Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 345: Daniel Pinchbeck

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Daniel Pinchbeck, author of numerous amazing books on gnosticism, psychedelics and shamanism, joins the DTFH! This episode is brought to you by Squarespace (use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site). This episode is also brought to you by Raycon (visit buyraycon.com/duncan and use offer code: DUNCAN20 at checkout for 20% off).

When life gets crazy and when doesn't it? ShopRite helps you keep it all together. Now with a little extra help from Instacart. If you need your groceries now-ish, but your options for going to ShopRite are later-ish or never-ish, you can get everything you need delivered through Instacart right to your door in as fast as an hour.

Skip the shop and savor more of your crazy, busy life with ShopRite and Instacart. Visit instacart.com to get free delivery on your first order. Offer valid for a limited time, minimum order, $10 additional terms apply. Greetings to you, sweet friends. It is I, Dee Trussell, and you are listening

to the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour Podcast. Today, we dive in to the sweet world of aliens, the occult, ayahuasca, DMT, and UFOs. Pretty much my favorite things on earth. And we take the dive with Daniel Pinchbeck, author of many books, including Breaking Open Ahead, which is a fantastic book on ayahuasca. We're gonna jump right into this episode,

but first, this. This episode of the DTFH was brought to you by the HTML Wisdom Shamans over at Squarespace.com. Friends, if you need to make a beautiful website, Squarespace has everything you need to produce something so glorious, it has the possibility of not just amplifying your own life as though somebody had just injected the light

of a radiant sun god into your juggler vein, but also it can help you create your business or your podcast, or even better, it can help you create something for no reason other than just wondering what would happen if you had a website floating out there in the beautiful winds of the internet. Why not make a beautiful website

to celebrate the life of your grandmother? Think how excited she would be to suddenly go to her website and see, there it is. My grandson loves me so much. He made a website filled with just pictures of my feet. Whether you need to get a website up fast or you wanna create a high level website of deep, profound complexity,

like the one you'll see over at dunkintrustle.com. Squarespace has everything you need to start building a glorious website today. Squarespace perfectly sizes to any device. They have shopping cart functionality if you want to start selling something and they are perfect for launching your podcast. It's a really incredible company.

I've been working with them now for many, many years and every time I upload an episode of the DTFH, I use Squarespace's interface and I have not had a problem yet. They're wonderful. Try them out. Head over to squarespace.com, floretslashdunkint, and when you're ready to launch,

use offer code DUNKINT to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Again, that's squarespace.com, floretslashdunkint, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code DUNKINT to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Give them a test drive. If they work for you, dive in.

Thank you, Squarespace, for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Dear darlings, if you want commercial-free episodes of the DTFH or just want to listen to your noble host, rambling for hours at a time, head over to patreon.com, floretslashdtfh, and dive in. There you will find commercial-free episodes of the DTFH, and at least once a month,

I do the exact same thing I will be doing when I inevitably find myself wandering around on the streets of some unknown city, talking to the air. I do a long, hour-long, rambling thing as I try to connect the chaotic, strange tendrils of the octopoid creature that is my mind together in some coherent form, and it's all there for you. Just head over to patreon.com, floretslashdtfh,

and subscribe. We also have a wonderful shop located at dunkintrustle.com, and also, I'm gonna start doing, if you wanna come and hang out in a kind of silent, probably boring way, the first Sunday of every month at Samarasah Yoga Studio starting in August, we're gonna just start doing a sitting meditation. I'm not really gonna do much talking.

It's literally just gonna be us sitting there quietly together. Go to Samarasah's website, they'll be linked to it at dunkintrustle.com in this episode, and come and hang out quietly with us for a little bit of time. I just have been doing my own sort of solitary meditation practice,

and every once in a while, I like to sit with a group of people just because it's weird, and it's cool, and it's fun, and it's weird. All right, we've got a fantastic podcast for you today. Philosopher, author, and psychonaut, and activist Daniel Pinschbeck is here with us today. My apologies that we recorded this in London.

Well, he was in London, I was in the United States, and you're gonna hear that weird warping thing where suddenly it sounds like somebody has transformed into a robot or is using a really shitty vocoder. I kinda like it because we talk about Gnostic conspiracies, occult control mechanisms, Daniel's new book, and it really does seem like

whenever we're getting to a point of really talking about something heavy, it just warps in this sort of demonic way. So again, my apologies, there is no way for me to fly to London and do this live, but I really did enjoy this conversation. So without further ado, everybody welcome back to the Ducket Trussell Family Hour podcast,

Daniel Pinschbeck. ["Ducket Trussell Family Hour Podcast"] ["Welcome, welcome on you, that you are with us, shake hands, no need to be moved, welcome to you." It's the Ducket Trussell Family Hour Podcast. Mr. Pinschbeck, welcome back to the DTFH. It's good to see you, man. I gotta tell you, I'm on your email list

and the book you just wrote, you called it an essay, popped up on my feed and it, man, it's right up my alley. And so I just wanna talk about this incredible book because it involves everything I love, occult conspiracies, the UFO phenomena, as people are calling it, and Gnosticism. So just for my own selfish desires, I wonder if you could start off

by giving a very brief synopsis of Gnosticism as you understand it, because it's been really weird. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around it. Yeah, so I mentioned that a good source is this book by John Lim Lash, not in his image, but essentially this idea that, you know, some people think Gnosticism is a heretical sect of Christianity,

but it's actually kind of a preexisting mystery school wisdom of the ancient world, the form that it took in the classical world until it was really persecuted pretty much out of existence like the fourth and fifth century. And the core belief, it's very different than Orthodox Christianity. They talk about a beautiful goddess

who lived at the center of the universe called the Plurama, who began to have visions and dreams of this, you know, emerald green and blue planet floating, you know, in the universe, and which was the earth, and she became enraptured when she actually fell into matter and she incarnated as the earth. So for them, the earth is this goddess of fire.

And in that fall into matter, it was a big event and it created these like ripples in the space-time fabric, and through those little rips and tears, these kind of devious evil beings called the Arkans came into this reality led by the ringmaster, who's known as the Demiurge. And essentially, they've, you know,

I guess you could say that they live off of our energy, our fear, our devotion and so on. So they've kind of constructed a false reality, you know, sort of matrix reality that we're stuck in. So we don't actually get to connect with the true cosmic source. So for the Gnostics, like the myth of the Garden of Eden and the serpent and the garden, they don't see that as Satan.

They see that as actually as the Christ is like coming as a messenger of the true cosmic power to, you know, help humanity awaken and gain knowledge again. Wow, you could see how that would infuriate modern stereotypical Christians. Cause that seems like definitely a thing that Satan cooked up. Like if you believe in that model, it's so amazing.

And all, but essentially the Gnostics are saying, actually Christianity is clearly the thing Satan cooked up. Christianity is a Demiurgic deviation that kind of feeds on some of our, you know, psychology. It's very cuttingly constructed. I mean, this is, John Lash really goes into this very well in the not in his image. So like, you know, it has a lot of things

and it really, it feeds on our desire to be perfect and to be good, but it uses these tendencies kind of against us, you know? So for instance, even the idea that we possess original sin is a deviation, you know? And if you look at Eastern religions or indigenous traditions, there isn't that idea at all. Like, you know, in the Eastern tradition,

you know, we actually have basic goodness, you know, and then maybe things happen and karma intrudes and we fall into ignorance or delusion or whatever. But this idea that we start out tainted is part of how the Demiurge kind of manipulated us into a control system. Okay, yeah, sure. If you can make somebody feel evil, bad, whatever,

you can control them, right? That's like a great way to control somebody is make them, also if someone thinks they're evil, they probably don't know themselves very well, right? Because they haven't gotten past the smog layer of karma into that fundamental goodness. And if you've got them there, then you've got them because you could tell them,

oh, yeah, you're rotten, you're just fucked. So as Robert Anton Wilson says, this is related to authoritarian structures, right? That's the idea that the Demiurge manifests as fascism, essentially. Right, well, okay, but also, I guess the idea is that, like if they found the Gnostic gospels in the desert and Nagomite in like the 40s

and, you know, some of them predated Christian scriptures and, you know, but I guess the idea is there was much more of the idea of like, open the door for yourself, like basically an esoteric path and Christ, you know, the idea that you save your soul by believing that having faith in Christ was not the Gnostic idea at all. The idea is that, you know, Christ was kind of like,

you know, a holy figure or a perfected human that he was showing us a model to follow, to reach an illuminated condition, not like we just save our souls by believing and having faith in something. Right, yeah, this isn't like a, it's not some kind of cure-all medicine. But, whoa, how appealing is that idea, though?

What a great way to just skip over all of the effort. All you gotta do is believe in this thing and imagine that you're saved somehow and then, voila, you're fixed or something. I have always gravitated towards Gnosticism. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by the wonderful Babies of Sound over at Raycon. You know what, I was in like a glasses store,

sunglasses store the other day, and I was looking at like hyper-expensive glasses, specifically Gucci sunglasses. And for one dark second, I was on the precipice of spending like, I don't know, $600 on a pair of fucking sunglasses. And then I remembered that I have never kept a pair of sunglasses longer than two months

before I sit on them, break them, or leave them somewhere else. Similarly, I once had a pair of super-expensive Apple fucking AirPods, and I left them in an Uber, and I decided, you know what, fuck it, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm not gonna buy another pair. I'm just not gonna have nice fucking earbuds

because I lose them. And then I got sponsored by Raycon. Raycon, they have wonderful wireless earbuds that started about half the price of any other premium wireless earbuds on the market. And they sound just as amazing. The company was actually co-founded by RayJ and celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Cardi B.

Raycon's E50 wireless earbuds have totally changed the game. They're comfortable. They're easy to take anywhere, and they've got these fancy cases that I like. I don't know why I like shit like that. Unlike some of your other wireless options, Raycon earbuds are both stylish and discreet, with no dangling wires or stems.

Those things could kill you. You suck you into a wood chipper. You wanna risk that? You need wireless buds, baby. They look great. They sound great. And most importantly, if by some horrific, catastrophic moment

of being distracted or pickpocketed by some earbud thief, at least you don't have to feel the gnawing guilt of thinking that you threw away a shit ton of money because you couldn't keep your fucking earbuds in your pocket. Raycon offers their wireless earbuds for everyone in a range of fun colors and at an unbeatable price. Go to buyraycon.com slash Duncan to get 15% off your first order.

That's buyraycon.com slash Duncan for 15% of Raycon wireless earbuds. If you've been eyeing a pair, now is the time to get this glorious deal. It's buyraycon.com slash Duncan. Support our sponsors because these sweeties support us. So to get into your book,

I didn't finish it. I just skimmed it and like I told you on the phone yesterday, you know you've got a good book when you realize that you're just underlining everything but I wanna read a quote from it if I can find it here. And maybe you could explain it to me one second here. Sorry.

Okay. And if you hear a baby, that's my baby. A likely story. Why would I even say that? Like you wouldn't think it was my baby. Why would I even say that? What's wrong with me? Okay.

So, damn it, I lost my space. Here it is. Okay, this is it. It seems an invisible something presses down on us, contorting all of our efforts so that our best intentions lead to the worst outcomes or the repetition of old miseries. Of course, most would argue

that this force is simply human greed and ignorance and they may be correct. But perhaps other forces are at play as well. Perhaps there are indeed off-planet, extra or infradimensional entities manipulating humanity, seeking to advance their own agendas. To be honest, I am quite certain this is the case. How are you so certain?

Well, I guess it has to do with my own personal experiences and like trying to build counter institutions or alternatives. And yeah, it just feels that there's like, monkey wrenches get thrown in. Like something doesn't really want us to evolve in a positive direction. So I guess that's kind of where that came from, that idea.

No, as I was saying, like any time I talk about Gnosticism running this shit, I will, I almost want to do a study and just like have a random generator tell me when to talk about Gnosticism on the podcast and see if it starts fusing out technically. Cause it does, I know what you're saying. I mean, on one level it sounds absolutely paranoid, crazy.

Anyone listening who like considers themselves logical or rational, feel free to roll your fucking eyes. But it does appear that they're these invisible barriers that instantaneously spring up the moment you make a strong decision in the direction of anything other than consuming. The moment you do that, it's like your own personal shit will pop up.

But then also other like stuff to the point where you think, oh, is this like a test? It has a quality of that. An initiatory feeling. Like this is- Was that Wilson called it like chapel perilous or something like that? Yeah.

All the tests that suddenly pop up. Yeah, yeah, it's like, okay, if you want, if you really want to like do this thing, whatever it may be, your own personal betterment, some compassionate act, it's not going to just be that easy. Like you have to really- To be like maximum, maximum resistance.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, obviously there's different ways to look at it. I mean, you know, one esoteric idea is that ultimately there's just one consciousness, you know, which you could transduce to say that we're all God on some level and have that type of capacity. But, you know, we, yeah, so in a sense,

I mean, I did organize two retreats years ago with the Khoi and the Lumbia and, you know, they walked like 25 hours down to the mountains to hang out with us and talk about their spiritual philosophy. And that's the culture where like the young kids who are going to be the teachers spend like seven years or more in like a dark retreat and a cave. Jesus.

They learn all the metaphysical traditions and ritual traditions without actually seeing the world and then they come out. So it's, you know, but basically the core nugget that they were hoping to convey to us and they were really happy when I finally kind of like repeated it back to them is that somehow, you know, what we experienced as the material world,

the physical world, the natural world directly reflects our individual level of like spiritual development or consciousness development, you know? So in a way that on one level, if we get these, you know, negative attacks and reflections back, it probably just means that we have, you know, more work to do, like more development to do and we haven't really integrated like the shadow, you know?

Yeah, but I talked about in that essay that you're involved with right now, the occult control system, you know, young, you know, wrote a book called The Flying Saucer Myth, which was his last work. He also believed that we were moving into the time that, you know, these religious traditions talked about as apocalypse, which for him, you know,

I mean, the word apocalypse literally means unveiling of the hidden thing or the revealing or the uncovering. And actually what the ultimate positive meaning of it is, is a, you know, young talked about it as the coming of the self and the conscious realization. So, you know, our consciousness growing to the point where we're able to actually kind of integrate the unconscious and the shadow aspects of the psyche, you know?

Sure. Yeah, yeah. So that maybe it's just necessarily part of this process. Like we can't really, you know, whatever leap we're trying to make individually and collectively, you know, requires these tests and these failures and then trying again and, you know, as Samuel Beckett said, you know, try, fail, try again and fail better, you know?

Oh, fail better. Ha ha ha ha. But, but I've become an expert at failure, so that's good news. But I did, I want to, this... I think I could give you a run for your money though. Ha ha ha ha. We'll have a contest.

The, the, the, there is a quality to it though, which, and, and you know, I don't want to get all paranoid here, but sometimes there is a sensation of feeling like, this is actually more than just, you know, I want to, I love the university or these cosmic university idea. We're all in some training, you know, academy for like young gods or whatever.

And we're being taught some basic stuff here. We are in the cave, so to speak. This place is the cave. And we're being taught some, some, what seems to be something involving not don't be selfish or something. But there does feel like there's also a prison aspect to it, which is why I gravitate towards Gnosticism,

that there is a sense of like, no, no, it's, it's not quite that. It's like you're, we're stuck in something here. And this is in Buddhism, Samsara, the repetition over and over and over and over again. It's Nietzsche talks about it a little bit. And in your book, but before I didn't have time to continue reading, you started talking

about this idea of the multiverse. And I was, since I haven't finished, I'm authentically asking, are you, do you imply in this book that by changing our perceptions, we sort of transcend the soul prison or jump into some alternate timeline where this rotten shit isn't happening? Something like that might, might be possible.

I mean, you know, yeah, I mean, it may, I mean, you know, I can't say, I mean, I've sort of like, so, you know, some of my trajectory has involved, like I wrote a book called 2012, The Return of Kessel Quaddle. And that book, I spent a lot of time studying the crop circles in England, which, you know, most people believe are made by human hoaxers. But, you know, the deeper I got into it, you know,

the more, you know, kind of extraordinary it was. And the less likely it seemed to me that it's simply a human-made phenomenon for all sorts of reasons. I mean, there's like physicists who published papers and peer-reviewed science journals, like what happens to the crop in the pattern that it's actually somehow affected

by some type of energy that comes down from below that, you know, blows out his nose and so on. Hello, I got to stop you there. That's a, that's, I, you know, when I'm thinking about crop circles, my brain goes to hoax, that's the easiest thing to believe. But also you're looking at that and you're like, what kind of maniac does this level of hoax,

like you are, you've been snorting, that's three weeks of Adderall snorting to like, you know, I'm going to go to a complex, perfect geometry in my field overnight. But yeah, I never heard that this is coming. I always thought, you know, when I'm going, whoo, I always thought it was coming from space. I never...

Yeah, yeah, sometimes what people have seen are like these balls of light that fly over and then the crop kind of falls down. So it's some type of like, you know, electromagnetic or, you know, some form of energy that we don't quite understand. And, you know, the individual crops are often affected where they have these kind of like blown nodes

where they bend, you know. So something that wouldn't happen at all if they were just being knocked down with boards or whatever, you know. So, yeah, there's that. And as you said, the incredible perfection of some of them, the gigantic scale of some of them in relatively busy areas so that you really can't even figure out

how somebody would have concocted this in one night. And, you know, there are hoaxers who then get, you know, now they get assignments from corporations who like logos in the fields, but they can't do, you know, as pristine or as amazing. And this is what the Demiurge would do. That's what's so funny about it. The Demiurge, the great imitator,

the synthetic version of reality created by the universe. Of course, it sees a beautiful fucking crop circle and is like, let's put a Pepsi logo in that shit. Let's put a, you know, it's so satanic. So I'm sorry to cut you off. Crop, crop circles from the earth. But also your amazing book, which, by the way, I think you caught some flak

because you basically predicted the apocalypse, right? Well, yeah, I mean, actually, in that book, I never said that anything in particular was gonna happen, you know, at or around December 21st, 2012. And actually, I feel that more and more if somebody was really paying attention, totally vindicated that we moved into, you know,

kind of like a, you know, permanent, like semi-psychedelic reality, you know? Let me interject something here, because this for me was a thing like, well, Pinchback did it, man. He made a kind of end of the world prediction and those are very dangerous to do. And then now sometimes I'm like, holy shit, he was right.

The end of the world isn't ending the way we thought it would end, you know? Like that's the thing, like people have within us an iconcept of the end of the world, which involves what? Volcanoes, tsunamis, explosions, nuclear holocaust, but no one predicted that the apocalypse or the interim state between the lifting of the veil

would be a complete diffusion of all truth, like a hyper refracted warping funhouse mirror of literally everything, including the identity. Who would have called that? No one would have thought that. And so, yeah, now I do think, well, I think that if you were to take a person from the 80s and drop them into this dimension,

they might think that this was, at the very least, some kind of dystopian dream and a weird nightmare they were having, but they wouldn't think things were doing okay. In the normal sense of the word, you know? I like it, it's a fun apocalypse, but it definitely seems to be, there doesn't seem to be an apocalyptic flavor

in the air these days. Yeah, correct. I mean, but to say nobody would have predicted it, I mean, as a kind of a coda to the 2012 book, it's something I also discuss in the occult control system essay. A number of indigenous wisdom keepers now talk about sort of a period from 2012

to could be 2021 or 2025, and the 2021 is one that I've heard a bunch, is kind of the transition period. We're moving from kind of one world to the next. Right. And there's a Nwadol shaman, which is Nwadol is the Aztec tradition. Sergio Magada, who wrote a book called

The Age of the Six Sun, and he argues that, yeah, 2012 to 2021 is this kind of transition. And what we're transitioning to and from is what he talks about as a son of light to a son of darkness. So I know that sounds scary, but essentially from their perspective,

you know, the last thousands of years, we were under a son of light and the focus of human investigation, inquiry and activity was kind of the waking world, you know, the material world, through technology, through science, through agriculture, through rational thought and so on. When we move back towards a son of darkness,

the focus becomes more on the world of the psyche, the dream world. So Burns is becoming more and more like a waking dream. It's more and more subtly, a psychically malleable and permeable. Yeah. And, you know, and that's happening on so many levels. Like for instance, our technologies, you know,

so like, you know, 20 years ago, if we wanted to arrange this hangout, it would have been extremely difficult. Now it's like so simple. And expensive. You know, if you wanted, what's that? Yeah, if we wanted to, you know,

if you wanted to make a sculpture, you would have had to learn, you know, how to make a sculpture, but now you could just draw something on a napkin and a 3D laser printer, it could create it for you. So that's sort of interplay between the psychic and the physical is becoming more malleable, you know? As all our existing structures are kind of

breaking apart in some type of like, you know, trickster-esque, trickster-like cataclysm, you know? Ah, yes. So, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so I find that. So, and by the way, also, when I, you know, when we talk about either the Gnostic kind of framing or this Aztec construct around the sixth son

and the fifth son and sixth son, or, you know, Rudolf Steiner, or Waymore and Thompson, or Carl Jung, I think that it's really important because we've come from a very literal and dualistic way of understanding the nature of reality, we tend to grab onto some idea and be like, oh, that's the thing, you know?

But actually, I feel when it comes to these things that are subtler and more esoteric, it's actually very good to really look at a whole bunch of them and then kind of like put the patterns on top of each other and it's almost like a weaving, you know, where you get like the patterns begin to make sense together.

So, it's almost like learning how to listen to like a new kind of music, you know, or, yeah. So, it's like a truth emerges, but I think if you get too caught in one discourse or rhetoric, you kind of get caught in another belief system in a way. Sure, yeah, and if you want to embarrass yourself, that is a good way to do it

is to become a true believer in any one thing. And these days, you know, probably that's, it's all up in the air now. It's the Buddha saying, it's already broken, it's shattered, the whole thing is shattered and it's shattering more and more and more. And as part of that shattering, there is this sudden emergence of news stories

that had they come out in the 80s, would have caused riots, but now we're like, oh, whatever. UFOs, I'm watching CNN reporters talk about how the Air Force is picking up signals on this high-tech radar of these tic-tacs, and then that should be the news story, right? Like, wouldn't that just be the one of what we're all just talking about?

It's like, wait, there's things flying around that are breaking the laws of physics? Some of them are like spheres rotating within cubes and stuff like that. But, you know, it's like shit, yes, but shit's so weird right now that people are like, I won't think about that later. You know, this to me is something

that has really got me rubbing my head, wondering, like, well, I guess maybe there is no hope in the sense that the hypnosis that so many people are under right now is so intense that things breaking the laws of physics are being written off as we understand them. I mean, what I propose in the essay is that this is probably like a hyper-dimensional intervention.

So, you know, we're living in like, you know, these sort of linear constructs of space-time, but from a higher dimension, you know, you could move through time, you know, as we move through space and kind of orchestrate it, you know, for certain results in the same way we might like make a painting or a sculpture or something like that.

So, there may actually, and many people have talked about this idea of like a controlled disclosure. You know, the disclosure seems to be happening, you know, in correspondence with these other, you know, social and ecological breakdowns that are happening. And it may even be that there's, you know, agendas that are, you know, from these, say, hyper-dimensional forces that are not to our best interests

or to our benefits, and that's also playing out. And, you know, it's very hard to accept that as something legitimate, because it's so wacky from the way we've been looking at reality, but then if you get into all the abduction accounts and, you know, these endless stories about people being taken aboard these ships where they're sperm and egg are extracted

to make hybrid children, and they're brought back to play with the hybrid children, and they're shown films of like a future Earth where there's a lot of catastrophe for humans are walking arm in arm together enjoying, you know, the landscape. I mean, it almost seems as if we're being like set up or prepared for some type of, you know,

crack in the structure or disruption. Or, you know, it's also possible that this is, you know, not going to go like that. And it'll continue to be bizarre and subtle, but somehow like ineffable and out of our grasp. You know, it's, could go either way, actually. Well, I mean, the, it seems that whatever these things are, and, you know, Occam's razor tells us

that these are some kind of new military drone, maybe, you know, using alien technology or, you know, reverse engineered alien technology. Occam's boring fucking razor. But- I mean, if you're talking about reverse engineering alien technology, that's not so boring. Oh yeah, I guess you're right.

One of the things that I think is really silly is this idea that there would be these, you know, these crashed alien ships and technologies that they didn't mean for us to recover. I mean, if these things, as they seem to be, are like, you know, hundreds, thousands, millions of years ahead of us, they're not going to be crashing into the rocks.

So if we have recovered anything, it's because whatever's behind this thing wanted us to recover these things at these particular junctures. Right. As part of this unfolding narrative that they're constructing around us. Well, I mean, let's say that they're, let's say it is legitimately,

and even, I'm sorry to say boring, no level of this is boring. It's all fascinating, but let's just imagine it's some kind of new drone. Like they figured out how to, you know, I don't know. I read about what an Air Force pilot or an engineer was talking about, well, here's what it would have to be, you know,

or what we based on our understanding what it would be. And they were mentioning something to do with the superconductor, but one that operates at room temperature, generating a mass that was somehow more than the planet, meaning that you would not be pulled into the gravitational well, and then you would then be, it's anti-grav basically.

And then, but not just that, you would have to have something within the fucking thing. If it were piloted by organic life, which, you know, probably wouldn't be, it'd probably be a computer, they would also allow the person inside to not fall asleep or die from the intense G-force that would happen

if it was moving that fast. So, but let's just assume that is what it is. If that's what it is, we're still probably in trouble because that's a lot of power for a human being to have. That's an unstoppable thing. So, and it all just smacks of what McKenna was talking about with the, you know,

the singularity, the sparks flying off of this event in the future that's going. Yeah, the shockwaves of history, kind of like reverberating backwards through time or something like that. And this is, I don't mean to go back to a question I already asked, but just because you are,

you did mention with some confidence, which I respect that there is this ability to move through time the way we're able to move through space. To me, this is the thing that I keep, especially like in deep psychedelic moments is keeps coming to me as this notion of like, oh, our minds can in some way or another,

we can leap through the dream, leap through time. We don't have to be here in this place, the way we think we have to be. And then in your book, you brought up Steiner talking about some kind of new moon. That the, can you talk about that a little bit? Because to me, it really does kind of resonate. The problem with the Steiner stuff,

it's hard to talk about a little bit. You have to kind of go down the tunnel or not, because there's so many, I mean, from my perspective, Rudolf Steiner who lived from like 1861 to 1925 is like one of the most incredible philosophers, geniuses of the age. And the sense one gets is that he,

when we experienced maybe on the high dose, ayahuasca or LSD was something that was just a natural state for him. And so when he went to bed at night, he would close his eyes, he would enter into all these other visionary realms. And then he realized that nobody around him had this ability.

So he was careful not to really talk about it until he became like a philosopher, got a degree in philosophy was like, had a job studying Gerta's science papers. Then he got involved with the theosophists like Madame Blavatsky, and kind of looked at what they were doing. So he really waited a long time until he began

to talk about the inner investigations that he'd made through his whole life. And essentially what Steiner claimed, at that point in time on the earth had a reason. And his mission was actually to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the West, which we'd lost with the rise of monotheism. Whereas like to better something,

they know when to expect these sort of llamas to come back. They have tests like this person was this person, that person was that person. We've lost all that, but it's still continued. So he actually ended up writing a series of books from karmic relationships where he would trace different individualities in the West back through their past incarnations.

But he also said that not only did human beings incarnate again and again, but the earth itself also reincarnates. And for him, the incarnations of the earth were really connected to human evolution and human consciousness. I mean, not just human. He also talked about, you know,

plants and minerals undergoing kind of an evolution of consciousness, you know. And so then he talked about how we have a number of bodies right now. We have, you know, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the eye or the ego. So we have like four bodies and we're moving towards the fifth incarnation of the earth

where we receive a new body, or we develop a new body that he called the spirit self. Wow. And essentially the spirit self would be, you know, so where we are now, we have the four bodies, the physical body, the etheric body or the life body, you know, the astral body.

When we go to sleep at night, then the eye and the ego connect to the astral body and they go into the astral worlds and sort of fly around and have adventures and they come back to the physical body, the etheric body. But the astral body is the realm of all the disincarnate spirits and entities. And a lot of them are, you know,

really want to have sensory world experience. So they're trying to get back into the sensory world. And so they hitch a ride on us. That manifests in our lives as compulsions, depressions, addictions and so on. Inspiration too though, right? It's not all bad shit. Like sometimes they give us like talent

or like suddenly you can play the piano when you couldn't before, things like that. They give you little gifts. I think it's where the whole selling your soul to the devil was just some grumpy ass dope who was like being offered some wonderful bobble from the spirit realm and was like, ah, you want my soul? Yeah, yeah.

So basically, well, exactly. That's what Steiner talked about when he talked about Lucifer, like Luciferic spirits. Lucifer means light bringer. There was a kind of spirit that had evolved too far to be in a physical embodiment. But it could only evolve on its own path by making an alliance with the human being.

So that's what like Arabs talk about, as Islamics talk about as the djin, or the Greeks talked about as the daimon, not the demon, but the daimon, which was your genie, the spirit of inspiration or influence, whatever. But anyway, so basically the fifth body that we're forming as we go into this next world incarnation

is as we are able to transform the astral body. So it doesn't prey upon us in these destructive ways. We create this new body called the spirit self that gives us a more conscious capacity to experience the astral worlds. Wow. And that's actually what's happening for him. But he also said some people

aren't gonna make this transition. Right, so he said that which other occult thinkers have also said, and it's not something that I really, that part of it that I prefer to dwell on or whatever, because then you also get cast like the doomsday thing again. But yeah, so when there are these evolutionary shifts, not everybody is ready to evolve in a certain direction.

So they have to take other kind of incarnational pathways. And so he talked about some group of humans being like so degraded and their karma is so bad that they would ultimately form like a new planetary body, like a kind of diseased mood that they would take off in their own direction. Big Trump rally, just a fucking infinite Trump rally floating up there.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, I like it. I'm sorry, I love it, man, I love that. I mean, it's such a fantasy idea. And again, you know, I don't mean to dehumanize anybody and I really mean that. But at some level, God, Jesus, don't you fantasize sometimes, man, about like, this is what I think sometimes.

If suddenly the ability, it just happened that we could move into another dimension. Anyone had it, if you wanted to go, you could go. Maybe you couldn't come back. Say it's another planet, I don't know what it is. How many people would stick around here? You know, especially if that place had within it all the things, certain personality types with love,

power, power. That's also kind of, you know, so many of these abduction accounts, they also talk about like Carla Turner with these books, where she talked about being, they go up there into these abductions. They're actually trained to operate the saucers. They're kind of told there's going to come like an ecological or military catastrophe moment.

Then the aliens are going to scoop a lot of humans like onto these ships and like take them somewhere else. And I would say that if that is happening, it seems like what's an offer. I would definitely stay away from those ships. What? Who do you work for, pinchback? Well, anybody can make their own determination at that point.

But I would prefer to go down with the ship than go up with their ship. You're not going to get on the ship. Come on. That's those particular aliens. Jesus, see, this reminds me of something one of my friends mind fucked me with a long time ago, which is like, when you die, don't go in the light.

You'll regret it. Oh, really? Yeah, like the light like said. That's the opposite of the book of the dead, no? Oh, I know. I mean, this was the worst mind fuck of all time. Because A, it's like now you're going to give me another thing to be confused about when I die.

How does he know? What's his specialized knowledge? I didn't ask. That's something you would ask. I didn't ask. I'm just, I was just like, oh, fuck, man, great. Now I'm going to have to roll the dice even then. But again, there is a sense of, well, one of my friends,

Jason Lou, have said to me, if the Gnostic stuff is right, then you do have to be suspicious of potentially all ethics, all morality, all of what we consider to be right, at least from a sort of mundane sense, could potentially be a trick, not a trick UFO, but a sort of, I guess you could say, linguistic UFO or a codified UFO that people are jumping into, imagining there's some safety in these weird regulations,

stipulations, and laws, particularly things involving like monogamy, all the standard shit that keeps people manacled into a specific type of life. You know what I'm saying? It's like people are already jumping on the wrong UFOs. Totally. Yeah, and that's actually, today I was preparing for a workshop and giving

with a friend on the trickster. And then I was starting to think about how, because there's this guy, George Hansen, who wrote a book called The Trickster and the Paranormal. I interviewed him once. You should totally have him on your show. He's really fascinating. I would love to.

Yeah. But he was talking about how we construct these like rigidified structures, bureaucracies, governments, monetary systems, education systems. And we keep trying to like banish and reject the trickster. But now we reached a certain point in doing that. And now the trickster has just like erupted into everything. It's like the ecological crisis, like Trump

is like the lord of misrule, like the Loki. Like in a way, even that trickster energy has been now sort of co-opted for the far right in a way. Whereas in the 60s, the trickster was more the size of like the yippies, the counterculture. So that's a very interesting thing to think about, I think. I do too. I mean, this is what I, this to me is maybe a blasphemous thing

for some people who don't want to admit it. But like with all the vileness of it from the, you know, the story, you know, the story of the coyote and like, I don't know, I'm going to fuck it up. But coyote is a rat. I don't know which creature, some wonderful creature, maybe a raccoon, I don't know, would leaves their kids with coyote.

You know, this is a myth. Coyote somehow is like, I'll babysit these kids. And, you know, the coyote being the trickster symbol for a trickster, you know? And so this poor dumb raccoon goes wandering off. And while the raccoon's gone, the coyote decapitates the kids, puts their heads on sticks, and then holds them in the window. So it looks like they're like happy that the mother's

coming home. But the fucking thing to catch, this is the trickster figure. Everyone thinks the trickster is like, I don't know what, man. Jim Carrey or some kind of like benevolent thing. This thing is like lava, magma, avalanches, the barbell, a weirdo throws from the overpass. It's not all like that what we know. And anytime you're around a true comic, a real comedian,

like at the comedy store, the ones who hang out there till 3 AM, watch the fuck out, man. They're like, they will suck you in just for fun. They won't hurt you on purpose, but you might get hurt if you're egoic or you're stuck in some certain part of yourself. Anyway. I guess it would hurt if they decapitated you and put your head on the stick.

Well, they'll decapitate your ego, or they'll decapitate, you know what I mean? They'll do a nice decapitation of the things that you love the most, and then do a little show with them and their corpses in front of you. But what I'm saying is, in that sense, to me, there is something beautiful about the American Trump right now, because it's so purely that chaos,

just a crazy swirl of absolute, illogical, complete confusion and weird, penduluming things. So in that way, it's like, my god, I guess. In the same way we didn't, it's like the anti-Christ qualities in that are so amazing. Because we always thought it would be, you know, the anti-Christ is supposed to be the omen. It's supposed to be Damien or whatever the fuck it, right?

There's this sophisticated guy drinking out of goblets, not some lunatic all blown out on Coke. What the fuck? So I mean, also the question is, you know, where does it go from here? That's a very interesting question. What do you think? Where do you think it goes?

Well, I mean, you know, so the last book that I published, I mean, I also want to discuss the new book that's coming out in September about ayahuasca. It was this book called How Soon Is Now. And yeah, in that book, I was looking at the ecological crisis as something like a collective initiation, a rite of passage for humanity that is going to force us to move from kind of adolescent

immaturity to adult responsibilities as species. And now I see that happening in like the children's movements in Greta Thunberg, who's basically seems like the voice of God right now. Wait, what's the, OK, can you wait, the children's movement. What is that? I missed that. All these kids in Europe who've been like striking

and doing hypermarches and so on. Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl, has a little bit of Asperger's, who's been speaking at, you know, she spoke to the UN, she spoke to the UK Parliament, and they declared a climate emergency. But she's a very, you know, focused voice who's somehow been given a lot of privacy right now. Actually, one of her ancestors, a brother

was a scientist who discovered the greenhouse effect back in the 19th century, which is quite interesting. Yeah, so anyway, so yeah, so this ecological crisis is this kind of collective rite of passage for humanity. And I think the movement towards the regressive movement towards the right is very much caused by what's happening ecologically. Just as in the 30s, societies were getting crowded,

and the Germans wanted more living room, the Libans realms that led to Nazism in some ways. Now people are beginning to fear about, you know, it's subconscious maybe, but resource depletion, peak oil, water, food sources, and immigrants, the threat that they posed, boundaries and borders. So the first movement is a regressive one towards authoritarianism.

But that's obviously not going to work. I mean, so if we stick with that, we're all probably going to die in some horrible extinction event. I mean, in Brazil, they're cutting down seven football fields of the Amazon rainforest per minute, and the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen, plus is like the center for the whole hydrological system of the planet.

So we can't really go too much further down that road, and we're going to probably see in the next couple of years the massive blowback. So if it's not going to be an authoritarian system that takes us any further, it's going to have to be something else, which might be more local, bioregional, citizens, councils, like actually people really taking responsibility in their locality

for their local situation, and also for the whole planetary situation, and potentially the tools that we've internet tools and social media, social networking tools could then be used to sort of transition into how we work together and communicate on the planet and make decisions together and so on. So it's going to have to be some kind of left field thing that emerges as a result of this collective realization

that we can't go further in this direction. This children's movement actually kind of reminds me, I mean, I'm trying to think of a nice way to say it. You know, like when you're around, I don't know what your dad's like, if you, but you know that it's almost a trope. The middle-aged dude goes to the doctor, and the doctor's like, you can't keep eating like this.

You can't keep smoking or drinking. You're going to fucking die. And then the middle-aged guy, out of so kind of like self-destructive, insane stubbornness, keeps doing it, doubles down on it even. Like fuck the doctor, you don't know what you're talking about. This is who I fucking am. To me, that's what we feel like collectively,

is like some dude in his 60s who just found out he's got diabetes and is an alcoholic. And instead of being like, oh, I'm going to stop drinking, he's like, fuck that, he's at the bar, like this is my life. And so within it, there's this like almost, how would you put it, glorified, self-destructive attitude that's being sort of reflected in what people

are calling climate denial, I think, you know, the sense of like, come on, the world is so big. It's so big, we're not affecting it at all. Anytime any kind of report comes out that even remotely alludes to things like, well, the CO2 is going to cause the greening of the planet, or things like that, people shoot it down. You know, they're like, you know,

or rather jump on it because they're excited because it's like, actually, don't you see, the factories are going to make the planet greener. The factories are going to make things better. Who wants all that fucking ice anyway, you know, insanity? So I love your optimism. And I love how your book, though I will admit, when I read it, it bugged me, I didn't like it.

In the same way you don't like hearing the truth, sometimes I got really pissed, man, but a lot of that stuff stuck with me, sent up to this very day, specifically, make where you're at a vacation, you know, don't you worry, whenever I go anywhere on a vacation, I always think of you telling me that and feel like an asshole.

So thanks, at least that happened. But I love that idea of like, make your home where you're at a place you can relax in instead of having to go all the way across the fucking planet to not be relaxed. So anyway, I love your optimism, but man, I don't know. This children's movement sounds great. But there's a-

I mean, I'm actually not, frankly, that optimistic at this point. Yeah, I mean, I've actually, if anything, I mean, the environmental data is so much worse even than it was a few years ago. You know, I'm, you know, I would say, I think it's highly likely that, you know, we'll see catastrophic breakdown,

potentially even human extinction, you know, within some, you know, relatively short timeframe. However, I don't know. And as long as I don't know, I'll try to argue for what seems to me like the happier, you know, alternative, you know? Well, maybe you're ayahuasca, maybe it's ayahuasca.

I'm sorry to cut you off. Maybe, you know, my, the hippie side of me, when it thinks about, well, what is the thing that's gonna push everyone, or enough of us collectively over into a place where it doesn't make sense anymore to buy fucking sparkling water in plastic or to use plastic cups

or just to make the little changes that will add up over time. Sometimes, you know, many of us think, oh, it's clearly ayahuasca, it's psychedelics. Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. But also clearly, you know, it is true that individually, you know, it feels like pissing against the winds. You know, there would have to be

a larger collective social movement that, and that's where, you know, I think, you know, extinction rebellion is only a piece of the puzzle because I think that movement also has to show us and make it clear to us like how much more awesome our lives will ultimately be if we actually, you know, redirects, you know, what we're doing. And that's where I think things like psychedelics

and Tantra actually are crucial as part of like a new paradigm, you know, for the future. But yeah, and you mentioned ayahuasca. I did want to, you know, discuss the new book with you. Do we send you a copy? I can't remember. No, I didn't get, I, you, if you sent me the copy, I missed it.

What happened is the PDF that you were going to send, I think I missed it, but then I got the link to this amazing book. You got all excited. Yes, that's what happened. Yeah, yeah. So the ayahuasca book is essentially the phenomenon of ayahuasca.

I wrote it with a friend, a young woman, Sophia Rockland, who is amazing and is actually working as a coordinator of a program in Peru to sustainably grow and harvest ayahuasca for the benefit of local indigenous communities because there's already shortages of ayahuasca happening because of somebody Westerners going down there. Crazy.

Yeah. But it takes like, you know, like three to seven years to grow, to be usable or even like more like 10 years or more to be really a mature vine. So try to figure out how it can benefit these local communities in the long-term way as it was really important. Yeah, so the book really looks at all the aspects

of the ayahuasca phenomenon, like what we know about its history, its origins, the myths the tribes have, you know, personal transformation, spiritual transformation, it's connected to different religions, the legal issues around it, all around the world and all the research that's being done on it. Cool.

Yeah, I'm really happy. It's a really good overview that hopefully, you know, following on the long tail of Michael Pollan's book will, you know, somehow, you know, break its way into the mainstream consciousness. What is your, how often do you do ayahuasca? I haven't done it for a few years now. Maybe I did it once a year and a half ago

because the last time I really did it, I went down to Peru and worked with a master shaman down there and we did like six ceremonies in nine days, this was like three or four people. And that was like really, really powerful and transformative that it sort of made me feel less engaged in the idea of just doing it like once or twice for a weekend and I'm waiting to go down again

and do it soon. But I want to do it in that immersive way, perhaps in Diana with another plant, which is a really big part of the shepibo tradition. Right. So yeah, I'm waiting to hear the call of it and I haven't heard it for a little bit of a while. I never heard, I have never done ayahuasca.

I've smoked, I've done many psychedelics, but for some reason ayahuasca, I always have this sense of like an embarrassing sense of like, oh, you're not ready for that. You can't do it yet for some reason. It's quite annoying. I mean, I know I'm a, Ah, just do it.

Okay, I got your permission. Just do it, shut up. Well, maybe I will. Man. Yeah, I mean, there's some great people I can connect you with. That would be awesome. Yeah, I would like that.

I think maybe I am ready now that I have a son to probably help the family too. I know it heals. I mean, I know that because I've met people who have been healed by it. And so I know that much. I also know it throws some people into manic episodes too. Yeah, it's not a magic bullet or whatever.

I mean, it can show you things, but then also you have to kind of do the work. It's not Jesus. Right. So thank you so much. I love chatting with you. And I really, really love this essay. You're calling it, it seems like a book, whatever.

I love this. I love your writing. You're so talented. And I'm glad to hear that you have a new book coming out on ayahuasca. Can you tell people where they can find you? Got any events coming up or anything that people can go to?

Sure. I mean, we will have lots of events in the fall. You know, I think September 10th in New York is when they get McNally Jackson down on South Street. And well, yeah, well, that stuff is still kind of being assembled and set up. People can find me in all the usual ways, like Instagram and Twitter and Facebook.

And the books are on, you know, Amazon or at bookstores, you know, WebPlanetStream is the new one. And, you know, the occult control system is the one that we've been talking about a little bit too. Thank you, Daniel. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, buddy. Have fun in London.

Good to see you, and I hope to see you soon. Bye. Howdy, Krishna. Thank you. Ciao, Joe. Ciao. Dear friends, thank you so much for listening to this episode of the DTFH. All the links you need to find Daniel Pinchbeck, Samarasah Yoga Studio, and anything else we mentioned, including Daniel's awesome book slash essay

are gonna be at dunkintrustle.com. Much thanks to Raycon and Patreon for supporting this episode of the DTFH. Please support our darling sponsors who have taken the precarious dive into supporting the DTFH. Give us a nice rating on iTunes. Don't forget to subscribe and enjoy your existence,

my sweet, darling friends. Until next time, Hare Krishna. We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style.

Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store, and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go.

JC Penney.