The retreat idea fell apart due to financial problems and there’s a long discussion on the site between Rob from the Chimbre retreat, Reality Sandwichers, and Daniel Pinchbeck about the mix between spirituality and commerce.  Really, think this thread is going to be referenced down the line regarding the problems of mixing God and money in any form – it’s not just a problem for Christian mega-churches. After a lot of back and forth and suspicion, Pinchbeck weighs in:

Since starting Evolver, we have been struggling with the question of how to finance this operation. Somebody like Rob, who comes out of the Wall Street world but discovered his soul through ayahuasca, is exactly our dream candidate for an investor and ally. We dearly wanted to work with him because we could see that he brought in a business force and acumen that we, who started this venture, tend to lack….

I still really love Rob and believe he means to do good for the world. However I also believe that the new spirit he discovered through ayahuasca is currently warring with the old Rob who made a fortune through the Wall Street vulture-fest. During our negotiations, I felt that he betrayed my trust and went back on his word. I asked him in emails if he felt I had betrayed his trust, and he admitted he did not. For me, I kind of agree with Don Juan that a man’s word is the only thing he really has. When I felt Rob was reneging in his initial offer to us about Chimbre, at the same time he seemed to be using all sorts of cunning and nasty negotiating tactics around Evolver, I felt that we also shouldn’t be involved with retreats supported by such an energy.

As a friend says, “It’s tragicomic. A psychedelia pillow-fight showdown. These are the progenitors of a ‘new consciousness’? Henry, we’re so screwed.”

Really fascinating to see people who are looking for enlightenment devolve into bickering and infighting.  I found this on Youtube, which is fairly enlightening about Rob, the guy behind the disagreement. At 1:35, there’s a pretty revealing anecdote about his volatility. Don’t want to denigrate him totally, as I don’t know the guy, but Pinchbeck’s made a recent comment about how people can have their mind opened by something like Ayahuasca and think the work’s over – they’re enlightened, they’ve been to the other side, they’re priests. But real-world human instincts aren’t shed that easily.

The two most compelling movements I see right now are the Zeitgeist Movement and Evolver & Daniel Pinchbeck’s work regarding a possible change in consciousness.  The Zeitgeist movement is anti-religion, and even anti-God, as the purpose of part one of Zeitgeist is to show how Christianity and other religions have a basis in sun worship, and that’s it, just worship of this object that leads to photosynthesis and creates life on the planet.  Pinchbeck would argue, I imagine, that the sun’s relationship to the earth is as spiritual as it is physical – ala his essay in Toward 2012 about Cosmos and Psyche.

A merging of the two movements would be interesting.  Zeitgeist’s plan seems to be to start a test society somewhere to prove a new economy could work – on his radio show, Peter Joseph, the filmmaker, mentions Finland as a possible starting point. An aside – he calls the integration of Zeitgeist into a real-world framework “Phase III,” which is what I call “The New City” in The American Book of the Dead, when a new community starts after WW III is over.

Could the two movements co-exist – a community of psychonauts and a community of atheistic libertarians?  The real question is how successful any new community could be, given the proclivity for power grabs even by people who are supposedly enlightened.  Not to be too pessimistic, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot of work to make any new revolution effective.  If a planet of 8 billion people is already not on board with these sorts of ideas, how is it going to work if even the “believers” are fighting with each other?  Making these grievances public is useful in order to iron them out, but it’s as if the human system is built to make the transition difficult.

There’s also the potential for demagoguery, especially among revolutionaries.  That seemed to be people’s fear about Pinchbeck and Chimbre – that he was trying to profit off his celebrity.  But that doesn’t really seem to be the case.  I don’t know if Peter Joseph has it in him to be a cult leader, but my fear is that the Zeitgeist movement could devolve into that if the movement started an isolated society somewhere. Not saying that’s the case, but the Reality Sandwich debacle shows just how hard it is to create these sorts of forward-thinking movements.  Zeitgeist is all about how power corrupts, and that’s true even for people who are fighting the power.

Yeah, it’s hard.  But at least they’re trying.