Once, a decade ago – on 1 September 2005, just around sundown, to be exact, I tried to incite a global revolution. The incident remains one of the proudest and, at the same time, one of the most humiliating events of my life. It was inspired by a potent psychedelic catalyst, and Hurricane Katrina.
I was at the Burning Man festival at the time. As almost everyone knows by now, Burning Man, a massive annual anarcho-libertarian pseudo-utopian art event, takes place in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada every summer. The festival has grown rapidly over the last years. It has captured the attention of the global media as celebrities and Silicon Valley billionaires flock to it.
I remember, after my plane landed at Reno airport, passing TV monitors showing satellite images of Hurricane Katrina’s ominous octopus arms, its vast spiralling dimensions. On the news, weathermen were plotting its likely course towards Louisiana. The emergency seemed surreal to me, an event that had nothing to do with my life.
By the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Burning Man was going strong. Thousands of costumed revellers danced each night, roaming the city during the day. Back in those days, nobody checked the Internet while at the festival. There was no cell phone service either. I found out about Katrina from friends who arrived on the playa late in the week. They described its devastating impact. I learned that the government had corralled 15,000 poor people, mostly African-American, in the Louisiana Superdome, in unsanitary conditions without water or power. Riots were spreading across the South, according to the news they brought with them from the ‘default world’, and National Guard reserves were being called up. It seemed that America – long a simmering cauldron of racial tension and class conflict – was on the verge of boiling over. Nobody at Burning Man knew – or cared.
Riding across the desert that day in a dusky purple haze, I entered a state of messianic megalomania, outside of the normal constraints of time or personal narrative. No longer held back by any sense of linear progress, or any concern for future consequences, I believed that the fractally rhizomatic Now was the only moment that mattered – the only moment that ever was. I felt fury at our failure, as a species, to overcome the ‘system’ – the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, the corporate mega-machine. This system was not only corrupt, creepy and hypocritical. It was also destroying the biosphere, and with it, our shared human future.
I first visited Burning Man in 2000. I went there as a journalist, to write a feature on it for Rolling Stone. I didn’t have great hopes for what I would find there. It seemed a self-congratulatory, hippie-ish thing. But when I visited Black Rock City, I realized the festival far exceeded what I had anticipated or imagined. Within a few days, it permanently expanded my sense of what humanity could become.
I discovered a huge, supportive, loving community focused on selfexpression, direct experience and personal freedom. Burners didn’t consider the exploration of consciousness to be marginal or worthless. Most understood it as a crucial expression of human freedom. As a New Yorker, I had no idea that the psychedelic counterculture on the West Coast had evolved in such spectacular style since the Acid Test days. The festival was an initiation, in itself. It was challenging to survive in that high desert, scorching hot during the days, frigid at night. The fact that everyone had to endure the elements was part of the journey. We had all chosen, intentionally, to experience this near-emergency. This brought us together and bonded us.
Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit this, but in the development of my personal political philosophy, Black Rock City holds a place that for me is as crucial as the Paris Commune of 1870 was for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ‘Working men’s Paris, with its Commune’, Marx enthused, ‘will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society.’ Although the French government stamped out the revolution, executing thousands, Marx went on to write many books – proving it is safer to be an armchair revolutionary than the fighting-in-thestreets kind.
The essential political insight I took from Burning Man was our capacity to reorganize society around principles quite different from the ones we have now. We can create a post-postmodern civilization where the pursuit of art, ecstasy, play and spiritual communion are central to its purpose. I believed a rapid global awakening was possible – and Burning Man pointed the way. Reinventing our fragile world as a collective art project, we would apply our technical genius and media savvy to liberate our human family, as a whole, from pointless suffering, destructive habits and outmoded belief systems.
Naively, I assumed that everyone at Burning Man understood that the festival was simply a prelude – a rehearsal for the main event. We were testing out the principles and ethos of a liberated society that at some point we would spread across the world rapidly. Eventually, we would engineer a metamorphosis of our civilization, re-creating it through the crucible of the imagination.
But suddenly, that night in 2005, I saw Burning Man’s celebratory spectacle, for the first time, as an artificial paradise distracting us from the sombre reality we needed to confront. Those with the awareness and ability to change the world were caught in a hall of mirrors – a subtle trap. Burning Man was a temporary autonomous zone, a beautiful desert mirage. It showed us what was possible, but it diverted our energy from the hard work of changing the system – from confronting the powers that be, in the real world. What it promoted was cultural rebellion, not social transformation. Burning Man had turned into a culture of its own, which made people obedient and complacent.
Enraged, I rode my bike to the Center Cafe. Inside, a large band of San Francisco hipsters was playing – drumming, banjo-ing, tooting horns – to a fervent, gyrating crowd. I jumped on the stage and took the microphone from the MC – a stylish impresario known for his Steampunk couture, white top hat and improbably long beard. Everyone was startled. The band stopped. I was already a well-known figure at the festival. A day before, I had given a talk to several hundred people in the large geodesic dome of the Palenque Norte camp, as part of their speaker series. Some of my audience was in the crowd.
I began to rant, semi-coherently, about Katrina, as well as the larger ecological, geopolitical emergency confronting our species. I noted that many of us had been coming to Burning Man for many years to celebrate, to party – I said we had partied enough. Now we can do something else together that might be equally fun: establish a sound foundation for a new socio-political order. Some of the crowd listened attentively. Some booed. Various attempts were made to get me off the stage so the band could resume. I ignored them.
Finally, Paradox – a well-known circus performer in the Bay Area – convinced me to give up the mic. We went to sit outside together, in the dust. I was still enraged. I grabbed him repeatedly, pulling his hair. This was the unlikely beginning of a great friendship. As I spoke with him, still high as a kite, I hatched an ambitious plan.
I proposed that we stop the festival’s annual crescendo – the burning of the Man on Saturday, followed by the immolation of the Temple on Sunday. Instead, we would invite the Burning Man community to stay in the desert for a few extra weeks while we drafted a planetary constitution together and built a social network and media platform to support the rapid transition to a regenerative, post-capitalist society. There were, I knew, so many brilliant people attending the event, leaders in many fields, from software to pop music to finance to law. Katrina was our opportunity to seize. Katrina had revealed the planetary emergency in microcosm. We would use the disaster to tap the community’s genius in a focused and organized way.
I saw it all in a flash. One group of Burners – legal experts, software engineers, social scientists, anthropologists, financial analysts, workers at NGOs and more – would gather at the Center Cafe each day, to design and build the prototype for a new social infrastructure through a cooperative, consensus process. This networking platform would include tools for democratic decision-making, sharing resources and alternative instruments for exchanging value, designed to first complement and then supersede the current money system. Another group of Burners – filmmakers, journalists, poets and artists – would document the unfolding process as we wrote the planetary constitution, demanding a world based on ecological and social justice, equality, peace and righteousness. Rather than making incremental and fitful progress, humanity as a whole would make a sudden forward leap.
Around the Temple, the spiritual community of Burning Man – meditators, yogis, alchemists, Sufis, kabbalists, Wiccans – would gather in a circle for a 24-hours-a-day ceremony in which they would visualize, meditate and bring down the imprint for the new planetary culture – currently hovering above us, somewhere, in the starry night. Rock musicians, DJs, opera singers and other performers would play at the Man – a concert continuing around the clock, live-streamed to the outside world.
I assumed the wealthier Burners would happily donate tens of thousands of dollars apiece to have food and water trucked in from Reno, supporting this crucial process. Property would be collectivized, so people wouldn’t have to waste any valuable time. Instead of having to look for your bicycle in a thicket of bicycles, for instance, you could grab any available ride. Rather than returning to your camp, you could catch a snooze in any nearby trailer. We would be living the revolution as we created it – we would be co-creating the New Now.
As I hatched it, I thought this plan had tremendous PR potential. We would perform revolution as a conceptual art performance piece in real time. I imagined our pitch to the world’s media: the community of countercultural hedonists, hippies, druggies, geeks and Silicon Valley millionaires are making a stand, taking charge of the planet’s future, at a time of ongoing war in the Middle East, corporate malfeasance, natural disasters and climate meltdown.
At first we would be mocked. But soon, the press – the global audience – would stop ridiculing us. They would grasp that this was the only way that massive social change could happen – from the dusty margins, the radical fringe. Once we built and launched our new peer-to-peer network for direct democracy and our open-source media platform promoting spiritual gnosis, equitable sharing of the world’s resources for the evolution of consciousness, everybody on Earth would jump on board. I figured the whole process might take six months, give or take. By then, we would have even George Bush, Vladimir Putin, the Bilderberg elite, the Koch Brothers, the Supreme Leader of North Korea, the Sunni Imams and Shiite Ayatollahs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the Chinese Premier solidly on our side. We would sit down together to work things out, pausing for sessions of MDMA-assisted group therapy when necessary.
For the next two days, I didn’t sleep as I sought to execute my plan. I raced from Burning Man camp to camp, trying to form alliances, building a cadre of volunteers. At one New York camp, Disorient – an established Burning Man brand, known for its bright orange costumes and digitally sequenced flashing strobe lights – I knocked a bottle of champagne out of one of the organizer’s hands, pissing him off as it dribbled fizz into the dust.
‘Haven’t you done enough partying over the years?’ I yelled at him. When they told me to leave, I lay down on the ground in protest. A few members of Disorient dragged me out of the camp by my feet. I found it ludicrous that they would drag me across the dust, from one blank spot to another – as if the campground was real real estate.
I gathered about twenty-five people together at my camp, Entheon Village, seeking to inspire them with my vision. Humouring me, friends as well as new conscripts took on the roles of lieutenants and subcommandants in a ragged, jester army. As it became clear we didn’t have the momentum we would need to stop the burning of the Man, my revolutionary project fizzled out.
A big dream for the world – however foolish or futile – leaves lingering embers in its wake. Tiny incandescent sparks. I learned so much from this embarrassing enterprise – whether blind alley or foreshadowing, I am still not sure. For a few delusional hours, I felt something similar to what a member of the Jacobin Club must have felt in 1789. I was convinced it was really happening. ‘Action is the only reality,’ the Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman once realized while on LSD: like a whiteboard swiped clean, our social reality can be entirely re-created and reinvented, given the proper circumstances and poetic serendipity.
But why, you may ask, do we need system change? For many of us, the reasons are blindingly obvious. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaign presented the economic case clearly. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor has reached Dada-ist proportions. Less than eighty-five individuals control more wealth than half the Earth’s population – 3.6 billion people. In the US, one-tenth of 1 per cent of the population is worth more than the bottom 90 per cent. While a tiny elite has more power than ever before, vast multitudes look ahead fearfully. They see a future of shrinking hopes and increasing instability. As debt increases faster than GDP around the world, the financial system tightens its grip, like a giant anaconda suffocating the poor and the middle class. Waves of protests and rebellions – the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, Brexit – reveal the ire of the masses.
We live in a post-colonial empire which uses violence – drone strikes, bombing raids, assassination, military invasion, extraordinary rendition – to impose its will on the world, as well as employing sneakier techniques, like the ballooning debts that countries across Africa, South America and Asia must pay their European and American overlords, while their resources are strip-mined away. This is already terrible. The even worse problem is that our industrial civilization has unleashed an ecological mega-crisis. We are threatened with an imminent planetary cataclysm that could drive us to extinction.
‘Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favour of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium,’ Roy Scranton writes in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. ‘Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.’
For reasons we will explore, there is a link between our unjust economic system – which forces constant growth while it disempowers the multitudes – and the ecological catastrophe that will soon engulf us. We can’t solve one without solving the other. As things go increasingly haywire, our species could easily join all the other species we are currently driving into oblivion. This could happen within this century – within the next decades. Right now, all bets are off.
Meanwhile, the corporate elite and the technocrats continue to promote the promise of new technologies to solve humanity’s problems. This sounds great in theory. Unfortunately, however, our engineers have no legitimate response to many of the ecological problems we have created. Many of the ‘quick fixes’ they promote – like geo-engineering – could make things far worse. As a whole, humanity is sleepwalking towards catastrophe, waiting for something or someone else – Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Indigo Children, the Pope – to take care of it for us.
As I’ve focused on the ecological crisis over the last years, I have sometimes felt like Chicken Little, freaking out as I pointed to a seemingly blue, changeless sky. But as a quorum of scientists metaphorically agree, the sky is falling. We can feel the changes taking place all around us. Many of the solutions are blindingly obvious. But we are not applying them.
In December 2015, world leaders met in Paris to hammer out an agreement aimed at restricting the rise of global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Although this was celebrated as progress, it may have set back the climate movement significantly. According to a group of leading climate scientists, the pact failed to mandate the rapid, severe cuts to global emissions that we actually need.
‘What people wanted to hear was that an agreement had been reached on climate change that would save the world while leaving lifestyles and aspirations unchanged’, the scientists wrote. ‘The solution it proposes is not to agree on an urgent mechanism to ensure immediate cuts in emissions, but to kick the can down the road.’
The Paris climate talks revealed, once again, the vast gap between what is politically feasible and what is ecologically necessary. Drastically to reduce CO2 pollution we would have to eliminate wasteful industries, severely limit consumption, reduce air and car travel to the minimum and restrict meat-eating globally. If we want to save the Earth, in other words, billions of us have to change our lifestyles. Nobody wants to think about this – and it is political suicide to propose it because it goes against the logic of a global economy based on incessant growth. But our survival requires system change, not reform.
The fastest way for a change to occur would be for the wealthy elite – or at least a subset of them – to take responsibility for humanity’s current predicament, overcome the hypnotism of privilege and use their capital to engineer a rapid turnaround. I know that sounds unlikely. Another option would be some form of revolution or global overturning of the current system, substituting new institutions for the dysfunctional ones we have now. I realize that sounds pretty difficult also.
It is much easier to build a lifeboat while you are still on dry land than to try to do it when you are caught in the middle of a neverending super-storm. We are getting many foreshadowings of what is to come. But we keep ignoring them.
On the evening of 29 October 2012, I was home in the East Village when Hurricane Sandy hit. An hour into it, I walked down to my corner, out of curiosity. I assumed the media had exaggerated the dangers of the storm, to boost ratings. I wanted to see for myself. To my shock, I saw brackish floodwaters rising, coming up Avenue C, engulfing cars. People were coming out of restaurants to snap pictures and selfies of this biblical menace. The police cars in front of the local precinct seemed to be floating, with water up to their windows. The flood tide was moving at a steady pace towards my street – towards my building.
I went home, threw some clothes and my laptop into a backpack, and headed off towards a friend’s house in SoHo, on higher ground, as wind lashed the trees back and forth. As I hurried away, a flash of light illuminated the ominous cloud cover. I heard a gigantic explosion behind me. It sounded like a bomb. Later on, I learned that the Con Edison power plant on 14th Street and Avenue C had just blown up. An hour later, the entirety of downtown New York was plunged into darkness. For the next few days, a large area of Manhattan was without power.
The morning after the storm, I walked back to my house. Everything was closed except for a few delis and restaurants serving hastily made sandwiches and coffee out of thermoses. Deli workers were trying to get rid of everything perishable from their refrigerators and freezers. In the East Village, people stood around on street corners, dazed expressions on their faces, inspecting the damage from the flood. I biked uptown, to stay with my mother on the Upper West Side, an area that was comparatively untouched.
I was supposed to fly to Mexico the next day to give a TEDx talk at a festival, commemorating the Day of the Dead, in an old colonial town popular with expatriates from the US and Europe. My talk was going to cover, in condensed form, the theme of this book: the ecological crisis as initiation – as an opportunity for us to engineer a self-willed, rapid mutation in human consciousness. But the airports were closed and my flight was cancelled. I assumed I wouldn’t be able to go.
Then I received a call with an invite to fly on a private jet to Mexico. The jet belonged to a media mogul, the CEO of a major conglomerate. The CEO and his wife were dedicated Burners – they were power players in the scene. They had started the festival in Mexico to bring some of the Burning Man vibe to their second home. They owned a beautiful villa overlooking the town as well as a company making the world’s most expensive tequila.
As an aside, I should note that I have been on quite a ride since I attained a moderate level of fame as a psychedelic author and visionary. In 2007, when Steven Colbert called me a ‘psychedelic drug advocate’ during our TV interview, he solidified my position as a public spokesman for the altered states and shamanic practices I had written about in my books.
‘Timothy Leary died recently. We just got rid of him. Why do we need another one?’ he asked me on air.
While I have taken pains to differentiate myself from Leary – the Harvard psychology professor turned psychedelic psychopomp, called ‘the most dangerous man in America’ by Nixon, who told the 1960s generation to ‘tune in, turn on, and drop out’, with unfortunate consequences – I have inherited a bit of his social cachet as rebel and outsider.
Over the last decade, I have had a unique opportunity to pass through many different worlds, learning and carrying ideas from one to the next. For a German TV show, I wandered the streets of Paris with Alejandro Jodorowsky, legendary director of Holy Mountain, and psycho-magician. I flew in a chartered helicopter with Sting and his family over crop circles in England, looking for extra-terrestrials. I hung out in the trenches of Occupy Wall Street with tousled anarchists. I visited the mountains of Colombia to study the rituals and philosophy of the Kogi and Arawak people. I debated with the comedian Russell Brand in a geodesic dome in Utah. I visited a ‘free love’ community, started by German radicals, in rural Portugal. I helped organize a summit on climate change at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, with slick marketing geniuses and non-profits like Greenpeace and 350.org. We failed to convince Zuckerberg’s minions to support the ecological movement with more than tokenism.
As much as I could, I sought to influence the influencers. Particularly, I thought drinking ayahuasca, the visionary medicine from the Amazon basin, would be extremely beneficial for many of them. In Big Sur, I attended one of the most lavish weddings of our transhuman times, as the guest of Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and the ex-president of Facebook. The roster of invitees included numerous rock stars and dotcom tycoons, founders and funders of Internet leviathans. Like almost all of them, I wore an outfit custom-made for the occasion, a long tailored jacket and silk-embroidered vest. We partied all night in a grove of majestic redwoods, transformed into a Hollywood phantasmagoria of Renaissance ruins and flower gardens for one multi-million-dollar night. The ceremony set world records for excess, triggering incensed editorials and local outcries. The wedding was easy to criticize. On the one hand, I found it a beautiful expression of love. On the other, it was a painful reminder that a tiny elite gets to enjoy the most fabulous Gatsby-like extravagance, while billions around the world remain stuck in poverty and desperation.
For Summit Outside, a weekend retreat, I visited a mountaintop in Utah. A group of young entrepreneurs had bought the entire mountain – a sky resort – to build a utopian community for the privileged, taking a page from the libertarian fantasies of Ayn Rand. We dined on one long table crossing an entire valley. A battalion of waiters served over a thousand of our society’s best and brightest, a well-meaning, khaki-tinged mob that included heads of charities, venture capitalists, documentary filmmakers and CEOs of tech start-ups.
On a private beach in Mexico, for the end of the Mayan calendar’s 5,125-year-long count, costumed dancers in Aztec headdresses gyrated to electronic beats among life-size reconstructions of Stonehenge, Easter Island’s massive heads and monumental sculptures of Greek deities. I spent the night tripping with one of the world’s wealthiest art dealers, a Brit. He offered me free career advice, telling me I should ‘be the messiah, play the pariah’. Back home, following his lead, I wrote him a long, histrionically irate email linking the planetary mega-crisis to the decadence of the art world. He never replied.
I write this having just returned from New Zealand where I attended a futurist conference organized by two tech geniuses in their early thirties, who dropped out of Harvard ten years ago to build a massive data-processing company, which they sold for a fortune. With the proceeds, they acquired 2,000 acres of Kiwi forests and dairy farms. They are integrating the most up-to-date methods of organic agriculture, food forestry and solar-powered villages, assembling a dream team of yogis, reiki healers, permaculture designers and software engineers. They chose New Zealand, after surveying the options, as the most likely place in the world to survive runaway climate change, global social breakdown and everything else that’s coming. They may be the smartest people I know.
Let’s get back to Sandy: the day after New York was humbled by the super-storm, I biked back to my apartment. Below 28th Street, the city was plunged into a velvety darkness, unlike anything I had experienced. A few bars had stayed open, illuminated by candlelight. Some blocks were so dark that when people passed me, all I could see of them was the reflective strip on their sneakers, caught in bike light for a flickering instant. It was like the darkness of the void – before the beginning, after the end. There was a thrilling ambience of lawlessness – no thief would ever be caught in the depths of that blackness.
My building had a dank, foetid smell. The flood had engulfed the already mouldy basement. My apartment was without heat or cell phone service. I threw every blanket over me and shivered through the cold night. Early the next morning, I was picked up by a chauffeurdriven SUV. The car gathered up a small group of fashionable Burners – photographers, event planners, stylists. We headed out of town to a small nearby airport.
I had never flown on a private jet before. To my surprise, there were no security checks before boarding. We didn’t need to remove our shoes, get bombed by malevolent millimetre waves, or throw away forbidden tubes of lotion and canisters of hairspray. Any one of us could have been carrying an assault rifle strapped across our chest and a suitcase nuke. Nobody would have checked. This was a gentle reminder that our world works a bit differently for the super-wealthy compared to everyone else. According to the net, the owner of the plane was worth close to a billion. He owned boats, private islands, as well as tequila companies and jets. Of course, he also contributed to many charities. They all do.
In a world plagued by so much unnecessary suffering, we might consider extreme wealth – and the entitlement and insulation it brings – a spiritual disease. Most of us are prey to outbreaks of it, on much smaller scales. I admit – in this regard and many others – I am no better than most.
When I was in my twenties, I got my first good-paying job as an editor at a magazine – a crass competitor to Vanity Fair, called Fame. Suddenly, with money in the bank, I felt far less sympathetic and compassionate than I had when I was poor. Where previously I would give money to homeless people, now I would scoff when, wearing my new double-breasted Armani suit, I walked past them sprawled out on the sidewalk. I wondered why they couldn’t pick themselves up off the ground and find a career.
Now for a far more embarrassing admission. Just a few years ago, I received a sizable grant from a foundation. When I had an influx of funding, after years of feeling grumpy and cash-starved, I sought to redress what I saw as old wrongs. I felt I ‘deserved’ a taste of the luxury lifestyle enjoyed by my many wealthy friends with their endless skiing vacations, boating trips and spa treatments. Instead of using every penny to fuel the social and cultural revolution I believe is necessary, I upped my lifestyle in various ways – fancier suits, better restaurants, a trip or two. I felt it was my due.
In some ways, it is easier to be poor. One has less choice and less responsibility. I am sure, at the mogul’s level of wealth, there is powerful peer pressure, among CEOs, to throw the best party, buy the coolest island or vintage car collection or whatever. Sitting on the private plane to Mexico in 2012, I wished I could find a way to speak to my host, to convey to him the pressing needs of our moment – what might happen if his genius for building companies could be channelled, used to liberate the masses from the mental prison the media has built around the human mind. But I could tell my views would mean nothing to him.
We landed. I dropped my bag in my hotel, then wandered through the mustard-coloured streets of the colonial town, appreciating its baroque facades and vibrant street life. A massive stone cathedral presided over the elegant central square. Locals, as well as expats, were costumed as skeletal phantasms. They wore tuxedos, evening gowns, white gloves. Delicate traceries of black ink decorated their bleached faces. Altars made of flowers, papier-mâché tombstones and giant sculpted skulls were set up all around town.
This extreme journey – from Hurricane Sandy’s urban wipe-out to the private jet to the elegant ghost world of the Day of the Dead – seemed a garish presentiment of what humanity may be rapidly approaching: an abrupt passage between worlds. It was just one year after the end of the 13th Baktun, completing the Mayan calendar’s long count, the focus of my second book.
It could be the case that the ‘dimensional shift’ that many mystics speak about, which the visionary philosopher Rudolf Steiner described as different incarnations of the Earth, and which indigenous cultures like the Hopi call a transition from one ‘world’ to the next, requires our total annihilation. After all, even for those of us who believe in great mysteries and subtle realms, we really know nothing about the workings of the invisible, occult dimensions. Death remains the biggest question mark. Maybe we all need to croak together, in one massive methane eruption, biospheric cataclysm or Dr Strangelovian plunge into nuclear winter, to work our stuff out on the astral plane.
Hurricane Sandy had revealed vividly to me the fragility of our instruments and our dependence on the grid. If the blackout had gone on past a few days, the bow and arrow would have seemed futuristic.
After Sandy, city agencies and volunteers from the Occupy movement banded together to rebuild those sections of the city that the storm had decimated, like Rockaway Beach and Red Hook. This was a noble effort. But it also seemed a doomed one. All of the evidence tells us climate change is intensifying. Why restore beachfronts and barrier islands if they will soon be abandoned in any case?
When it comes to the future, we appear to suffer from a severe lack of direction. Collectively, we are lost, fumbling in the dark. How can it be that we have so little idea of where we are going – or want to go – as a species? Perhaps people believe there are experts taking care of the problem – but what if the experts turn out to be self-deluded in various intricate ways? What if there are no experts, as of now, in what the future can bring?
And yet, we can say a few things about the future with a fair degree of certainty. By 2050, without some drastic, as of yet unimaginable intervention – without a radical, globally orchestrated programme to reduce CO2 levels through conservation and sequestration – the Earth will be considerably hotter than it is today. With climate change quickening now, by then the planet could be two, three or more degrees warmer. Accelerated warming might cause three metres, at least, of sealevel rise, according to climate scientists. This would have disastrous impacts.
Let’s admit what we all know. We are already experiencing crazy, rapidly fluctuating weather. As I write this, New York is colder in May than it was in January. In a few decades, the situation could be far more chaotic than we can even predict. We depend on plants to provide us with sustenance. In order to blossom and grow – to feed us, in other words – they need climate stability.
The Arctic is melting rapidly now; month by month, gigatons of ice are released into the seas. Many of the world’s low-lying coastal cities – including New York City, my home – could be deluged, made uninhabitable within a handful of decades. If that happens, hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people will start migrating inland in either a somewhat controlled or chaotic fashion.
Let’s assume the current political system finds a way to stay in place despite panics and paroxysms. In that case, a tiny elite will still maintain control over the vast preponderance of the world’s wealth and property. They will employ private armies, killer drones and government surveillance to guard and protect their privileged status in a disintegrating world – if they haven’t found a more insidious method, like hacking the brainstems of their serfs or developing the next tier of mood- and mind-altering drugs to control the nervous systems of the sheeple directly.
It is inevitable that the melting of the mountaintop glaciers that provide fresh water to several billion people, and other drastic changes in climate and weather patterns, will induce unending droughts. Famines could be endemic across much of the world. With these cataclysms, along with spreading diseases, we might undergo significant, if not severe, population die-offs. These conditions, in all likelihood, will lead to regional wars over resources, the scapegoating and persecuting of minorities, as well as the collapse of many nation-states.
Industrial disasters like Fukushima and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill will become regular occurrences in the wake of tsunamis and superstorms. All the big cats and great apes will go extinct, and mosquitoes and insect pests will migrate north. Seeking escape from physical hell, the masses may zone out on immersive games and virtual reality spectacles. As the world turns into a giant refugee camp, engineers will experiment with massive geo-engineering schemes. They will pour sulphur particles into the atmosphere and iron filings into the oceans with unpredictable, perhaps even more disastrous consequences.
This scenario is, of course, only an outline, with many X factors. Perhaps advances in medicine and nanotechnology will bring life extension and superhuman capacities to the privileged few, creating a deeper biological divide between the Haves and Have Nots. Populist fury may erupt against the First World – the primary source of economic injustice and ecological decimation – as the Earth becomes hotter, more crowded and more barren of life. This could lead to the detonation of ‘suitcase nukes’ in major cities and bioterrorism or false flag events involving weaponized or genetically engineered viruses.
Mass panic would force a descent into martial law. People may be electronically tagged, their every move under the surveillance of sophisticated artificial intelligence agents. This would be a hotter, drearier, more despicable world – but one that seems quite likely, from where we are now.
Another scenario is plausible and far more extreme. Soon – any time now – we may face runaway climate change – rapid warming, beyond the worst predictions. Over the last decade, scientists found that positive feedback loops accelerate warming. For instance, the disappearance of Arctic ice means that more sunlight is absorbed and less is reflected, turning up the thermostat.
One way this can happen is through an eruption of methane. Methane is roughly 30 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas than CO2. While methane only stays in the atmosphere for ten years, whereas CO2 circulates for over a century, there are huge quantities of it frozen in the oceans and the Siberian peat bogs. Scientists believe a sudden eruption of methane caused the Permian Mass Extinction 250 million years ago, when 95 per cent of all life on Earth went extinct within a few decades.
From the study of past geological epochs, we know that once warming passes an unknown tipping point, the Earth can heat rapidly, becoming a biological desert in a half-century. Through studying the climate record, preserved in ice-core samples, geologists have learned that the climate generally doesn’t make a slow, incremental transition from one steady state to another. Instead, it tends to make a drastic lurch in a short timeframe.
When you take the time to study the ecological data, you can feel as though you are on a bad acid trip, in danger of losing your moorings as well as your mind. The situation can seem irrevocably, almost absurdly grim. Even so, I believe there are many good reasons to hope. The human species is creative, innovative, highly adaptive. We can change quickly. We might be on the cusp of a rapid transmutation now. Because we are meshed together into one global brain via the Internet, new ideas, new ecological techniques – even new currencies or ways to practise democracy – can spread across the world in a micro-millisecond.
Although a tremendous amount of damage has already occurred, and more is unavoidable, it is still possible that we can rally ourselves. We can redirect our civilization along a different path and we can do it quickly. As Peak Everything author Richard Heinberg notes, ‘In order to save ourselves, we do not need to evolve new organs; we just need to change our culture. And language-based culture can change very swiftly, as the industrial revolution has shown.’
Similarly, Alexis Zeigler writes in Culture Change, ‘The solution to changing the Western lifestyle is the simple impossible act of creating social networks that build social support outside of the mainstream in the context of a truly sustainable society.’ If we haven’t accomplished this yet, it may be because we haven’t really tried.
Materially, we can shift global practices in farming, industry and energy production within a few decades. We can reforest the planet. This would put a massive amount of excess carbon back in the Earth. But along with the material, industrial aspects of this transition, we will need to undergo a shift in our values, beliefs and habits. In other words, we need to change our technical and industrial base, our political and economic system, as well as our consciousness and our culture – our way of relating to the world. I know this is no small feat, but it is possible. It could occur through a tipping point, where a small group discovers a new way of being that quickly spreads out to encompass the whole. And it could happen fast.
Also, from my perspective – as we will explore – there are reasons to hope that fall far outside what mainstream thinkers, scientists or our academies imagine possible. There are aspects of reality that remain unknown, inaccessible, to most people. For instance, there is a great deal of evidence that we possess latent psychic abilities, which some researchers call Psi.
Psi could be exponentially more powerful as a transformative force than electricity, if we can figure out how to use it. ‘Psi is a terribly important adventure. It is the wild card in our seemingly hopeless attempt to get the human race off the endangered species list,’ writes Lawrence LeShan in A New Science of the Paranormal. ‘We must be open to facing the possibility that we will find things so new and startling that they change our preconceptions about ourselves and about the universe we live in,’ he writes. ‘So far, we have not had that courage. Perhaps now with species extinction looming before us, we will find that courage.’ I consider it possible that the ecological crisis could be a ‘cosmic trigger’, forcing not only rapid technological and social innovation, but also a psychic evolution.
In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, my last book, I explored the thesis that humanity is undergoing an evolutionary leap from one level of consciousness – one state of being – to the next. Although I dealt with the 5,125-year-long count cycle of the Mayan calendar, which ended on 21 December 2012, I never anticipated either the Apocalypse or Rapture at or around that date.
I proposed instead that the purpose of the calendar was to mark the transition – to help us make the jump. I saw the end of the long count as an invitation for humanity to undergo a global awakening and take a different path. This would mean adopting aspects of the worldview and some of the practices of indigenous and aboriginal cultures.
These small-scale, traditional societies developed methods of longterm continuity based on their spiritual ethos of interdependence and connection to nature. As Native American sociologist Jack Forbes puts it, ‘The life of Native American peoples revolves around the concept of the sacredness, beauty, power and relatedness of all forms of existence. In short, the ethics or moral values of native people are part and parcel of their cosmology or total worldview.’ We can, I think, merge crucial aspects of the indigenous worldview – as well as the ecological and social practices that stem from it – with our advanced technical capacities. If we manage this, we can learn to respect the limits of the Earth and bring our global civilization back into balance.
In the modern world, time is linear and spatial – you can waste it, run out of it or equate it with money. We are supposed to be making ‘progress’ towards some ineffable, technological goal. But this is just one way of conceiving time, of exploring its many dimensions. There is also the dreamtime, the ever-present origin, known to aboriginals.
Aboriginals don’t conceive of history, of progress and redemption, or decline and fall. For them, the universe is a sacred continuum, an ongoing ceremony. There is only one holy moment, infinitely extended. This way of understanding time is at least as sensible as ours.
In the modern world, people tend to think of humanity as separate from nature – somehow above or outside of it. We forget that all of our abilities are extensions of what we have received from the natural world. I think this gives us reason to hope. The development of modern industrial civilization may also be part of a natural cycle. Most probably, the evolution of society – the development of consciousness – is as exquisitely timed and purposeful as other processes we observe in evolutionary biology. We may be following a programme or sequence – much like foetal development, where the mother transmits chemical signals to her infant, at precise intervals, up to the moment of birth. How we understand and articulate it is part of the programme, executed by the code as it writes itself.
Right now, I believe we are in transition – in the birth canal – approaching the next threshold of our awakening, the next phase of our life as a species. In quantum physics, for example, we are realizing the union of Western science with Eastern metaphysics. In the Middle Ages, modern science emerged out of magic and alchemy. Science began with observation of the physical phenomena we observed outside of us. It has slowly turned inwards. Mysticism starts from the other direction. It begins with our subjective experience – the phenomenology of perception – and opens to the world in its totality. As we approach the end of history, the edge of the abyss, these forms of knowledge are fusing together, merging and unifying. I consider this to be part of the prophetic shift we are undergoing.
The world – according to Hinduism and Buddhism, is ‘maya’, illusion. Similarly, Carl Jung saw the world as a projection of the psyche, a parable of the imagination. I take this to be true, to the deepest level. The imagination is not just a faculty. William Blake considered it to be human existence itself. We are living a fable devised by one underlying source, pure consciousness – the ‘I Am That’, which we are. When we deepen our consciousness – when we ratchet up our awareness of unity within multiplicity – the world shifts correspondingly.
We can no longer allow ourselves to be carried along by the forces of history. Humanity has reached a juncture where, in order to survive, we must become co-creative with the evolutionary process, inflecting and shaping it. We can take responsibility for the plot, its twists and dizzying turns. This requires a new vision and shaping intention.
I don’t think everyone needs to drink ayahuasca, go to Burning Man, or explore the prophetic or esoteric aspects of reality. There are many different pathways to self-knowledge and happiness. I also believe that it makes no sense to separate out the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘material’ – or the spiritual and the political – as if they are opposites. That is a flaw in our thinking that we inherited from outmoded religions. The separation between spirituality and matter was absorbed into New Age spirituality, which has often been self-centred. Now we must grow beyond it to make a spiritual commitment to our human family, as a whole, as well as to the greater community of life on Earth.
It is hard to imagine how we can make a rapid systemic transition without a mass awakening or a consciousness revolution. As unlikely and implausible as it seems, we need to transform the basis of our post-industrial, ecologically suicidal, hyper-individualist, deeply unjust society. We can establish, in its place, a system that supports the collective health of humanity as it restores and replenishes the biosphere. Considering the severity of our biospheric emergency, we must find technical as well as social solutions that can replicate quickly and scale exponentially. If it helps to focus our minds on the alternative, we can call it a regenerative society.
Sustainability, the ability to maintain life in its current form over a long duration, needs to be eclipsed by a new paradigm. As a call to action, what sustainability seeks to sustain, above all, is some version of our current way of life, even though the evidence is quite overwhelming that it cannot continue. Living processes, generally, don’t just endure or persevere. Life either flourishes and blooms, evolves and transforms, or it stagnates and dies. The rhetoric of sustainability tends to support the belief that our current form of post-industrial capitalism can be reformed – that it can persist, in something close to its present order.
The emergent paradigm defines its ideal as a regenerative culture. We can look at our current institutions and ideologies as a substrate, a foundation, providing the conditions for another level of transformation, just as modern bourgeois society, based on market relations and competition, emerged from monarchy, based on feudalism and obligation. According to chaos theory, the nonlinear dynamics of living organisms allow for the emergence of new orders of complexity, when a system reaches a high level of instability. As the mono-cultural, technocratic approach of post-industrial capitalism crumbles, a new worldview – a new way of being – is crystallizing.
To understand what I mean by a regenerative society, we can contrast it with the consumerist society we have now. In a consumer society, the main focus of cultural and industrial production is making and selling consumer goods to those who can afford them. Industry creates profit for corporations and shareholders. A regenerative society, in contrast, would apply technology and industry to restore and replenish the ecosystems of the planet, while also seeking to enhance the quality of people’s lives. The focus would not be on accumulating wealth for the few, but on distributing goods and resources fairly. The goal of such a system is a world where humanity thrives, living in harmony and symbiosis with the planet. This requires a greater emphasis on resilient local communities and bioregions, rather than global corporations and nation-states.
Albert Camus – chic existentialist, renowned hipster intellectual of his time – saw rebellion as a metaphysical principle. When men rebel, they overcome their individuality and alienation. They identify themselves with all those who suffer under oppression. In The Rebel, he wrote, ‘only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred (or to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace) and the world of rebellion. The disappearance of one is equivalent to the appearance of the other, despite the fact that this appearance can take place in disconcerting forms.’
Modern civilization represents rebellion from the past. We rebelled against any idea of God or the sacred, declaring, with Nietzsche, ‘the death of God’. Is it possible we are leaving the time of rebellion behind us? Has nihilism, hyper-individualism, domination, patriarchy, run its course? Are we finally losing interest in our own extended tantrum? Is the pendulum swinging back from the world of rebellion to the world of the sacred? Personally, I believe this is our evolutionary destiny.
Since the 1960s, consumer society has diluted the pursuit of enlightenment into a lifestyle option, as meaningless as all the rest. People seek enlightenment at weekend workshops, or by mantra chanting twice a day, while they pursue careers in corporate finance or advertising. Mindfulness is taught to project managers at Google to boost their efficiency.
Spirituality has become trendy; shamanism is a fad. For the post- Marxist critic Slavoj Žižek, Westernized Buddhism, as well as yoga and urban shamanism, ‘enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game, while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle really is – what really matters to you is the peace of the inner self to which you know you can always withdraw . . .’ Žižek proposes that ‘New Age “Asiatic” thought’ – reflected in bestsellers like The Power of Now, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and The Secret – has become ‘the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism’. I find this a helpful insight.
The elite of our society – mainly Baby Boomers now – tend to indulge in a feel-good, Diet Coke version of spirituality, without sacrifice or commitment. They nibble at the edges of mysticism, toying with The Four Agreements, mastering The Seven Laws of Spiritual Success, flying to Hawaii for weekend Tantra workshops designed to enhance their orgasms. They scrupulously avoid the surrendering of ego meant to accompany enlightenment, as well as its political, social and ecological dimensions.
But right now we need to wake up for real. We must wake up – not because spirituality makes us feel good, or chanting a mantra gets us a new car, or because avowing Advaita Vedanta non-duality assuages our guilt at not doing enough for the world. We need to wake up because the Arctic was 30 degrees Celsius warmer than usual in the winter of 2015. We are polluting every ecosystem on the planet. Somehow, we have to overcome distractions to confront the destruction we have unleashed on the world – and hopefully reverse it. At this point, our planet’s future – the lives of our children and all children – depends on us, on our passion, commitment and critical discernment; on how we make use of our limited time and resources.
We must overcome self-interest to see ourselves in a new way. Our species can evolve to play a supportive role in the Earth’s ecology: that’s our opportunity. As individuals, we can see ourselves as secret agents or midwives, helping to birth a new human society. We can be catalysts who create change with our words and our deeds. As part of this initiation the cosmos has delivered to us, I am afraid we must be willing to make serious short-term sacrifices.
I meet many well-off people who are constantly trying to heal themselves. While healing ourselves is important, it can also become a trap. Instead of waiting for some magical healing to occur, the most advanced and aware among us need to lead by example – to take courageous risks, pointing the way forward for everyone else. Perhaps we can only truly be healed when we overcome our sense of entitlement by embracing a new collective mission, acting together as one.
Multitudes of people are getting angry and desperate. As the old world collapses around them, they will turn to Trump-like demagogues, choose hatred and pursue short-sighted goals that will further damage the Earth. These people need to be shown another path, but we can only do so once we have found it ourselves. At this point, we need more than a vague idea of the alternative – we can’t just hold hands together and sing ‘Imagine’, waiting for a more beautiful world spontaneously to emerge. We have to understand what’s wrong with our system while we work on building the tangible alternatives. We should demand a world that works for everyone – including the most desperate, marginalized and deprived people.
We all know, in our hearts, that liberation – authentic illumination – requires a Christ-like dedication to service. Buddhists take the Bodhisattva vow – they commit to awaken all sentient beings, out of compassion, through innumerable cycles of death and rebirth. What does this mean for us? We must find a way to embody, to express, our solidarity with the sorrowing Earth.
If we are aspects of that one being – the eternal principle, the Absolute, the Void, the Creator Spirit, the Artist formerly known as God – then the original revelations of Christianity shine in a new light: I and the Father are one. Love your neighbour as yourself. If there is only one non-local source – one consciousness, infinitely variable and indivisibly the same – then all separation is illusion: we are one.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King remain intimidating figures because of the way they lived their values and ideals. For Martin Luther King, ‘The Kingdom of God’ existed now, not in some imaginary future. The Kingdom comes into being whenever we unite our ideals with our actions. Gandhi built a mass movement of nonviolent activism based on principles of satyagraha, or ‘truth force’. He overthrew British colonial rule in India based on this principle: ‘The followers of truth and nonviolence will offer satyagraha against tyranny and win over the tyrant by love, he will not carry out the tyrant’s will but he will suffer punishment even unto death for disobeying his will until the tyrant himself is won over.’ Gandhi’s thought is so unadorned, so pure, it is still shocking to encounter it.
We have unleashed planetary catastrophe through our actions as a species. We have induced an initiatory crisis for humanity as a whole. I think that on a subconscious level we have willed this into being. We are forcing ourselves to evolve – to change or die – by creating this universal threat to our existence. We will either squander our chance and fail as a species, or we will seize it, making a voluntary, self-willed mutation in how we think and act. This is the choice that faces us now.