Toward a "Post-Technological" Future?

Could we take a different direction?

Pakal, 8th Century King of Palenque

As I reconsider the ideas of peak-oil theorists like John Michael Greer and James Howard Kunstler, I keep thinking about the visionary Jose Arguelles, known for his work with the Mayan Calendar. Arguelles thought we were moving toward a “post-technological” civilization. I want to explore what he meant by this, and why I find it so compelling.

A former art history professor and author, Jose Arguelles was a major influence on my book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (new audio version available here). I consider him one of the most important thinkers of our time, although his work is largely ignored today. His books include The Transformative Vision, The Mayan Factor, Earth Ascending, and Time and the Technosphere. I edited and published his last book, Manifesto for the Noosphere, when I ran a publishing imprint with North Atlantic Books. The book came out soon after Arguelles’ untimely death in 2011, at the age of 72. I will explore why I consider him so important in a future essay.

There are many reasons why Arguelles is ignored while Terence McKenna still has a huge following. McKenna was far more entertaining, sardonic, and hipster-friendly than Arguelles, who could be a bit wooden, imperious, and distant. While Arguelles was less the sly mercurial joker than McKenna, in some ways he went much further out than McKenna ever dared. Later in his life, Arguelles declared himself the reincarnation of an 8th Century Mayan king. He released a number of channeled texts he claimed were transmitted to him by Lord Pakal, his former avatar. He declared a “new time” based on his own version of the Mayan Calendar.

Both Arguelles and McKenna were fascinated by the Mayan Calendar, which ended a 5,125-year “Great Cycle” on December 21, 2012. They fixated on the end of the Long Count because of psychedelic revelations they gleaned in the early 1970s. After a massive visionary download he received in Colombia, when he spent a sleepless week telepathically communing with what he believed to be an extraterrestrial intelligence that spoke to him through psilocybin, McKenna claimed that “2012” was going to initiate the “Eschaton” or the “Singularity.” He saw this in both technological and mystical terms. He playfully envisioned the construction of a futuristic artifact that somehow exteriorized or materialized the human soul. He thought the hyperreal, futuristic other-dimensions revealed in short-acting DMT trips gave us inklings of this future state of being, as we entered the Singularity wormhole.

Jose Arguelles and Terence McKenna

McKenna’s ideas influenced the tech community of Silicon Valley, who embraced the prospect of a Singularity or “concrescence,” while shearing away the alchemical weirdness. According to Google Director Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity is the approaching threshold when the speed of innovation accelerates exponentially as humans merge with technology. Potentially we will be able to upload our individual identity and consciousness to a virtual, silicon matrix. We will no longer be mortal entities, but “ghosts in the machine.” Kurzweil proposes this may occur around 2045, if not sooner. In many ways, this futuristic fantasy has become part of the promotional machinery of corporation globalization. Corporations like Meta and Tesla need us to believe that industrial technology-plus-Capitalism is leading to a great paradise, despite its currently ruinous effects we see across the Earth.

Arguelles’ vision took a different direction entirely. Like McKenna, he anticipated the inception of a new planetary culture, one based on synchronicity and telepathy. He predicted a collective, global awakening. We would realize we didn’t need a lot of the technology and industry we had built — it was only impeding our communion with one another and connection with the Earth. Post-2012, we would voluntarily start to take down a lot of it, choosing a simpler lifestyle which he called “post-technological.”

We would focus, instead, on honing our psychic and super-sensible faculties and building local utopias. We would discover we preferred “telepathic seances” in small villages or garden communities to alienated, commodified spectacles. Lessons learned, we would abandon nation-states, consumerism, Capitalism, and war, moving back toward harmony and natural time.

As an aside, I recall the first time that the possibility of a “post-technological” future became tangible for me. I visited Martin Gasheseoma, an elder of the Hopi in New Mexico, to learn about their prophecies of a transition from the Fourth to the Fifth World. The elder told me that the Hopi had been forced by the US government in the 1960s to elect a tribal council that made decisions for the community. They built modern roads between the different Hopi Mesas, villages on top of stony hills. But Gasheseoma said the roads were a bad idea and most of the Hopi did not want them. I asked him what he thought should be done with them.