Daniel Pinchbeck

Daniel Pinchbeck will be conducting a three day workshop (6/1/07-6/3/07) entitled Prophecy and Transformation: 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.

The following links will give you some sense of Pinchbeck's ideas:

Speaking Shamanic with Daniel Pinchbeck

Post Modern Prophecy: Urgent Myths for Urgent Times (A dialog between Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff)
(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

Evolver: An Interview With Daniel Pinchbeck (Part 1 and Part 2)

Daniel Pinchbeck and the New Psychedelic Elite (Rolling Stone interview)

Video clips of Steven Colbert's interview (Part 1 and Part 2) with Daniel Pinchbeck

Here is a quotation from Pinchbeck's book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, that I find intriguing:

In the book of Job written several centuries before the New Testament, Yaweh subject his “faithful servant,” Job, to a harrowing series of tests, after excepting a wager from Satan that Job’s faith can be broken. “Job is no more the outward occasion for an inward process of dialectic in God,” wrote Jung. Like a scientist performing some cruel experiment on bacilli in a test tube, Yaweh kills Job’s family, removes his land, riddles him with disease, and inflicts every imaginable form of ruin upon him. Job, however, remains steadfast. At the same time, he is determined to understand the reason for his plight. According to Jung, Job is the first man to comprehend the split inside Yaweh – that the God-image is an antimony, comprising both the dark god of cruelty and the benevolent deity of love and justice; “in light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.” Confronted by archetypal injustice, Job insists on equalizing compassion, and eventually receives it, as his status in the world is restored.

Despite his overpowering might, the creator fears the judgment of his creature. “Yaweh projects onto Job a skeptic’s face which is hateful to him because it is his own, and which gazes at him with an uncanny and critical eye,” Jung noted. From the perspective of the God-image, Job had attained a higher state of knowledge than Yaweh through his trvails, and this required a compensatory sacrifice, enacted, a few hundred years later, through the incarnation of Christ.

Jung realized that God intended to fully incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this time was quickly approaching. From his psychoanalytic and personal work and theoretical musings, he proposed that the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was unfolding into a “quaternity,” adding a fourth element that had been suppressed from the Western psyche. “The enigma of squaring the circle” was one representation of this quaternity, “an age-old and presumably pre-historic symbol, always associated with the idea of a world-creating deity.” This aspect of divinity, now returning and requiring assimilation into consciousness, was the Devil, who had been dissociated from the Western psyche at the beginning of the Judeo-Christian aeon. Along with the Devil, the fourth element also represented natural wisdom, personified by the Gnostic deity Sophia, long exiled and excised from the canonical texts.

Since the creator is an antimony, a totality of inner opposites, his creatures reflect this schism. To descend into humanity, God must choose “the creaturely man filled with darkness – the natural man who is tainted with original sin,” Jung wrote. “The guilty man is eminently suitable and is therefore chosen to become the vessel for the continuing incarnation, not the guiltless one who holds aloof from the world, and refuses to pay his tribute to life, for in him the dark God would find no room.” The uniting of opposites, the reconciliation of dark and light contained in the God-image, can only take place within the consciously realized “guilty man,” not the sanctimonious, ascetic, or self-righteous one – anyone who denies their shadow will only project it in some new form.

*Other quotations from Pinchbeck's work.

A Course in Miracles

Food for thought. Come to your own conclusions. As a teacher who now plies his craft outside the confines of classroom walls, these words make sense to me:

A Course in Miracles
Manual for Teachers

Introduction

The role of teaching and learning is actually reversed in the thinking of the world. The reversal is characteristic. It seems as if the teacher and the learner are separated, the teacher giving something to the learner rather than to himself. Further, the act of teaching is regarded as a special activity, in which one engages only a relatively small proportion of one's time. The course, on the other hand, emphasizes that to teach is to learn, so that teacher and learner are the same. It also emphasizes that teaching is a constant process; it goes on every moment of the day, and continues into sleeping thoughts as well.

To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration others learn, and so do you. The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice. The purpose of the course might be said to provide you with a means of choosing what you want to teach on the basis of what you want to learn. You cannot give to someone else, but only to yourself, and this you learn through teaching. Teaching is but a call to witnesses to attest to what you believe. It is a method of conversion. This is not done by words alone. Any situation must be to you a chance to teach others what you are, and what they are to you. No more than that, but also never less.

The curriculum you set up is therefore determined exclusively by what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others is to you. In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be totally unrelated to what you think you are teaching. Yet it is impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really teach, and therefore really learn. To this the verbal content of your teaching is quite irrelevant. It may coincide with it, or it may not. It is the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you. Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself. Its fundamental purpose is to diminish self-doubt. This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real. But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach.

This is inevitable. There is no escape from it. How could it be otherwise? Everyone who follows the world's curriculum, and everyone here does follow it until he changes his mind, teaches solely to convince himself that he is what he is not. Herein is the purpose of the world. What else, then, would its curriculum be? Into this hopeless and closed learning situation, which teaches nothing but despair and death, God sends His teachers. And as they teach His lessons of joy and hope, their learning finally becomes complete.

Except for God's teachers there would be little hope of salvation, for the world of sin would seem forever real. The self-deceiving must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell? This is a manual for the teachers of God. They are not perfect, or they would not be here. Yet it is their mission to become perfect here, and so they teach perfection over and over, in many, many ways, until they have learned it. And then they are seen no more, although their thoughts remain a source of strength and truth forever. Who are they? How are they chosen? What do they do? How can they work out their own salvation and the salvation of the world? This manual attempts to answer these questions.

http://acim.home.att.net/manual_contents.html