Hi folks,

My new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, is coming out in a few short weeks. It can already be pre-ordered on Amazon, at a reduced price. I hope those of you who want to read it will purchase an early copy. If initial sales of the book are encouraging, the publisher will put resources into its promotion and marketing, which means it will reach a wider audience. For reasons that will be evident to anyone who peruses the book, I feel a certain level of urgency in getting these ideas out into the world. My hope is that this book will give people new ways to think about our world situation, on many levels.

Among many subjects covered in 2012, I look at the works of Mayan scholar/prophets Jose Arguelles, Carl Johan Calleman, and John Major Jenkins. I end up agreeing with Arguelles' fundamental concept that we require a new calendar to change our deformed relationship to time and institute planetary harmony, but I do not think that his calendar is our answer. I end up suggesting that we need a global meeting of minds from different spiritual traditions and scientific disciplines (astronomy, physics, etc.) to create a new synchronic calendar that can be disseminated to the global commons.

Parts of the book revolve around Burning Man, as well as visits to the Santo Daime religion in the Amazon of Brazil, and the Hopi in Arizona. I also carefully explore the phenomenon of the crop circles in Southern England, describing my experiences around Glastonbury and Avebury over two summers of research.

Below, I have enclosed the back cover quotes, a press release describing the book’s contents, and then my tour schedule, as it stands. It looks like there will be a party for 2012 in San Francisco on the night of June 7th, and we may organize something in Los Angeles as well, so if you are in either of those places, and would like to attend those events, please email me. The New York publication party will be at Alex Grey's COSM on May 4, in Chelsea.

I am still looking for more opportunities to read and talk about 2012, so if any of you have suggestions or contacts with possible venues, please let me know. If you can’t afford the book but still want to read it, please ask your local library to order it. I am also seeking media coverage and reviews of the book, if you have ideas. Also, please feel free to forward this post to anyone who might be interested in this material.

Yours,
Daniel

“Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl is a dazzling kaleidoscopic journey through the quixotic hinterlands of consciousness, crop circles, and ancient prophecy, as well as an intriguing and deeply personal odyssey of transformation. 2012 presents a compelling and complex teleological argument, weaving together the twilit realms of the human imagination and the harsh realities of accelerated global catastrophe. Its conclusions are surprisingly robust, original, and thankfully optimistic.”
— Sting

"A daring and intriguing, sometimes deeply disturbing, very well researched and extremely readable book that puts an entirely new slant on 2012. From quantum physics to aliens, from crop circles to reincarnation, from shamanic hallucinogens to Rudolf Steiner, from the Amazon jungle to Stonehenge, from fragments of jaundiced autobiography to the ending of worlds, Pinchbeck takes us on a mind-bending, paradigm-rattling ride."
— Graham Hancock (author, Fingerprints of the Gods)



2012: THE RETURN OF QUETZALCOATL
A PROVOCATIVE REVISIONING OF SPIRITUALITY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
by Breaking Open the Head author Daniel Pinchbeck


2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin nonfiction, May 4, 2006, $26.95, ISBN 1-58542-483-8) by Daniel Pinchbeck unifies the inquiry into cosmological phenomena — including crop circles, quantum physics, and the worldwide resurgence of shamanism — in support of the Mayan prophecy that the year 2012 will bring an unprecedented global shift in human consciousness. Appearing forty years after the pivotal heyday of the 1960s, 2012 also argues for the legitimacy of the 1960s-era spiritual and intellectual legacy, embracing the works of writers such as Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and Carlos Castaneda.
A generation ago, pursuing “mind expansion” through altered states of consciousness was hip as well as culturally relevant. By the end of the 1960s, not only were psychedelic drugs outlawed but our society had rejected the idea that it was valuable to open the “doors of perception” at all. For more than three decades, the mainstream has not allowed any serious inquiry into these areas, which once seemed to point toward a new consciousness.
Author Daniel Pinchbeck has deep personal roots in the New York counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. His father was an abstract painter, and his mother, Joyce Johnson, was a member of the Beat Generation and dated Jack Kerouac as On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957 (chronicled in Johnson’s bestselling book, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir). Pinchbeck was a founder of the 1990s literary magazine Open City with fellow writers Thomas Beller and Robert Bingham. He has written for many publications, including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. In 1994, he was chosen by The New York Times Magazine as one of “Thirty Under Thirty” destined to change our culture.
A profound spiritual crisis in his late twenties led Pinchbeck to the study of shamanism. His first book, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, recounted his personal initiation into several tribal cultures that continue to use “magic mushrooms” and other hallucinogens in their rituals. Pinchbeck became convinced of the legitimacy of the shamanic and mystical worldview held by indigenous peoples around the world. This brought up troubling questions: If the modern West, in its pursuit of rational science and materialism, had rejected crucially important aspects of reality, what did this say about our society, and its immediate future?
2012 chronicles the writer’s journey to answer these questions, beginning with an exploration of prophecy, especially the vision of the Classical Mayan culture (also the subject of a new Mel Gibson movie, Apocalypto, filmed entirely in the Mayan language). The Mayans were obsessed with time, and according to their Sacred Calendar, the year 2012 marks the end of a “Great Cycle” of more than 5,000 years, and the climax of larger patterns that appear to go back 16 billion years. Pinchbeck discovered that a number of theorists, working outside the mainstream of archaeology, make a compelling argument that 2012 could represent a transformation in the nature of human consciousness as well as, potentially, a unified and harmonic global civilization.
In 2012, Pinchbeck recounts his own personal experiences as he follows the traces of prophetic and occult knowledge, including a visit to southern England to investigate the crop circles, and a journey to the Brazilian Amazon to study Santo Daime, a religion that uses the psychedelic drink ayahuasca as its sacrament. He unifies the ideas of a large number of writers, philosophers, and physicists to create a new cultural context for understanding the many aspects of being that to date have been ignored and suppressed by mainstream culture and the academy.
2012 is an unusually elegant, serious, critical and adventurous exposition of ideas often regarded as beyond the purview of intellectual inquiry. Readers may share or reject its conclusions, but they are certain to find the journey unforgettable.
Pinchbeck lives in New York’s East Village, where he is currently launching Evolver (www.evolverproject.com), a new media and membership organization, with offices in Manhattan and on the West Coast.

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2012 Tour: Daniel Pinchbeck

Monday, April 24: New York City

8:00 P.M.: Talk at the New York Open Center, “The Mayan Calendar and the Judeo-Christian Apocalypse,” 85 Spring Street, New York, NY, 212-219-9635. ($20, $18 Open Center members)

Thursday, May 4 (publication date): New York City

8:00 P.M.: Reception/party at Cosm (Alex Grey’s Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors), 540 West 27th Street, 4th Floor.

Monday, May 22: New York City

7 P.M.: Talk/signing at Barnes & Noble, 4 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003, 212-420-1322.

Friday, June 2: Los Angeles

7 P.M.: Talk/signing at Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90069, 310-659-3684.

Saturday, June 3: Los Angeles

3:00 P.M.: Talk/signing at Diesel Bookstore, 3890 Cross Creed Road, Malibu CA 90265, 310-456-9961.
Thursday, June 8: San Francisco

7 P.M.: Talk/signing at City Lights, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133, 415-362-8193.

Sunday, June 11: Oakland

3:00 P.M.: Talk/signing at Diesel Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, CA 94618, 510-633-9965.

Wednesday, June 14: Seattle

6 P.M.: Talk/signing at Elliott Bay Bookstore, 101 S. Main Street, Seattle, WA 98104, 206-624-6600.

Thursday, June 15: Portland

7:30 P.M.: Talk/signing at Powell’s, 2720 NW 29th, Portland, OR 97210, 503-228-4651.