair.
Everybody in our ruling elite that we counted on has failed us. Now we see this entire political and economic apparatus laid bare and orchestrated against the common good. We must fully integrate where we are now, reflect on it, and figure out how we use our individual and collective gifts to navigate a way out of it.
In practical terms, people often ask what our ongoing responses should look like. Once again, I wish I had better answers. I believe that we should seek to form stronger local communities, but, at the same time, I remain a bit of a loner and outsider. I can’t say I am modeling this, at this point. I would love to be part of some movement to establish new authentic, grassroots media and social networks (as I tried to build years ago). But at the moment, it is just an idea.
Of course, we need the Democrats, as flawed and pathetic as they are, to retake Congress next year, if we want to avert a deeper level of catastrophe. My sense is that the Trump regime and the Republican party, which is now an overtly fascist and Christian White Nationalist party, have no intention of giving up or sharing power. As James Speyer wrote in The Daily News:
It is time to acknowledge what has become tragically obvious: the Trump administration is essentially acting as a massive criminal enterprise. It lies, steals, extorts and murders—all while cloaked in the awesome authority of the state. It is on a crime spree that puts Al Capone to shame…
Viewing the Trump administration as a massive crime syndicate allows us to be clear-eyed about what is coming down the road, and to plan accordingly. To take the most urgent example, there ought to be no question as to whether Trump will try to steal the midterm elections. Of course he will try to steal them. Criminals gonna crime.
Trump tried to steal the 2020 elections, and the lack of any consequences for that supremely traitorous act only further emboldened him. It is every patriotic American’s duty to oppose the coming effort to nullify the will of the voters.
If the authoritarian forces remain fully in control, I believe we will see the realization of the dire Hopi vision.
Millions of people, mainly men, were consumed by a cultural backlash around gender and traditional sex roles. The rise of Nick Fuentes’ Incels and the triumph of the Right is largely a reaction to women (and minorities) gaining increasing power and leverage in society. Women now attain close to 60% of college degrees in the U.S., thriving in entrepreneurial and corporate careers, while men have tended to backslide. The toxic Internet culture steered millions of disaffected and underachieving men toward reactionary politics, nationalism, and Far Right militias. I believe we need a radical approach to address the crisis around gender and sexuality; perhaps something like a “truth and reconciliation” process between the genders.
While AI has the potential to unleash tremendously destructive impacts, AI could also be used to rebuild our digital infrastructure in a way that works better for people. We could build networks where individuals actually control their own data, and where every piece of media could be tracked back to its human creator. We must recognize that our would-be autocrats are following a familiar playbook, one that has been used in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and many other countries. We need to keep raising awareness of the historical parallels, as many people in the U.S. lack sufficient context.
At this point, the lack of a collective spirit of resistance in the US is glaring. There are many reasons for this. The country is geographically spread out, lacking a single central hub—like Paris where government, business and media can be halted in one fell swoop. We also have a hyper-militarized culture, and an American mythology of “regeneration through violence.” I also connect the complacency of the American multitudes to cultural factors such as poor diet, dystopian and brain-melting media, and psychopharmacology that have made our people cynical, hopeless, and apathetic. Secular materialism is also a massive problem as it leads to cynicism and nihilism. If you believe that death brings absolute annihilation, you are less likely to risk your life for any cause and more likely to submit to techno-feudal authority.
Movements led by figures like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. possessed a metaphysical or spiritual force that inspired courage and hope for a better world. Lacking that, our educated upper-middle class seems willing to surrender their freedoms to preserve some facsimile of normality. They fail to realize that the Christian Nationalists do not just want a little control; they want it all. As the Heritage Foundation has made clear, the regime intends to roll back the rights of women to the Middle Ages, while dismantling democratic institutions entirely, along with anything that threatens them, such as institutions that engage in scientific research or preserve historical and cultural knowledge.
What makes this struggle incredibly dangerous is the technological power and surveillance capacity now available. The technofeudal regime possesses the capacity to micromanage and manipulate what many people believe and think to an unprecedented degree. Algorithms reinforce radical ideologies, slowly altering the entire imagination of the populace. With AI, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern real from fake. This deliberate darkening of the mood is a known tactic of psychological warfare; a steady diet of dystopian media and conspiracy leaves people feeling detached, dissociated, and disempowered.
I am also very concerned about the cognitive capacity of young people overwhelmed by the onslaught of social technologies. The hippocampus is essential for spatial navigation and memory. When young people outsource aspects of their innate cognitive capacity to digital tools, they fail to develop these physiological areas. They may have permanent handicaps.
I find that many people in their twenties, who had smartphones as kids, entirely lack spatial navigation abilities. Now, with LLMs, people are also outsourcing their ability to reason. If a generation becomes too cognitively impaired to understand what is at stake and to respond properly, they will be easily divided and controlled. Divisiveness is the basis of the authoritarian playbook. As the Epstein files reveal, the Trumpestein class projects a false dichotomy of left versus right to keep the populace fractured.
In the face of all of this, we must consider the role of the metaphysical. The uncanny, almost supernatural way the historical tumblers have clicked together for this authoritarian movement feels akin to dark magic. We are learning about ritualized taboo-breaking and sacrificial practices that may go back to ancient Babylon, operating, whether consciously or not, at the highest levels of power. But the counter-force must also be considered.
As someone who believes consciousness is foundational, I agree with Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas around morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance. Indigenous cultures developed magical and shamanic techniques through reciprocity with their local ecology, deepened over many generations. In the Postmodern West, we, also, possess morphogenetic fields. These can be influenced, reshaped, by ceremonial practices, decentralized networks for mutual aid and participatory decision-making, and the integration of analytic idealism, animism, Hermetic philosophy, Jungian archetypes, and so on.
Ultimately, I believe everything is magic, made of morphogenetic fields co-creating the world we experience. From a Dzogchen tantric perspective, samsara is nirvana. At a deeper level, we are That—that consciousness which has woven this all together. We are exactly where we need to be at this exact moment, participating in this vast collective dream.
This recognition is not disempowering or apolitical. It grants us the freedom to explore the deeper, darker elements of our reality without losing equanimity. We happened to awaken into these bodies, on this strange, swiftly tilting planet. Whatever happens next will also be a magical manifestation. Let’s humbly support magic that is rooted in vitality, connection, and truth, while we apply our unique gifts to awakening from the nightmare of history, into the great dream of reality.
