The movement pulls away from the mainstream and gets apocalyptic
By JAMES PARKER | August 17, 2006
.jpg "060818_newage_main")
THE GREAT UNRAVELING: The difference between today's New Agers and the old ones is the former's fear of an imminent system crash |
“In the United States,” wrote novelist and poet Jim Harrison in 1976, “it is a curious habit of ours to wait for the future when it has happened already.” Thirty years on, how much deeper is that swoon of postponement, and how much more pressing the crisis. In weather systems, in belief systems, the planet condenses with rage; the blandest recital of the facts can shake the air like a Yeatsian prophecy. Faces averted, we peck out text messages. At the political level the most complex issues are debated in the style of barking dogs, while at the counter of your local Starbucks a man is placing an order as nuanced and sophisticated as a 17th-century sonnet. And on the street the Hummers roll, driven by small, blond college girls, as if America had invaded itself.But if the future won’t stop happening, neither will the past. Because here’s both the good news and the bad: the ’60s never ended. That decade’s chaotic drive toward collective rebirth — stalled, dissipated, betrayed, backlashed, and broken down — was not (it turns out) the endpoint, but the augury. “The Sixties,” says Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin), by phone from New York City, “were an attempted voyage of initiation on a mass-cultural level, but at that point it couldn’t be completed. The maps weren’t there, there were no guides, and a lot of people kind of lost it.” Pinchbeck, a thirtysomething former journalist who has transformed himself — with the help of mind-ripping pharmaceuticals and organic hallucinogens like iboga and ayahuasca — into a multi-disciplinary critic of the “design problems” in Western civilization, is standing by for the next stage. “There’s some kind of process of assimilation that required those currents which came out so powerfully in the ’60s then to go underground and become subliminal,” he says. “But they’ve had a major effect on people in the West, whether through access to indigenous shamanism or in the extraordinary growth of yoga, and in a way they’ve been preparing the container so that if we were to go through another kind of initiatory level, there would be people ready to hold it together.”
Shamanism? Yoga? Welcome to the New New Age — the just-in-time resurgence of the holistic, anti-materialist worldview, garbed in esoterica, brandishing its own style of drugs and music. And brace yourself for a major paradigm shift: at the vanguard of the armies of transformation is … Sting! “Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012,” he blurbs on the book jacket, “is a dazzling kaleidoscopic journey through the quixotic hinterlands of consciousness.” Yes indeed, someone got his message in a bottle. “I became friends with Sting after my last book [Breaking Open the Head],” says Pinchbeck. “He got in touch with me and I actually stayed with him in his house in Italy.
“He’s had contact with indigenous shamanism, and he’s aware of the importance of the material. He’s kind of like an elder statesman, and he’s been giving me a lot of support.”
Related:
Will Harvard drop acid again?, Springtime for Darwin, Reprise, More 
- Will Harvard drop acid again?
In a moment of delightful whimsy in the annals of drug history, Albert Hofmann, after purposely ingesting LSD for the first time, rode his bicycle home and experienced all manner of beatific and hellish visions.
- Springtime for Darwin
There are two stories, and two stories only.
- Reprise
Trier captures the moment when the recklessness of youth gives way to adult responsibilities, and the way childhood friendships can fall apart when different paths are taken.
- Johnnie Walker
If a glass of smooth, full-bodied whiskey makes you feel like celebrating the drink, then consider the Johnnie Walker Tasting Dinner at Todd English’s Bonfire (50 Park Plaza, Boston) a holiday.
- From Rio to Austin to Boston
Carnaval Brasileiro isn't a concert — it's a bacchanal, a dance party that surpasses the lunk-headed debauchery of New Orleans Mardi Gras and is more in the spirit of Rio.
- Flow job
My wife and I decided it would be okay for her to fuck other guys.
- Beating up on Chris (times two)
It’s nice to see the rest of the world picking up on something we Vo Dilunduhs have known for years.
- From Mangoland to Portland
It’s a particularly wonderful experience to eat Venezuelan food in the middle of a sleet storm in Maine.
- Portland scene report: October 19, 2007
She’s shaved her head. That’s always a good thing.
- Old soul
Imagine your friend kicks everyone out of their holiday party because they’re tired of dancing and sharing their wine. Where are you going to go?
- Do they really serve old people stuff that good?
The big winners of this year’s Chili and Chowder Challenge soup-cooking contest aren’t the best restaurants in town.
- Less
Topics:
Lifestyle Features
, Culture and Lifestyle, Media, Religion, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Media, Religion, Joanna Newsom, Poetry, Sonic Youth, Wicca and Paganism, Devendra Banhart, Thurston Moore, Godsmack, Less
