For this newsletter, I tend to write essays that involve a lot of research and citations from other sources. I enjoy synthesizing different perspectives and finding the focal point where they mesh together. But I want to explore other approaches to writing here. I want to share more experimental, off-the-cuff attempts that express where I am at the moment. I reserve the right to contradict myself, make mistakes and change my mind. I am curious to hear your thoughts and ideas, always.
I find this time we are in now to be unprecedented, weird, disorienting. Perhaps most of you agree? This month, we reach ten years since “2012,” the prophetic end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. One of my books — my favorite, probably my great work until this point— explored this prophetic threshold.
2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl came out in 2006 — I was forty years old at the time— and made an impact. I was careful not to state anything too specific or definitive about what the future would hold: I knew that I did not know. And in fact, in that book and subsequent attempts, such as the film I made with Joao Amorim and Giancarlo Canavesio, 2012: Time for Change, I entertained various possibilities.
For a number of years, I had the exhilarating sense of being at the center of something — an emergent cultural and social movement, a horizon of magical possibility. I also felt a tremendous weight of responsibility and pressure that, I see in retrospect, became too much for me to bear. I cracked under that pressure. Looking back, I wonder if I was somehow possessed — I know we don’t believe in possession in our culture, but shamanic traditions take it seriously. I still feel a lot of regret and pain over mistakes that I made. It has been humbling.
In 2003, while researching my 2012 book, I visited the Amazon in Brazil to work with the Santo Daime, a syncretic religion that uses ayahuasca as its sacrament. In the Amazon, I had an overwhelming mystical experience: A voice that seemed to represent a presence or a nonphysical being outside of my consciousness spoke inside my mind for a week. Announcing itself as Quetzalcoatl, the voice dictated a prophetic text that became part of my book.
Muhammad’s Vision
I knew that such visionary transmissions happened to others (Swedenbourg, Crowley — even Moses or Muhammad), but I didn’t imagine anything like that could ever happen to me. I didn’t see myself as an active participant in some kind of prophetic unfolding; I was just a journalist, an outsider, a witness — a mere writer, trying to figure things out. I knew that I wasn’t a fully healed or healthy person — that I had unaddressed trauma, and was physically a bit frail, suffering from scoliosis and asthma since childhood. But suddenly I seemed thrust into a more central role in an unfolding cosmic drama. I felt I was meant to do something important — to help people reckon with our increasingly overwhelming civilizational crisis, to find a path beyond it.
Was this just narcissism or delusion on my part? I still don’t know. At the time I experienced a deluge of synchronicities as described in the book. The subjective experience of receiving that transmission was powerful, convincing. I believed I was given a particular task: To transduce a particular energetic frequency into written language.
Back then, I felt I was in a forcefield of fate and destiny. I vaguely expected a kind of collective metamorphosis or psychic transmutation to happen soon. It seemed to me then — it still seems to me now — that we, as a species, race toward an epochal event. Certain visionaries and philosophers (Jean Gebser for example) have called this “the end of time.” By this they mean the entry into a new temporality, a different relationship to time as well as space.
When I look at the world around me now — when I feel into what’s happening — it seems closer to entropy than regeneration. It seems like dissolution and collapse rather than awakening and rebirth. In fact, from various prophetic viewpoints (such as that of Rene Guenon), this sense of darkness, constriction, and (let’s be honest) impending doom were anticipated as signs, marking the crescendo of the Kali Yuga.
I recalled all this — plunged into these reflections — while reading a few bracingly pessimistic end-of-the-year essays by Umair Haque on his E&Co platform. Haque bluntly states what many of us already know but don’t want to admit: The climate is collapsing. The pandemic is not going away and, with more transmissible variants, it may never end. The US and other countries are sliding toward authoritarianism. There doesn’t seem to be any savior waiting in the wings.
For the last few years, everything has seemed suspended, held aloft in a strange kind of stasis. At some point, gravity must assert itself. And then what happens? If we can’t go back to the old way of being, then where do we go?
One line from my prophetic transmission haunts me: “You have only a few years yet remaining to prepare the vehicle for your higher self: Use them wisely.” It has been fifteen years since the book came out — a few more than a few. I still wonder if this was a warning that we are heading toward an extinction event, faster than we anticipate. Perhaps there is something else — a nonphysical dimension — awaiting us, beyond this Earth plane. Or did my unconscious simply glom onto ideas — about Revelation and New Jerusalem — from the Bible and add them to the mix? Or are such ideas archetypes, drawn from the collective unconscious, that reflect precognitive insight?
All I know is that I hardly feel that sense of magical possibility anymore — just small glimmers of it. Humanity and the Earth seem to be undergoing something like a dark night of the soul. It seems senseless to pretend otherwise.
Yet — isn’t there still a chance for that messianic return, that metamorphosis, that sudden awakening out of this turgid dream into something else: The collective realization of love as the unifying force, the only truth, as our lives become unmediated expressions of it?