Reckoning and Rapture

We all need somebody to take care of us, and sometimes it’s everybody.

I'm delighted to announce the release of The World You See Is the Myth You Are In as an actual paperback: A physical thing that exists in the world. You can also pick up a Kindle version here, or an EPUB here.

The book offers a thematically organized selection from my last years of Substack essays on our rapidly shifting current reality. I explore ideas and thinkers from a wide range of perspectives, looking at approaches to the meta-crisis or polycrisis drastically looming over our world.

My friend, the musician Adam Green, wrote a fantastic forward for the book, which I have added here. I hope it inspires you to buy a copy, plus one for a friend — or perhaps 150 for your entire community according to the Dunbar Number.

Forward to The World You See Is the Myth You Are In, by Adam Green

I first met Daniel Pinchbeck in late 2011, The Occupy Wall Street movement had just camped out in Zuccotti Park, and a societal revolution felt palpable.   

Pinchbeck was already famous in my circle — He’d been profiled in Rolling Stone Magazine, hailed as the new Timothy Leary for introducing the next generation to ayahuasca shamanism, iboga, and other plant medicine in his first book Breaking Open The Head.  His second book Quetzalcoatl Returns started the 2012 zeitgeist, and the idea had so permeated pop-culture that Pinchbeck had been caricatured by Woody Harrelson in a blockbuster 2012 disaster film by Roland Emmerich. 

“Though not much is made of the Mayan angle, the most amusing character, a doomsday prophet and radio broadcaster played by Woody Harrelson, seems in hair, beard and interests to have been drawn along the predictive lines of the real author Daniel Pinchbeck...” - NY Times review, 2012

At our first meeting he told me about such a dizzying tornado of concepts I felt compelled to take notes — A book called Sacred Economics that his publishing company Evolver had just published, outlining a vision for an economy based on gift rather than money. A proposal for splitting off into small tribal communities of 150 people, 150 being The Dunbar Number of the maximum close relationships people can hold in their minds at one time. The concept of reverse interest to prevent hoarding wealth.  The Noosphere, a new state of human planetary consciousness, connectivity, and innovation, that’s enveloping us.  

I remember he told me that humans are a myth-based species. I wondered if that means that we humans will make all of our collective myths come true eventually.  I was writing the script to my movie ‘Adam Green’s Aladdin’ at the time, and I began to incorporate Pinchbeck’s ideas from our conversations into my film.  

When 2013 arrived without the fire and brimstone, some people had their laugh about the 2012 doomsday craze. But Pinchbeck’s predictions were correct in certain ways — right around that time all our phones began automatically sending our data into the cloud, not entirely unlike the Noosphere. Increasingly, humans became possessed with the ghost of technology and the world around us began to resemble a giant video game. Likewise, the jilted spirit of humankind seemed to be like a retching pupa trying to throw itself up into something strange and new. As globalization thrived while the ecosystem crashed, the current resistance movement emerged.

With his next book How Soon is Now, he went into solutions mode. I saw Daniel travel the world trying to gather as many solutions to the planetary crisis as he could find, like a man desperate to find the cure for a sick universe, seeing if he can galvanize a group of people to band together to enact meaningful change outside of the system. 

In his new collection of essays, The World You See Is The Myth You Are In, Daniel finds in the medium of Substack a way to respond instantly to the most important planetary emergencies, technological concerns, and cultural shifts. Each chapter masterfully combines years of cutting edge research and concept collecting, helping us to cultivate innovations within our souls.  He imagines a sort of ancient future, where recovered mystery knowledge collectively guides us towards harmony. When I interact with Daniel’s writing, I feel the urgency of his message — We’ve lost our way inside a system based on profit extraction, creating a circumstance we don’t know how to get ourselves out of. How strange it is for us to come into global consciousness while realizing we are passengers on a treadmill that appears to be running off a cliff.

Since the 90’s, Tech Companies have been selling us on thinly disguised repackagings of hellish terms like ‘cyberspace’, coined in William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, and ‘metaverse’, from Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which have their origins in dystopian science fiction novels, stories set in broken worlds ruled by Corporations and Mafias. Instead of a planetary consciousness shift resulting in a new psychedelic socialism, we are seeing ultra-rich actors and Silicon Valley founders getting regular ketamine infusions and gobbling down bags of edible mushroom gummies the color of neon-blue lollipops.

In Pinchbeck’s essays, many great questions are put forth. Will AI expedite the need for us to move beyond capitalism? Is AI the alien we’ve been looking for all this time, and do we have no choice but to unite with them? Will we band together in small communities and harness new technologies to promote collective moral action, or rather will corporations sell private governments to subscribers? Does the structure of the Native American Hopi language reveal a different way to communicate with each other than English does, one that is more suited for preserving the planet? Will the wisdom and mysteries that psychedelics offer be hijacked by the marketplace and defanged like was done with New Age culture? 

Like Allen Ginsberg before him, Pinchbeck is our consciousness transforming figure of the East Village. As Ginsberg convinced Leary to get LSD to the public, Pinchbeck has performed a similar service by initiating so many of us into the mystery worlds of ayahuasca, Iboga, and DMT. Likewise he has played an important role in initiating us as well into the current planetary dialogue and the important decisions we must make as a species. Can we all become initiates in time to respond to Pinchbeck’s calling to protect the lungs and heart of the world?

We are all interconnected nodes of the same consciousness. Let’s allow Daniel to be our guide for a moment, let’s see what Garden of Earthly Delights his work might inspire us to create. We must find in ourselves the ones who we are looking for, who will transform reality.  

It’s glorious to be alive at this moment of such reckoning and rapture. We all need somebody to take care of us and sometimes it’s everybody. If we can indeed make our wishes and myths come true, it’s time to change the nature of what we wish for.