well im not sure i can fairly comment on theme yet
becaue there is so much of the book i havent read yet

but...
according to the introduction
the planet earth is headed for an ecological
social, political and rescource apocalypse
...thats bad

but according to these various philosophers
and a certain historical perspective (all of it well souced)
we are headed for a shift in consciousness
...that's good

but its not clear what or how and it looks
like a destructive 'birthing process' must occur first
...that's bad

but the crop circles may contain a clue
...that's good

but most people are too stuck on themselves to notice
...that's bad

but it comes with a choice of toppings
...that's good

but the toppings are also cursed
...that's bad

you get the idea

"Throw another shrimp on the barbee, mate!"...

www.godhatesshrimp.com/

Hi Xodman,

I want to say I appreciated your log of thoughts and impressions while reading my book. I will try to answer your questions.

As to why I omitted Leary, I just couldn’t cover everything! I had to go with what I was drawn toward – I also omitted Nostradomus, plus a number of prophecies from other Native American cultures (such as “White Buffalo Girl”) that would have supported my thesis. The eight circuit model seems interesting, but I have not yet explored it in depth. I am more drawn toward Stan Grof and his model of the perinetal matrices, and the relationship between birth trauma and transpersonal experience (also its relationship to astrology, via the work of Richard Tarnas), but wasn’t able to incorporate that in the book either.

As for “answers”, I feel that I do provide a number of possible conclusions, but I also leave it up to the reader to sort through these possibilities. I didn’t want to impose my answers, but let people work it through the material on their own, so they can integrate the new perspective or paradigm I am offering. If I try to separate some of these hypothetical “answers”, they include the following:

1. Perhaps I am offering a kind of “system software upgrade” for the modern mind, which has been trapped in dualism, literalism, and rational materialism. I am saying that “rationality” has to open up to include actual, tangible factors of reality that are left out of the materialist paradigm – psychic phenomena, for instance, and transpersonal experience, and the “reality of the psyche.” By making this shift in perspective, you reorient yourself in relationship to the world and the cosmos. Because we create systems and technologies based on our perspectival relationship to time and space, this might allow for a deepseated shift in the nature of our world.

2. Our civilizational crisis is based on a wrong relationship to time, and this can potentially be overcome through a new calendar that would place us in a new “timing frequency.” This is Arguelles’ idea – but I carefully critique the calendar he has created. I argue that we will need a global meeting of minds – astronomers, physicists, shamans, mystics, astrologers – to create a new calendar and harmonic timing frequency, meshed with the physical reality of the surrounding universe. A new timing frequency would be retroactive as well as projective, so we would be able to do away with nationstate charters, Third World debt structures, unfair legal codes, etc. We could create a new harmonic template for a compassion-based planetary civilization without artificial borders or boundaries.

3. My own narrative suggests that those of us who are currently outside the power structure and have been intensifying our consciousness and deepening our awareness over the last decades may turn out to constitute a new “elite class” that will supplant the current political and economic leadership during an imminently approaching crisis. As previous revolutions – such as the French Revolution – indicate, there is a natural process in which a ruling class becomes increasingly out of touch with visceral reality, until that class can no longer maintain order. At that point, the class that has attained a deeper attunement to the truth of their time naturally emerge into prominence. Although this was a violent and chaotic process in the past, if we can understand and integrate the pattern at a deeper level before the crisis happens, we can ready ourselves for being leaders in this shift to a new form of social organization. I believe this process is also carefully explored in Tao do Ching and the I Ching.

4. We co-create reality through the activity of consciousness and our directed intention. Therefore, we have to take careful stock of our intentions and how we direct our psychic energy. If we are obsessed with apocalypse and collapse, or enmeshed in paranoid conspiracy, we help to bring those results into manifestation. I agree with Arguelles that the “job” of the visionary is to envision the best possible outcome for humanity – by realizing and holding the higher frequency, we help to bring new possibilities into manifestation.

5. The importance of psychedelic investigation and the transpersonal domain: The book suggests that what is taking place is a nondual process of consciousness evolution – we have to simultaneously do the painful work on ourselves, master ourselves, in order to bring about positive transformation of the world.

6. A huge amount of trapped and wasted psychic energy is embedded in sexuality and love relationships, and we need to bring this area up to a much higher level of conscious awareness and articulation. Women have as much work as men in realizing and reintegrating their shadow projections – much of the feminine “will to power” manifests in the arena of personal relationships, with devastating consequences. This turns out to be very hard work on a personal level. A transformation in our realization of eros – also a resacralization of eros - may be necessary before we can make a positive transformation of the world.

7. The most extraordinary and sophisticated reading of the Mayan Calendar by Calleman suggests that breakdown is coming very soon – 2008, give or take a few months. This may seem over literal- but I think his reasoning is quite sound. This also fits with other predictions I have seen – Peak Oil etc – and also intuitively seems to fit with the sense of accelerating entropy now prevalent. Therefore, those of us who may as I said above become the elite of a new planetary civilization have just until that time to prepare – I would like to see the widespread dissemination of a new paradigm including sustainability, alternative energy and permaculture tools, new media expressing a positive vision of human possibilities, as well as wider dissemination of shamanism and other techniques of personal transformation.

8. We are in the same situation today with psychic power as people were in the 1750s with electricity: They had experienced lightning and static shocks but had no idea how to bring it down into the world to create an industrial grid. Many of us are experiencing upsurges of synchronicity and psychic phenomena (part of the process of the “coming of the self” revealing the “reality of the psyche.”), which suggest that the new “mutational” shift in consciousness will allow us to understand and access psychic energy in new ways, by integrating intuitive and rational modes of cognition. We can begin to envision what support systems for this transformation might be like, as that visioning process will help bring it into realization.

Does this help at all?