Daniel Pinchbeck Quotes

“We live in a culture where everything tastes good but nothing satisfies.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“In shamanic cultures, sychronicities are recognized as signs that you are on the right path.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long term consequence. If there is still a vague and oppressive sense of guilt, of wrongness and imbalance, this gnawing guilt spurs capitalism on to greater acts of consumption, more ... Read moreviolent attempts to subjugate nature, more totalizing efforts to create distractions. To the "rational materialist" mind, death is the end of everything; this thought feeds its rage against nature, which has placed it in this position of despair.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“The plants that produce visions can function- for those of us who have inherited the New World Order of barren materialism, cut off from our spiritual heritage by a spiteful culture that gives us nothing but ashes- as the talismans of recognition that awaken our minds to reality.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“As I wandered the streets in a desolate funk, I would ask myself the impossible, the embarrassing, the ultimate childish question of Why? - Why this city? Why this life? Why anything? Of course I knew that "why" was a question you were supposed to stop asking around the age of ten but I couldn't free myself from it.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Deep down, nobody wants a job to occupy his or her time. We want a mission that inspires us.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“From a shamanic perspective, the psychic blockade that prevents otherwise intelligent adults from considering the future of our world - our obvious lack of future, if we continue on our present path - reveals an occult dimension. It is like a programming error written into the software designed for the modern mind, which has endless energy to spend on the trivial and treacly, sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World, for the mass extinction of species to perpetuate a way of life without a future, for the imminent exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, or for the fine print of the Patriot Act. This psychic blockade is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine spewing out crude as well as sophisticated distractions, encouraging individuals to see themselves as alienated spectators of their culture, rather than active participants in a planetary ecology.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“We live in a world of media overload and data smog, where everything distracts us from everything else. Yet underlying this noisy assault, our culture offers us nothing transcendent. No deeper meaning, no abiding hope. In my crisis, every facet of the contemporary world seemed part of a diabolical mechanism carefully designed to keep people from wondering about the real purpose of their endless frantic activity.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“I realized that most thoughts are impersonal happenings, like self-assembling machines. Unless we train ourselves, the thoughts passing through our mind have little involvement with our will. It is strange to realize that even our own thoughts pass by like scenery out the window of a bus, a bus we took by accident while trying to get somewhere else.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Corporations took our innate impulse toward dissent and our desire for meaningful change, and transmuted them into effective sales tools for their products.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Three hundred and fifty years ago, Shulgin notes, the Church proclaimed, "The earth is the center of the universe, and anyone who says otherwise is a heretic." Today, the government proclaims, "All drugs that can expand consciousness are without medical or social justification, and anyone who uses them is a criminal." In Galileo's time, the authorities said, "We do not need to actually look through that mysterious contraption." Now the government says, "There is no need to actually taste those mysterious compounds." In the past, the Church said, "How dare you claim that the earth is not the center of the universe?" Today the government says, "How dare you claim that an understanding of God is to be found in a white powder?”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior concentrating to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm ... To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“The drive to Black Rock City from San Francisco leads through the Nevada flatlands, past the jittering neon sadness of Reno.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

Reality, as you currently experience it, is something like a waking dream. It is disguising deeper and more intensified levels of being and knowing. For those who are ready and willing, the doors to those other levels now stand open.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“I'm starting to reread a bunch of Gandhi and it was kind of traumatic, because he was so clearly, unbelievably amazing. And the stuff that he is suggesting is so profoundly opposite from what is happening in our world today.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“The universe is an emanation of mind. As human consciousness evolves in an accelerated spiral, we are being compelled to realize that our minds are manifesting reality to an ever-increasing extent- our collective shadow-projections of wasteful technologies, wars, and weaponry reflect subtler interior regions of our psyche and the discordant deceptions in our intimate relationships. If this interpretation is valid, it forces upon us a concomitant responsibility, a grave burden.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

Electronic culture created soulless replacements for connective rituals- television supplanted tribal legends told by the fire; 'fast food' consumed in distraction took the place of a shared meal. We substituted matter for Mater (feminine principle), money for mother's milk, objects for emotional bonds.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

Cynicism is something that is part of the media production of a certain type of subjectivity or consciousness that is passive and disempowered, cynical, fatalistic, pessimistic.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

As a German philosopher writing in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, Marcuse understood the sleep inducing force of indoctrination, its power to make people forget and forfeit their own real interests. "The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible," he wrote. "The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful."

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“I think what we're going to ultimately recognize is that capitalism was a transitional and immature system. It got the planet to be globalized and now something else has to emerge. We have to be the ones. We can't wait around. Nobody else is going to do it for us. We have to be the ones who create that new emerging system.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

Marcuse wrote: "Perhaps an accident may alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior of man, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change." ...

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“I grew up in a very artistic, cultured home, but without any kind of spirituality. My parents were secular materialists, so I saw art as having an alternate value.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“People used to make their own clothes, now they buy clothes. People used to take care of their own kids, now they pay other people do it. And that was because capitalism requires more and more things being turned into money - being turned into profit. But that has reached this absurd limit where there's nothing left to turn into money, and the capitalist system is breaking down.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“I think that the more people go through their own personal initiations, the less collective destruction may be unleashed on the planet.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“The unbroken realization that you are indivisible from the universe, from universal consciousness, from the source of everything - that you are that source, that there is no other, no second, nothing that is not part of that unity, except as transitory illusion. If you could maintain that realization at all times, through waking and sleeping states of consciousness, across the threshold of death itself, what would you be?”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“The 'coming of the Self' is an apocalypse for the ego, the 'you' that wants to hang along for the ride. It may be that the only way to survive the Apocalypse is to undergo it, first, within your own being.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Through the last centuries, the effort of capitalism has been to take all the things that were human relations and turn them into monetary exchanges.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we've denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

I totally think we have a future on the planet. I just think that we have to get away from Western thinking, which is very much founded on dualisms.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Individuals who are really inspirational are always what changes history. Gandhi had a bunch of good ideas, and he led a non - violent revolution that transformed India.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“According to Buddhism, each person is a Buddha who has forgotten their original nature. If we in the pampered West, having grown up with so many advantages, could not claim our own health and our agency, preferring to see ourselves as helpless victims, then who would do it? Who would take responsibility for the world?”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Shamanism is a kind of universal spiritual practice with indigenous cultures around the world, and one important element of it is taking care of spirits.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“It is the difficult, but unavoidable, task of the modern individual to assimilate consciously all of the contents - from darkest degradation to profoundest purpose - contained in the psyche.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

If you step back from it and really think about what the mass media does on a global scale, the most significant thing it does is coordinate behaviour.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

My personal, metaphysical belief is Vedanta, which is that ultimately there is a singular consciousness. It's like a Hindu metaphysics, that basically we're all like characters in a play that consciousness is putting on to discover its own creative capacities.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Synchronicities express themselves through chance meetings and natural events as well as in dreams and supernatural episodes.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Life as an end is qualitatively different from life as a means.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“I think a lot of people who were addicts are actually people who had that strong innate need to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness. But because our society has turned into this destructive culture of these horrible drugs that nullify you, they have that experience in a negative way. And then they lose that capacity forever, to have it in a positive way.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“If consciousness is the ground of being rather than an epiphenomenon of physical processes, we may find that a basic question asked by modern astronomy and space science- 'Is there life out there?'- should be rephrased. Organic life, as well as intelligence, may already be a property enmeshed in the fabric of the cosmos, brought to fruition through the spiraling dynamics of the solar system and the galaxy, built into the structure of the universe itself.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“Our normal human tendencies are distraction and dissipation. We begin one task, then get seduced by some other option, and lose our focus. We drift away from what is difficult and we know to be true, to what is comfortable and socially condoned.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck

I do think that if you were to be scrupulous and research into it you would find that certain types of natural psychedelics have, if anything, anti-addictive properties. And all the evidence really points towards that. But you have the people who are running these drug rehab situations, they demonized all the drugs.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

I don't really advocate for psychedelics. I don't really think anybody needs to do them, or has to do them. For me, they were the only way I could have cracked open my own spirit in a way.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

Maybe the same instruments and tools that have been used to keep people in slavery and ignorance could potentially be used to liberate and awaken them.

— Daniel Pinchbeck

“The idea that I really like is December 21st, 2012. Try to get a global moment of collective reflection as a way to bring about an uptick in human consciousness.”

— Daniel Pinchbeck