Daniel Pinchbeck, How Soon is Now, Heavy-Handed Climate Apocalypse Stuff |343|

Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Today’s guest definitely fits in that category. Daniel Pinchbeck is a leading thinker about consciousness and he has a lot to say about science in his new How Soon Is Now. So why did we wind up having a conversation that sounds like some kind of frick’n political debate? I don’t know, but I think I have some ideas and I need to talk about them, because this crap has been going on for too long now.

Ever since this crazy election in the United States, a lot of people in the parapsychology, near-death experience, extended consciousness, whatever you want to call this realm, have been on tilt and they seem to have a completely different political viewpoint that I do, which is fine, except that I’m tired of these folks completely ignoring my position, because I don’t agree with them.

Look, as I’ve stated on this show, politically I am post-partisan, I think Bush was a war criminal, I think Cheney and Rumsfeld were war criminals, I am not republican and I voted for Obama the first time, but when he turned out to be of the same ilk, of the same cloth as Bush and started locking up whistle-blowers and doubling down on the patriot act and doing everything possible to perpetuate war and do all that other crazy stuff, I voted against him, and in this latest election cycle, I voted for Hilary. Truth be told, I voted for Hilary to keep peace in the house because I’m in California and my vote didn’t matter and I didn’t think there was any way in hell that an outsider like Trump could win. But still, I voted for Hilary because I don’t put any stock in this Republican/Democrat nonsense.

But, as you’ll hear in today’s interview and as you’ve heard if you’ve checked into the Skeptiko forum lately, people that are all pissed off about the political situation in the United States, cannot hear any of that, and that’s scary.

You know, as I’ve said on this show, it’s about following the data and then it’s not really about following the data, because people don’t change their positions. Well, let me go back, it’s about following the frick’n data. If you think climate change… well I can’t even say that with a straight face. If you think [catastrophic] global warming is real, fine, bring it, bring the data, but don’t expect everyone to agree with you, because they don’t, because there’s a lot of very qualified climatologists, as we explored in this show, probably at least 40%, who don’t agree with you, and if you think, as Daniel does, that the only reason people don’t agree with you is that they haven’t been presented with the options as you see them, you’re living in Bizarro Land. No matter what your position is, there’s people who’ve explored the other side and come to a different conclusion. That’s the nature of debate.

So, let’s all come to our sense, as flawed as science is, let’s lean on science a little bit to try and get a first cut at figuring out what the data is really telling us.

So this interview with Daniel Pinchbeck was contentious, but you know what, it was a good dialog to have and it’s a good dialog to get it out there, it’s a good dialog to stimulate conversation and real thinking, no matter which side you take and no matter who you agree with. And let me tell you something else, if you think this is a discussion about climate change or global warming, it’s not, it’s a dialog about how we take our understanding of who we are and how we then project that onto other people, how we interact with them, how we take that and figure out how we’re all going to do the next thing that we’re going to do together.

So I have a couple of thoughts on this, but I’ll hold off until the end of the interview. I also want to fill you in on the very interesting email exchange that I had with Daniel, after the interview.

So, stick around, here’s comes my interview with Daniel Pinchbeck, author of How Soon Is Now.

Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Daniel Pinchbeck to Skeptiko. Daniel is an author and well-known figure in the modern consciousness transformation movement that we talk so much about on Skeptiko. He’s the creator of Evolver.net and Reality Sandwich, which we’ve spoken about and had interviews about before. His books include Breaking Open The Head, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and the latest that we’re going to talk about today, How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation.

You’re right about the Paris climate talks of 2015, and you say, which a lot of people agree with you, they don’t go nearly far enough and that we need to, this is your writing, eliminate wasteful industries, severely limit consumption, reduce air and car travel to a minimum, restrict meat eating globally. I mean, I think a lot of people in this collective spiritual community would find that a little bit heavy-handed, and a little bit like, how are you going to get there Daniel, without being, just as coercive or just as heavy-handed as the people you’re trying to unseat?

Daniel Pinchbeck: I really don’t believe in coercion. I believe that, as I said, my presumption is that, given the opportunity, people will want to make changes for the benefit of their children and their descendants. And yes, according to the huge preponderance of scientists, we need to radically reduce and then eliminate CO2 that we’re putting into the atmosphere, and they talk about something like 8% to 10% CO2 reduction per year is what we should be aiming at and I know that sounds almost “haha” compared to when you think about Trump and Rex Tillerson on drilling and so on. But I’m hoping that in a sense, what’s happening now, is kind of almost like a last gasp of an old system, and hopefully without it bringing about too much more destruction, it will also help us have an awakening as to where we do need to go in the immediate future.

So, for instance I’m interested in creating voluntary opportunities for people to say like, “What do I value and how do I want to act and would it be possible for me to invest less on another car or on more vacations or on keep eating meat, if I know that’s going to have a damaging impact on the community of life and my own descendants and so on?”

So I think, in a way, it’s very much about messaging and about how it’s presented and the kind of social tools that also could be offered to people to go in that direction, if that makes any sense to you.

Alex Tsakiris: It does. I mean, like you, I consider myself an environmentalist, I’m super concerned about the number of environmental crisis we seem to be facing, that seem impossible to solve. But, I’m also interested in considering the possibility that some of the scientists who are on the other side of, in particular, the CO2 issue, may have something to say, and I think that they’re not often listened to in the same way that everyone else is listened to.

Just this week we had Climategate 3.0, where this whistle-blower came out, yet again, same old story, you know, a high-level respected guy, preparing the report for the 2015 Paris Conference says, “Hey, I was prevented from presenting the real data. There is an organized effort to present a picture that didn’t conform with what I had found, which was, there was a stall in global warming.”

So, we all accept that Big Oil is out there, and they’re conspiring to coerce science, but gosh, after Climategate 2, climate in this latest thing, don’t we also have to acknowledge that there’s all these other players on the other side, who are just muddying up the waters. How are we supposed to really come to the kind of conclusion that would allow us to make those kind of, monumental changes that you’re talking about, or that we all know, if you buy into that, kind of global warming scenario, are absolutely necessary? Because you’re right, if you accept that, then those changes have to be made. How do we sort out both the science and then the decision to make those kinds of changes?

Daniel Pinchbeck: I guess I end up being a little bit flummoxed by the people who still are kind of stuck in the denier mode. You know, I’m 50 years old and I can remember how much colder it was in winters. I mean, this winter in New York, in late January people were wearing T-shirts. When my mother was a girl, they were sometimes able to walk across the Hudson River, it was frozen over so much and that’s never happened in my lifetime. We’re putting in one million tons of CO2, industrial CO2 into the atmosphere every hour. We know that it’s a narrow sheath, it’s quantifiably measurable, we have more than 400 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere now, and last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, we know that sea levels were 100 feet higher, and temperatures were 4 degrees Celsius warmer.

We also know that just doesn’t happen, like an incremental shift, there are breaks in the system and sudden kind of jumps, partially released through like frozen deposits of methane, which are already starting to thaw, which are 30 times more potent, as a heat-trapping gas, than CO2.

Beyond the very, very obvious and overwhelming evidence of the CO2, that for some reason people have a hard time believing, we can also look at things like ocean acidification. The oceans are 30% more acidic than they were 40 years ago. This is leading to a breakdown of the coral reefs around the planet. The coral reefs hold a huge amount of ocean biodiversity, so that’s a big loss.

We can also look at many other factors that are happening. We look at deforestation, the loss of the forests, and species extinction, that’s the other one I was going to point out. According to the UN estimates, we’re losing 150 to 200 species per day. I believe they estimate there’s 8.7 million total species on the planet. So if you sort of do the math, that equals to us losing 10% of the earth’s remaining biodiversity every 10 to 15 years, right? And that’s happening as we’re taking away the tropical forests and other densely inhabited regions, converting them to soy bean plantations and developing them, or whatever.

So, how many more decades or 15 year periods of 10% loss of biodiversity can we stand, because we’ve also learned that the whole web of life is tightly meshed together? So for instance, if we wipe out the bees and the butterflies, that’s all of our pollinating species and so on. So, I honestly think that this is a ridiculous argument to be having. We’re clearly in an ecological mega crisis and there’s every indicator, from almost every reputable scientist tells us that, and there’s a lot of money on the other side, so we don’t even know who clever and cunning these people are, spreading this information through, like these so called Climategates and so on, and it really feeds on a kind of rebel, hyper-individualistic mindset that has also led to this Alt-Right thing, I’m sorry to say.    

So, I would, if I were you, develop some skepticism towards your skepticism.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, there’s so much there to pull apart and I think that’s the hard part of this issue. I am with you on the species reduction, I am with you on the environmental problems that we face, acidification of the ocean, coral reef, all these are huge problems, but a lot of people are saying, and I am kind of in their camp in a lot of ways, is that a lot of the CO2 stuff and the global warming stuff, gets lumped into a lot of other things, where it becomes this mishmash of issues.

So, is the planet warming? Yes, there’s no disagreement and even if you take… I love the word ‘denier’, because you can just apply that label to anybody and then they’re smeared, but if you take the climate deniers, like the person I always point to is a climatologist at Georgia Tech, Judith Curry who was extremely highly regarded, is really clearly level-headed, middle of the road, and is someone, if you listen to her says, “Look, I was on the side of the consensus, more or less, until Climategate happened in 2009 and I really looked at the data and I looked at the manipulation of it and it caused me to take another look at that.

There’s a number of other people who have taken that same position, so do we really have to say, “Oh, this is all settled science, we all kind of know everything,” when there’s a lot of pretty important, well-informed people who are saying, “You know, if you really look at the ice core samples, like you talk about in your book, just… we can’t get into a big climate debate, it would take the whole time, but in the book you say, “Look at the ice core samples.”

Daniel Pinchbeck: You’re bringing up, like people always do, with one or two renegade scientists, you know, I mean…

Alex Tsakiris: She’s not a renegade scientist, she was called to testify in Congress.

Daniel Pinchbeck: You can obviously, everywhere we go around the planet, we have huge cities, we know we’re putting in a million tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, we know the measure that’s it’s gone on from, you know, 275 we could stable climate.

Alex Tsakiris: Correct. No one disagrees with you, Daniel.

Daniel Pinchbeck: We know the oceans are absorbing a huge amount of industrial CO2 and that it led it to be 30% acidic over the last 40 years, what is the discussion here? I don’t actually understand, but I don’t want to spend all of our time on it. I just think, from my perspective, when I hear somebody like you speaking about it, what I… I didn’t want to believe in the fact that we’re forfeiting our future due to climate change, believe me. I would have been much happier, I would have liked to have written some novels. I’ve spent 9 or 10 years working on this book, exploring a lot of subjects that I didn’t even know or understand how to think about them very well at first, because I felt called to do it. And when I hear your tone even, your frequency, it’s like this resistance to just facing something which is, from my perspective, pretty self-evident. Like in New York, you never could walk around in late January in a T-shirt, until like the last couple of years.

All around the world there are these tremendous changes happening, you know, these giant ice glaciers are breaking off, we’re losing the albedo affect. They’re pretty clear about all the feedback groups, it’s not an infinite system. So, from my perspective, when I listen to somebody like you talking, it’s like, it’s almost like, I feel it’s like the last gasp of a certain type of individuality, you know that it wants to not believe that the mainstream consensus can be right about something. It’s the same energy that’s gone into, kind of saying that even though the mainstream media sometimes fucked up and sometimes supports military CIA stuff, and so on, that it can never be right about anything.

I feel in America right now, there’s a kind of a collective hysteria, it’s like a histrionic undertone that’s making us unable to even agree on very basic things, and it’s very frightening to be honest.

Alex Tsakiris: Well you just kind of laid a lot of bullshit on the table there. I mean, I’ve done 330 shows now on Skeptiko, primarily about consciousness and getting past the crazy materialism, we are biological robots on a meaningless planet, that is dominant in science and you talk about some in the book, we we’re totally in sync with, and that has led me to looking broadly at spirituality and what role spirituality plays in consciousness and what is the interface and where are the extended realms of consciousness as we understand them through psychedelics but also through near-death experience and through all these other means.

So, I don’t know what frequency you’re hearing from me or what label you’re hearing from me, but part of my investigation has been the understanding that our understanding about consciousness, our insistence that consciousness is an illusion, which is such a crazy, crazy idea but it’s still mainstream scientist, it’s still the dominant paradigm, that that is…

Daniel Pinchbeck: I’m sorry, what do you mean by an illusion?

Alex Tsakiris: Well, famously Daniel Dennett, 20 years ago, wrote that consciousness is an illusion. That is fundamentally the position of the materialist, is that there is no such thing as consciousness, right? That is the epiphenomena of the brain, mind equals brain, that is materialism, that is physicalism, consciousness is an illusion, right? Are we on the same page, right?

Daniel Pinchbeck: Yeah, I suppose. I would have thought… yeah, I see what you’re saying.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s what Dennett wrote. Dennett wrote consciousness is an illusion and if you look at…

Daniel Pinchbeck: I’m looking through Google as we go over these things. I thought more epiphenomenon, but yes, he says an illusion. Okay, that’s crazy, yeah.

Alex Tsakiris: It’s crazy and it’s crazy, so no one says that anymore because it’s crazy. I just listened the other day, Sam Harris is talking to David Chalmers, you know who those two people are, right?

Daniel Pinchbeck: Of course.

Alex Tsakiris: Of course, and they’re having that discussion, they’re going, “You know, we know Dan, he can’t really believe that, does he? I mean he said this consciousness is an illusion, he’s this little guy, he’s going to pass away, another casket that changes the paradigm, but does he really mean it?” Because these guys can’t even find a way to prop up that silliness. But we still live in that materialist mind equals brain world, right?

So, for me to jump over on the other side and say, well wait a minute, these guys have an incredible ability to distort the truth. I’m open to anyone who says, “Hey, let’s look into this a little bit further, let’s slow down the idea that it’s all settled, we all know everything.”

To now get off the global warming thing, but I just heard the guy from Greenpeace and I totally get… the former, the past president of Greenpeace and I totally get where he’s coming from, he said, “Hey, you know what, when I started Greenpeace, we were worried about all sorts of environment issues regarding humanitarian efforts, we were particularly concerned about, like atomic bombs. We’ve got a hundred atom bombs running around the world, at least a hundred, but we don’t know where they are, they’re lost, they’re out there on their own.”

We don’t talk about that, we don’t really talk about… you talked a little bit about destruction of the creatures in the sea, that we’re just depleting that, you know, we don’t talk about any of that because the agenda has been set, it’s all about global warming, global warming has happened, it’s catastrophic, we’ve got to jump in here, we’ve got to take control of this thing, God needs out help on this one. I want to put the brakes on that a little bit and make sure we really are looking at the science.

Daniel Pinchbeck: Yeah, I did my best to try to understand it from my limited perspective.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, what I was trying to get at before was, all these things require, I assume, because you said you’re into individual rights and protecting the rights of individuals, they require some sort of consensus, some sort of representative government. It just doesn’t seem like people are interested in going down any of these paths that you’re talking about in a large number and that’s what I was eluding to.

Daniel Pinchbeck: I disagree with you, they haven’t been presented with the option. The media has a hold on their minds, their consciousness is controlled and programmed by a tiny elite, they haven’t been given an option for a truly equitable, a truly decent way of approaching this circumstance, they haven’t been given tools for participant or democracy, they haven’t been given a free internet so they can learn about what’s happening. Their minds are controlled by a fucking small group of assholes.

Alex Tsakiris: Well earlier on you were kind of defending the mainstream media as saying, “Hey, they don’t get everything wrong.” Certainly they don’t get everything wrong…

Daniel Pinchbeck: There is no inconsistency in my perspective, it’s highly coherent. I’ve spent years developing it. I feel that you’re not… like I don’t know, maybe we need to spend six hours haranguing this out, I don’t think it’s going to happen in one podcast. It’s highly coherent and it’s systemic. We have a systemic illness going on. People are lost, people are confused, people are scared, the whole system is designed to make them that way.

We can put this thing back into balance, but first we have to have the imagination that it’s possible, and that’s what great thinkers like Oscar Wilde and Buckminster Fuller and Hannah Arendt, to help us to have that imagination, so we have to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way, that we could actually create a harmonic system that works in resonance, in harmony with the ecology of the earth as a whole system.

We could do that, okay? Just in the same way we figure out how to fly, just in the same way we figure out how to make smartphones and extract all these rare minerals and fossil fuels from the environment. We could not turn our attention to how do we make this thing work for all human beings, for our entire human family? We have the technical capacity to do that, as Buckminster Fuller said, it’s a design problem and it’s an imagination problem.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay. I think it’s okay to disagree, so I don’t have a problem that you don’t see my ideas as coherent or even sensible or anything like that, or that I don’t see yours as coherent, I mean that’s really not the issue.

Daniel Pinchbeck: I’m going to meet you at the same level of force that you’re meeting me, because otherwise I feel that I’m not even getting a listening here. I’m sorry, you know?

Alex Tsakiris: That’s why I paused before, to make sure you had a chance to talk. So let me kind of respond to what you’re saying, in really a new way, okay, that I think relates to your book in an important way and a way that is synergistic with my approach, because is it possible that the material world, that we’re talking about right, because there’s this spiritual, extended consciousness world, that we were talking about earlier on, that may exist and may have a totally different set of rules than this material and justifies the means, we have to do this or do that, those two worlds could be different in some important ways, that we don’t realize. I’m just throwing that out as a possibility. So, isn’t it possible that it’s true what a lot of spiritual teachers tell us, is that in some way we don’t quite understand, the world is always perfect just the way that it is?

I was thinking the other day, when I was preparing for this interview, I was talking to my friend, Rick Archer, who does this show, Buddha at the Gas Pump and he introduced me to Amma. Do you know Amma, the Hugging Saint?

Daniel Pinchbeck: Absolutely, I’ve gotten three hugs.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, great, great. So you go and see Amma right? And no matter what…

Daniel Pinchbeck: By the way, Alex, the idea that the world is already is perfect is actually an idea that’s totally in my book. I talk about the idea of Samsara and Nirvana ultimately being the same thing and I talk about how certain psychedelic experiences, particularly 5-MeO dimethyltryptamine, which the purest source of it comes from the Bufo toad in the Sonoran Desert, it gives you an immediate experience of Nirvana, from subject/object to nonduality, pure bliss, that is underlying the illusion of the manifest reality. But that doesn’t change our responsibility, out of our innate and pathetic nature, to deal with the disaster that we’ve constructed on this planet right now.

Alex Tsakiris: Amma is amazing. For anyone who’s listening that doesn’t know, Amma is this woman of extremely humble, horrible really, origins in India, who at a very early age felt this awakening, this spiritual transformation that she went through and was guided to help the world. And the one thing that’s undeniable with Amma, if you go and see her and you’re like this kind of skeptic, “What’s the scam here, whatever?” One is they’re just beautiful people, they don’t charge anything. You can go and see Amma and get a hug, it doesn’t cost you anything, and you want to stay there, it’s a very minimal fee and they give you great food and all these classes, it’s a great experience. But the sheer physical feat that she does, of sitting there, 18 hours a day regularly, hugging one person after another, you don’t think it sounds like a lot but it’s got to be gruelling and sometimes when she goes to India, it’s not 18 hours a day, it’s 24. It’s just an amazing physical feat and in India she’ll hug people for 18 hours and then she’ll dig latrines, right?

But here’s the story that Rick told me that I thought was amazing. One of her devotees goes up to Amma at some point and says, “I don’t get it. At one point you’re telling us that this is all mire, this is all illusion, we don’t have to worry about this world and on the other hand you’re so busy doing all this stuff,” and Amma’s response was, “World, what world?”

So, somewhere in between that story, and your story, is a balance that I’d like to seek, because I see Amma and I see her call to action and her choice of how she acts, as being different in some important ways, because it’s about personal, it’s about connection, it’s about heart to heart, it’s not about thinking that we need to find our allies to go and fight this system versus that system and change the world. What do you think about that?

Daniel Pinchbeck: Yes, once again, it’s like every time you try to characterize my perspective, I have an instant sense of total retraction, because I feel it’s a mischaracterization, but it’s subtle and it’s complex and I don’t know if we’re going to get to an agreement in the course of this conversation.

As I said, I agree that Samsara is Nirvana. My whole perspective is that it’s out of our hearts that, you know… firstly I don’t think hearts and minds are separate, I think there are neurons in the heart, the heart is also a thinking organ and we have the capacity to descent into our hearts and think from there, and when we do that we realize that this situation that we’re in is deeply fucked, right? And we’re heading…

Alex Tsakiris: Not everyone thinks that, you think that, but not everybody agrees.

Daniel Pinchbeck: Okay.

Alex Tsakiris: You keep calling me on some tone or something that I have, I mean, you’re just kind of laying out this stuff and saying we have to accept it as truth. Well no, there’s two sides to it.

Daniel Pinchbeck: We now have a President with narcissistic personality disorder, able to launch 4000 nuclear missiles at any moment, you know, we’re losing 10% of the earth’s biodiversity every 10 to 15 years, etc. etc. Yes, there are beautiful things about the world and there’s progress that’s happened, but even some of that is double-edged, like for instance, we are in love with our gadgets and our smartphones and our laptops, but those are also causing, not only ecological destruction, but genocide. It’s estimated that 3 million people have died in Africa through conflict minerals.

So it does seem to me that most people would agree that the situation is very difficult and tilting towards getting worse on many levels. Maybe, it’s like universal that people want to deal with that, and yes, in some ways it’s gotten better, which I also address in the book, but the point is, and I guess my perspective is, without getting to a systemic understanding of what we’re doing to ourselves ecologically and so on, we’re not going to be able to have a systemic solution.

In the book I go into areas, for instance, that are controversial and I don’t expect everybody to like, agree with the ideas in the book, but just to have an alternative model, like an alternative vision for how things could change.

So for instance, in the book I talk about loving relationships and alternatives that people might look at in those areas, to the nuclear family, the monogamous model that has been established since the origins of patriarchy and so on. And as I said, I look at the potential for reinventing the way that we exchange values, so that they’re not destructive to the earth’s ecology. How we could rethink our political system, so that it’s more based on people having continuous participation, rather than having an essentially meaningless vote every four years, which leads them to mass frustration and voting for somebody who should not be anywhere near that type of power, and so on and so on.

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