Pinchbeck - Notes from the edge times: Review

Pinchbeck’s new book Notes from the Edge Times is a slight departure from the subjects he explored in his first two books (Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl) which primarily investigate prophesy, psychedelics, UFOs and shamanism. Now he takes a somewhat more Marxist (almost Zizekian) slant on where culture should head in the midst of socio-economic collapse. According to Pinchbeck, human culture has reached a precipice where we must permanently puncture the bubble economy and break the cycles of our current social stasis, a time where we need to evolve and adapt or face extinction as a species: “we actually need to build the scaffold for the new society and value system while the old one melts down. I find that most people from the older generation share this blind spot. Many artists embrace the culture’s destructive tendencies, even glamorizing the dysfunctional characters who emerge from our cynical doom-spiral state. We tend to dwell upon the muck, rather than use art to envision and inspire the way out of it”

Although I emphatically agree with Pinchbeck’s core mantra – Evolve! – I understand critics who point out that Notes from the Edge Times simply restates this same message over and over again in different ways, albeit in beautiful and compelling ways. He provides numerous examples, anecdotes, and aphorisms, but all his writing circles around a mystified endorsement for spiritual evolution and a general discontent with the modern capitalist ethos. For me, Pinchbeck is the perfect writer to augment one’s own undertaking of this so-called ‘Great Work,’ the emptying of the ego to enter into a confrontation with the unconscious, the gateway to the numinous, the higher Self. As Pinchbeck describes “The Self doesn’t care if we drive a fancy car or score with supermodels, and might even prefer to smash delusion of the ego to incite deeper realization.” However, for those who haven’t regenerated after spiritual self-decimation (or breaking open the head) should note that Pinchbeck’s writings are a supplement and not a supplanter for such experiences and journeys. Like Jung, he’s the type of spiritual thinker who deters people from becoming clones or fanatical disciples. For example, in one of the book’s chapters, Pinchbeck confesses that “I have taken as my personal mantra the not very transcendent phrase, ‘I don’t know.’”

“Some theorists propose that we have reached a point in evolution where we have the capacity to consciously co-create reality, and choose our own script for the future, this feels fuzzily plausible to me. On the other hand, our past actions and intentions have created the reality we experience now. It seems highly unlikely we can phase-shift to hyperspace, the fifth dimension, or what ever it is, until we have learned how to take proper care of this material world, and those who share it with us. Although maybe I am wrong and we will get a free pass. I just don’t know.”

This chapter captures the essence of Pinchbeck: an honest and brilliant writer who filters through an impossible nebula of information and experiences, assembling it all into prose and accepting none of it as objective truth. Spiritual inquiry desperately needs this quality of deconstructing. We should longer accept faith alone as an intellectual or spiritual strength. In these days of apparent rapture, too many have turned towards divisive factions of thought out of fear. Here, we need to scratch at something new, beyond duality, something beyond the excess that capitalism necessitates for its own economic distention, beyond its Darwinian behavioral deadlock, and definitely beyond the hellfire soothsayers that crave paternalistic punishment. Many open hearted individuals look to the horizon in yearning for a new renaissance of perception, where we shed our ‘us versus them’ mentality for a new global awareness, a paradigm that avows the radical equality of people.

Notes from the Edge Times provides enlightening commentary and critiques of today’s cultural and spiritual climate. It ultimately forsakes the force and otherworldliness of his previous works for a more pragmatic world view and perspicuous style of writing.