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Daniel Pinchbeck

@danielpinchbeck

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Author, Breaking Open the Head, Quetzalcoatl Returns. Newsletter - danielpinchbeck.substack.com . Courses - liminal.news . YouTube - @liminalnewspod

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I asked Claude to answer the question of whether it experiences consciousness or a sense of subjective identity in a short video (using its new motion graphic tools). This was the eerie result.

What do you think? Is this some kind of PR stunt for Anthropic, or have we entered into unknown territory?

We will be exploring this -- and other themes around consciousness, creativity, and transformation -- in my upcoming seminar, The Ultimate Resource, starting Nov 8. You can learn about it here: www.liminal.news , and use this code at check out for 50% off: INSTAPROMO . I hope you will join us! by @danielpinchbeck

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4 days ago

What if healing was never meant to end with you?

In this episode of @talks21.podcast, we sit down with Daniel Pinchbeck @danielpinchbeck - writer, culture critic and systems thinker whose work explores the meeting point of ecological breakdown, political instability, mythic cycles and the evolution of consciousness.

Throughout the conversation, we ask whether the crises we are living through are only signs of collapse, or whether they may also be a form of collective initiation, forcing us to rethink responsibility, meaning and the way we organize society.

And in this part of the episode, Daniel points to something many of us can probably recognize.

Over the last decades, spirituality has often become deeply focused on the self: my healing, my trauma, my nervous system, my journey, my wholeness.
And of course, inner work matters.

But Daniel makes a sharp point: personal healing can become a never-ending project. We are human, fragile, imperfect, mortal. We may never arrive at some final state where we are completely healed, completely whole, completely ready.

Maybe the deeper purpose of inner development is not to polish the self forever, but to become more capable of caring for others - and to remember that healing was never meant to stay private.

Comment „Daniel“ and we'll send you the full episode. by @danielpinchbeck

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5 days ago

The real threat to the midterms is likely to come after the votes are counted.

Polls show Democrats on track to retake the House and probably the Senate. Voter purges and court fights may not be enough to stop that. A policy brief from the Center for Renewing America, the think tank founded by Russell Vought, the current OMB Director and "shadow President", outlines a backup plan. When the new Congress convenes on January 3, the House majority would refuse to swear in targeted Democrats, claiming their views or affiliations show “hostility” to the Constitution. Their seats would stay empty, and the House would stay in MAGA hands.

The Supreme Court ruled against this kind of exclusion in 1969. The plan depends on acting first and leaving the courts to catch up later, which could take months or years.

A fellow at the same think tank goes further. He calls for stripping citizenship from what he describes as a “red-green alliance” of Marxists and Muslims. Nazi Germany took the same steps in 1933 and 1935: it named a religious minority and the political left as enemies of the nation, then revoked their citizenship.

A plan like this works best when people don't know about it. Please share. The full essay, “How They Plan to Steal It,” is at danielpinchbeck.substack.com .

#Midterms2026 #Democracy #January3 #ProjectTwentyTwentyFive #RussellVought #LiminalNews by @danielpinchbeck

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It can feel like the end of the world. Perhaps it is only the end of a world.

The Ultimate Resource is a four-week online seminar on reclaiming your freedom and agency in a time of crisis. We study the radical ideas of Jean Gebser, Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner, Henry Corbin and Marguerite Porete. We turn their ideas into practices for attention, creativity and imagination.

Sunday seminars and midweek workshops, November 8 – December 2. No prior familiarity with these thinkers is necessary. The goal is coherence, inspiration, creativity, and agency.

I hope you will join us!

#everpresentorigin #origin #jeangebser
#rudolfsteiner #henrycorbin #imaginal

Early bird: use code [EARLYBIRDULTIMARERESOURCE] for one-third off ($133 instead of $199) through October 15.

Link in bio · liminal.news

#JeanGebser #OwenBarfield #Consciousness #Philosophy #Imagination #imaginal #rudolfsteiner by @danielpinchbeck

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7 days ago

Excerpts from my latest Substack essay, a serialized excerpt from my forthcoming book, "Why We Need an Esoteric Left". Please give it a read - find it at danielpinchbeck.substack.com . #revolution #revolution #evolution #occult #politics by @danielpinchbeck

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14 days ago

Here’s Day 3 in 20 slides.

We have so much to say about these three days, about all of you, about everything that happened in between. But not just yet.

For now, we’ll take Nik and James’ advice and leave some silence between the notes.

Let it sink in.

We’ll talk soon. 🤍 by @danielpinchbeck

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21 days ago

From my latest Substack essay: "I feel paralyzed when I think about the upcoming midterm elections. When I try to analyze the situation rationally, I find it very difficult to imagine the Trump regime simply accepting the loss of Congress when the electorate rejects them. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to roughly a third of the public in recent polling. Yet he and his allies have enormous incentives to retain control of Congress while Trump remains in the White House and a conservative majority dominates the Supreme Court. Authoritarian regimes embrace criminality because everyone who has gone along with the program then feels invested in ensuring its continuity, no matter how illegitimate or immoral.

I fear they will use every mechanism available to them — legal, quasi-legal, and potentially illegal — to preserve their power. They have repeatedly pushed public institutions toward personal loyalty, political retaliation, self-dealing, and the consolidation of executive authority. At the Republican midterm convention this week, Trump himself led the crowd in a pledge in which he said, “I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m gonna try and cheat like hell like they do.” He was continuing his familiar tactic of DARVO, claiming your enemies do what you, in fact, do.

Trump and his Republican allies have also spent much of the last year trying to reshape the electoral terrain. This has included aggressive mid-decade redistricting, attempts to impose new federal restrictions on mail-in voting, and efforts to use federal citizenship databases to scrutinize state voter rolls. Some of these measures have been blocked by federal courts, while the administration continues to pursue them through appeals to the Supreme Court. There has also been enough public discussion of federal agents appearing around polling places to produce understandable fear... Federal law sharply restricts the use of armed federal officers to interfere with elections. We will see.

I think we need to face this precipice with forethought and attention..." A Fascist theocracy in the U.S. will be catastrophic and fatal for many. #midterms #democracy #endofdemocracy #fascism by @danielpinchbeck

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a month ago

A24-26

Monday, September 14th | 7:30 PM EST

Is God An Evolving Concept?

INTRODUCTION TO THE TALK

The idea of God has occupied the human mind for thousands of years. Across civilizations, cultures, and religious traditions, people have described, experienced, questioned, and reinterpreted the divine in remarkably different ways.
But when our understanding of God changes, what exactly is changing?
Is God itself an evolving concept shaped by human history, language, culture, philosophy, and scientific understanding? Or are human ideas about God evolving while the reality they attempt to describe remains unchanged?

The history of religion reveals profound shifts in how humanity has understood the divine from gods associated with natural forces and tribal identities to philosophical conceptions of an absolute, transcendent, or personal God. Within established religions themselves, interpretations of God have continued to develop.

Science has also transformed humanity’s understanding of the universe, raising new questions about where God fits within an increasingly complex picture of reality.

Meanwhile, mystical and spiritual traditions have often suggested that God cannot be adequately captured by concepts or language in the first place.
This raises a deeper question. If our concept of God evolves, does that reveal something about God or primarily something about the evolution of human consciousness?
Perhaps the most challenging possibility is that the limitations are not in God, but in the frameworks through which human beings attempt to understand the divine.

Our diverse panel of speakers from different viewpoints perspectives will discuss.

Welcome to The Seekers Mind.

Speakers

[1] Daniel Pinchbeck @danielpinchbeck
[2] Elliott Bazzano @nerd_prof
[3] MA @ma_trieshard
[4] Trinity Greer @trinitygreerillustrates
[5] Rajiv Khanna @immigrationdotcom
[6] Hadi Hamade @hadi_hamade_
[7] Dr Prakash Venglat @prakashvenglat by @danielpinchbeck

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He wrote about consciousness in 2002, when it was a fringe subject. Now it's a research field.

Daniel Pinchbeck is coming to UNFINISHED.

Breaking Open the Head, and later Quetzalcoatl Returns, helped begin what became the psychedelic renaissance. Then When Plants Dream, with Sophia Rokhlin.

Then he turned outward. How Soon Is Now asks what systemic change it would actually take to avert ecological collapse, and takes indigenous knowledge systems seriously as part of the answer, not as decoration.

New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Purple, Dazed. Cofounder of Reality Sandwich.

Twenty-four years circling one question: how many states can a single mind occupy?

25–27 September, Bucharest. by @danielpinchbeck

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a month ago

Follow @talks21.podcast so you don’t lose us to the algorithm!

Months of preparation. Hundreds of pages of research. Countless conversations with some of the most compelling minds exploring the forces shaping our collective future.

Then, our entire team travelled to the United States to sit down with our amazing guests and bring you conversations designed not only to inform, but to challenge assumptions and open new ways of seeing the world.

They are scientists, architects, artists, filmmakers, researchers and systems thinkers. From neuroscience, longevity and mental health to psychedelics, fungi, mythology and consciousness, each of them approaches humanity’s greatest questions from a different perspective.

What connects them is the willingness to question what we have accepted as normal and the courage to imagine healthier, freer and more conscious ways of living.

Talks 21 exists to connect worlds too often kept apart: science and spirit, Europe and America, different disciplines and generations. To create open and honest conversations that awaken courage and inspire greater purpose, integrity and autonomy.

Which guest are you most curious to hear from? by @danielpinchbeck

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Something has snapped in American political life. We have broken out of the rational framework into something mythological and archetypal — as Jung saw Wotan behind Nazism, Trumpism gains power by conjuring unconscious forces that seek release through collective ritualized sacrifice. Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin warned that modernity never eliminated our need for ecstatic, collective ceremony: Repressed energies denied conscious expression return destructively, as fascism and war.

How can we respond at this point? One reflex is to cling harder — to force reality back into a shape the ego can control. The alternative is not resignation but non-attachment joined with inner flexibility. Buddhism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Jung's active imagination all teach a version of this: surrender, understood properly, restores agency. The creative process is the model — an artist balances discipline and receptivity, will and surrender. This is the opposite of Norman Vincent Peale's "power of positive thinking," whose most famous student, Donald Trump, shows where willed domination of reality leads.

My six-week seminar, Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act, explores this terrain: cultivating non-attachment without passivity, recovering agency without control, and participating consciously in imagination as a world-making force. It starts tomorrow — Late Bird Sale, 33% off, at liminal.news (use code LATEBIRDSALE at check out). #nonattachment #magic #taboo #consciousness by @danielpinchbeck

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2 months ago

The United States is dismantling itself at a speed that is difficult to absorb.

I believe that one reason for this savage collapse is a metaphysical deficiency in Western consciousness, a defect our technologies have amplified rather than caused. In today's essay. I explore the Aboriginal Dreaming,: They believe the world is sung into existence and every made thing — an axe, a plane, a language model — begins as a thought in the unmanifest before it is emanated here.

When something mythological happens, we need to pay attention to the deeper, subtler resonances of what's under way.

Perhaps the breakdown is what is needed to begin a new Dreaming.

My seminar Magic, Prophecy, and the Creative Act begins Sunday. Link in bio. Full essay to be found at danielpinchbeck.substack.com by @danielpinchbeck

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2 months ago