2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
by Daniel Pinchbeck
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| SPOILER::Let's Get Pretentious-Messianic Narrators, can they ever not smack of ego?::SPOILER | 2 | 05/05/2008 07:58PM |
| Daniel Pinchbeck: Offspring of von Danekin & Burroughs? | 1 | 03/14/2008 05:25PM |
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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 575)
Read in June, 2008
recommended to Dylan by:
Hannahrecommends it for: critical minds willing to occasionally visit the new age/occult bookshleves
This is a book about metaphysics, which I found eerily fascinating. Pinchbeck's key premise, which he arrived at through his own experiences beginning with his experimentation with psychedelics, is that consciousness is not just a product of matter, an epiphenomenon of brain functions. Instead, he asserts that mind and matter are inseparable and are in fact interactive. With the ideological landscape swept clean by Nietzsche's general refutation of the modern Western worldview Pinchbeck finds su...more
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Read in May, 2008
"DOOM!"
Sorry, that's not the author's exact quote; let me find it for you. Here we go: "It is my thesis that the rapid development of technology and the destruction of the biosphere are material by-products of a psycho-spiritual process taking place on a planetary scale." I've just finished the introduction to this charming and overeducated Beard-o's "metaphysical epic," and I'm already glad I started it. I never thought I would say this about a book, ...more
Sorry, that's not the author's exact quote; let me find it for you. Here we go: "It is my thesis that the rapid development of technology and the destruction of the biosphere are material by-products of a psycho-spiritual process taking place on a planetary scale." I've just finished the introduction to this charming and overeducated Beard-o's "metaphysical epic," and I'm already glad I started it. I never thought I would say this about a book, ...more
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Read in March, 2008
Daniel Pinchbeck was raised in Manhattan, got his graduate degree at Brown, co-founded Open City, dated an Art Forum contributor, was a successful freelance journalist, and he threw it all away in the name of psychedelic shaminism. Like so many New Age spirituality books on the shelves today, this one outlines the author's journey from cynical deconstructivist to enlightened mystic. Unlike most spirituality books, this one attempts to appeal to New York's Union Hall set. Pinchbeck already found ...more
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Read in November, 2007
recommends it for:
the unintelligent and easily manipulated
this guy is a fucking idiot. i'm forcing myself to finish this because i need to see where he ends up. after a promising start, the book cruised straight downhill into a pile of endless shit.
um, buddy, guy, dude, you've based your stupid book on widely (and I mean WIDELY) discredited pseudoscience and touchy feely new age drivel. i'd be laughing while reading this if it wasn't so infuriatingly tragic that people believe this garbage. uh, you do understand that science is based on that which i...more
um, buddy, guy, dude, you've based your stupid book on widely (and I mean WIDELY) discredited pseudoscience and touchy feely new age drivel. i'd be laughing while reading this if it wasn't so infuriatingly tragic that people believe this garbage. uh, you do understand that science is based on that which i...more
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3 comments
Time to fuck with your mind a bit. I'm all for it. Mind's were meant to be fucked with. I have been a little obsessed with 2012 for a while now and when I accidently knocked this green gem off the shelf at Barnes and Noble while looking for Chuck P's latest I gave into synchronicity and bought it.
Daniel Pinchbeck is alright. He's a competent writer and pretty intelligent, though he's no Terrence Mckenna. The book is a gathering of facts that range from Shamanism and psychedelics to crop...more
Daniel Pinchbeck is alright. He's a competent writer and pretty intelligent, though he's no Terrence Mckenna. The book is a gathering of facts that range from Shamanism and psychedelics to crop...more
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Read in February, 2008
I wasn't quite sure how to feel about this book. It was very technical and dry at times and hard to get through. I found myself zoning out in certain parts. The information on Mayan cosmology was very interesting and I found the sections on aliens very entertaining but very hard to swallow. Daniel Pinchbeck's writing feels incredibly self-involved and narcissistic at times which makes his writing less respectable. At one point in the book he refers to himself as the avatar and as a prophet,...more
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I need to write an essay on this book.
But my main thought is that while this book is supposedly about a lot of New Age mumbo, the central story of this book is a novel about a failing marriage due to a narrator obsessed with grasping the mystic at nearly any cost to his personal life. Read that way the book is fascinating.
But read as a prophetic guide to the coming 2012 "consciousness shift", it is garbage. Pinchbeck spends most of the book tenuously connecting various nodal ...more
But my main thought is that while this book is supposedly about a lot of New Age mumbo, the central story of this book is a novel about a failing marriage due to a narrator obsessed with grasping the mystic at nearly any cost to his personal life. Read that way the book is fascinating.
But read as a prophetic guide to the coming 2012 "consciousness shift", it is garbage. Pinchbeck spends most of the book tenuously connecting various nodal ...more
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Read in January, 2008
Where to begin...Pinchbeck is a fair writer, terribly self-involved and this book would be more appropriately labeled as a memoir. I received it as a gift and read the first 100 pages or so with extreme relish. However, the book failed to form a coherent process, it was more like a stream of thoughts which ran the gamut of Pinchbeck's background and personal experience. The details of the Maya were quite interesting, as were some other aspects, such as the heat influence on the stalks in crop...more
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Read in October, 2007
Pinchbeck is one of those scholars who, without losing sight of his end-goal, manages to take himself and his reader on a macro-tour of alternate universes simply by virtue of mind that rejects no thing. Though I'll admit I found his character less than appealing, I admire his ability to cohesively cross disciplines and present already-stigmatized information in such a manner that it becomes new, more urgent, and that it may manifest an amount of hope for a future that differs in some way, any ...more
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Read in January, 2007
This book was great. I enjoyed the book as a whole. It is written very well written from the first person but a bit scattered. Once you get his flow to the book its not so bad to be thrown back into another topic. You also get a very good idea where the author was coming from in his opinions and does a good job developing himself as a character. This being what I would say is a non-fiction book but along the magic lines really opened my eyes to different perspectives on what is knowledge. It cha...more
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Read in November, 2006
recommends it for:
Anyone who likes mystical theory and looking outside the box
Daniel Pinchbeck did an amazing job with this book. He combines all his knowledge and experience into one very interesting expression of his view on our world and beyond that. He speaks mainly off entheogens and their impact on his life and research, describing his experiences very articulately, in very vivid and a magical way. He talks alot about the different civilizations he has encountered and there spiritual cultures and tradition. One specifically is the well known Mayans. The book ti...more
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Read in December, 2007
Will blow your mind, but in a good sort of way. Weaves together such seemingly divergent topics as crop circles, Carl Jung, Burning Man, Rudolf Steiner, and more post millennial strangeness, into a seamless memoir that retains its readability while still remaining among the more thought provoking journeys one can undertake through words. A worthy successor to Breaking Open The Head, and anyone who enjoyed that fantastic treatise on psychedelics and neoshamanism will enjoy this book as well.
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Written in an similar style as Pinchbeck's swirling mind and nasally speech patterns, this book is less of a novel and more of a collection of author, philosopher and researcher quotes; personal journals; and hypothesis about past civilizations, the future of our existence, and everything in between. However, unlike many of the paranormal snobs with their noses and earl greys in the air, I greatly enjoyed 2012:The Return of Quetzalcoatl.
The content was a bit unorganized, but I found each chap...more
The content was a bit unorganized, but I found each chap...more
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recommended to Hanaa by:
some nerd who works at my book store.
recommends it for: people with no lives.
recommends it for: people with no lives.
I am totally indifferent to this book. It's in the 'Controversial knowledge' section at my book store. I can see why. It was in the Science section first, but I was confused as to WHY it was in the Science section. Anyways, i've read tons of books on the world ending and when it's going to end, for example: Nostradamus. My dad is quite Obsessed with him, I don't know why, I think people who predict things are scary, and should keep it to themseleves. Sure that sounds immature, but in reality, ...more
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Read in June, 2008
Wow. If you want to take a trip through alien abductions, crop circles, a bit of conspiracy theory, psychedelic enlightenment, tribal knowledge and the end of time all wrapped in some rather odd psychodrama from the author about his troubled marriage and relationship with love, this is it for you.
I mean, I read it. And it's not bad for what it is. But you have to suspend a bit of disbelief, and you have to take the author with a grain of salt. There are plenty of perfectly lucid, fascina...more
I mean, I read it. And it's not bad for what it is. But you have to suspend a bit of disbelief, and you have to take the author with a grain of salt. There are plenty of perfectly lucid, fascina...more
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Read in August, 2007
wow. this book really was as fascinatingly interesting as it was impossibly dry. several chapters held my attention thoroughly and made me really examine and think about the world around us, philosophically, rationally, metaphorically, and mythically, while others were perfect when i needed to get to sleep quick. overall, i'd definitely reccommend it to people who are looking to learn more about interesting ideas about the future of the human race and culture, while looking at clues from ancient...more
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Read in March, 2008
loved, loved most of this book. although, the last bit is frustrating, and by the end, although i really enjoyed 90% of it, the guy struck out with:
1. whining about his "partner"
2. whining about a "priestess."
3. pointless information about burning man (he has an epiphany that some of the people there are not actually spiritual seekers, but are superficial people on drugs.)
minus that strike-out snafu, he ends it with the current plight of the hopi indians which is...more
1. whining about his "partner"
2. whining about a "priestess."
3. pointless information about burning man (he has an epiphany that some of the people there are not actually spiritual seekers, but are superficial people on drugs.)
minus that strike-out snafu, he ends it with the current plight of the hopi indians which is...more
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Read in June, 2008
recommended to Tim by:
Meagan Lloydrecommends it for: nobody
I give up. I made it about halfway through this book, slogging through piles of vaguely coherent ramblings about a mishmash of New Age theories mixed in with terrible pseudoscience. I wanted to read the whole thing, partly to see what it was that Pinchbeck is trying to get at, partly to read his descriptions of mind-altering substances and experiences (iboga, ayahuasca, Burning Man, etc.), and partly because my sister gave me this book as a gift. But after one too many annoying post hoc ergo ...more
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Read in January, 2008
I wanted to like this book more because it touches on a lot of areas and phenomenon that are really fascinating in themselves - crop circles, ancient civilizations, psychedelics and shamanism, consciousness, the nature of time, the future of humanity - but it was just too all over the place. I felt like it started to be increasingly disjointed and more about the author's personal life falling apart. And honestly, it was hard to have much sympathy...he seemed self-absorbed and manic, and I starte...more
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Read in February, 2008
2012 is part memoir, the psychedelic and spiritual "awakening" of the author, and part research study, based on the Mayan belief in a profound, world-wide conciousness shift, believed to happen in the year 2012. I found this book, and Pinchbeck's philosophy, incredibly interesting, though very disjointed. A lot of it makes perfect sense (the cyclic dawning and collapse of great civilizations), a lot of it requires great imagination and a major step away from my usual skepticism (the cr...more
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