jürgen fauth’s muckworld

After Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck is now gearing up to become the Leary/McKenna of the Oughts. Contemporary shamanism, I suppose, is the word. He takes his trip pretty far out in the new book: the regular iboga/ayahuasca explorations are back, told with blunt first-person honesty, and solid scholarly work that touches on anybody who’s even remotely relevant, from obvious ones like Castaneda and Fritjof Capra to more obscure figures such as Rudolf Steiner. There are chapters on quantum mechanics that shouldn’t thrill no one any longer, there are UFOs, Stonehendge, Hopi prophecies, and of course–much to my chagrain*–the Mayan calendar. The general theory here is that the end of the Long Count on December 21, 2012 will usher in some sort of revolution of global consciousness, activation of the noosphere, what have you. I was particularly taken with his treatise on crop circles, on which I’ll soon post more. Interesting for a mind-bending ride, expert synthesis of hermetic traditions, and very revealing personal stories from Burning Man, Amazon villages, and the depths of DPT trips. Recommended, even just for the jolt of Pinchbeck’s courage to go very far out there.

* Ever since Tikal, I’ve been wanting to do something with the end of the Long Count. He got there first, next is Mel Gibson….

A couple of links.

Wilber led to Steiner, and both kept mentioning lucid dreaming in such a peculiar way that I figured it’d be worth looking at. This is the popular book by the leading researcher, and there’s enough practical advice here to start practicing. I usually have trouble remembering my dreams at all, and that’s the first step. Then you have to get used to checking for “dreamsigns.” Once the critical state test becomes second nature, you can expect to check while you’re dreaming–and becoming lucid. I had a first success two nights ago, but the moment I realized I was dreaming I got so excited I woke up….

I got a second book about lucid dreaming from a Buddhist perspective–Tibetan Dream Yoga–that seems much less utiliterian than this one so far.

A textbook, essentially, by the director of Sweet Smell of Success Alexander Mackendrick. This caught my interest because of the matter-of-fact talk about film grammar in the second half, but the first half was almost more interesting: I didn’t expect much new from the chapters on constructing narrative, but there’s lots of good practical advice with a different emphasis from what you find in most fiction textbooks. Recommended.

I’ve been remiss in blogging the strange books I’ve been reading lately, so here’s a quick roundup.

This one’s a fascinating treatise by Rudolf Steiner, founder of Antroposophy.

Every hormone-addled boy wants to join a rock band because “the chicks are great.” But those kids don’t know that becoming a director is an even better way to get laid. This biography, by a bunch of Cahiers du cinema writers, drives home that point beautifully, and it names names: Jeanne Moreau, Claude Jade, Fanny Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, and pretty much every other beautiful woman who ever acted for Truffaut.

If that’s not inspiring, the book traces FT’s growth from street punk and syphilitic deserter to Oscar-winning independent auteur with admirable style. The part about his flame-out with Godard is fascinating, but I have to admit that I had to skim the clinical and terribly depressing description of his last brain-tumor infested months.

Phil Lesh’s autobiography isn’t as idiosyncratic as Dylan’s, but it’s almost as fascinating–even if you’ve heard most of the GD legends & lore laid again and again. How many accounts of Altamont, the first Human Be-In, the Acid Tests, the Discovery of the Name, and the Lunar Eclipse at Gizeh can you take, really? As far as I’m concerned, this stuff is always delicious–and Phil’s got a unique voice that comes through loud and clear, adding a new persepective to things. The book starts out as lots & lots of fun, everybody trippin’ the Haight and forging the group mind with psychedelic abandon…. and then, of course, the inevitable decline takes over the second half, as the drugs isolate the band members from each other and Jerry’s health begins to fail. His liver transplant and the years since 95 are covered but don’t get a lot of space.

His final words: “There never will be another band like the Grateful Dead.”

Brilliant. If anybody can map a way forward out of the exhaustion of postmodernism, it’s Ken Wilber. This book, written as socratic dialogue, is a boiled-down version of his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and I’ll be damned if I can boil it down any further–the title isn’t as hyperbolic as it might seem.

My favorite idea here–and there are tons–is the concept of Transcend and Include, which according to Wilber is how evolution moves forward, how transformation happens. It is part of his integrative vision, which does a fantastic job at ferreting out useful insights from all disciplines of human thought. He places everything in a four-quadrant system (internal/external, individual/communal), and the beauty here is that suddenly everything from psychoanalysis to abstract painting, transcendental meditation, communism, and nanophysics suddenly fits together in a very baggy and appealling system.

As I read over this, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t make any sense at all. Here’s what Amazon has to say:

“This account of men and women’s place in a universe of sex and gender, self and society, spirit and soul is written in question-and-answer format, making it both readable and accessible. Wilber offers a series of original views on many topics of current controversy, including the gender wars, multiculturalism, modern liberation movements, and the conflict between various approaches to spirituality.”

Yeah, I guess that’s better. Either way, this is full of fresh ideas.

Naomi Klein’s anti-corporate manifesto is slightly outdated–it came out even before Seattle, and she had to add an afterword after 9/11–but her arguments about the ever-encroaching branding on our lives are still incisive, and if anything, corporations have even more power over us than they did in the late nineties. The first section, “No Space,” is especially interesting, and so is her take on possible alternatives to the corporation-sponsored “globalization.” Klein’s website.