Some words to describe this book: amazing, twisted, messianic, holistic, germane, and useless.
This book describes Pinchbeck's autobiographical journey through the underworld of his subconscious and the mytho-historic underpinnings of the human civilization with the Mayan 2012 end time as his focal point. Pinchbeck's use of psychodelics echoes Graham Handcock's work but in a more personal, germane sense. He seems to know that he's going a bit mad through this journey, but knows there's something there as well, some mysterious other that beckons to us all -- perhaps in 2012 if we can save ourselves from a economic/environmental apocalypse. An amazing work, but one that mysteriously doesn't seem to go anywhere.
From Publishers Weekly
Pinchbeck, journalist and author of the drug-riddled psychonaut investigation Breaking Open the Head, has set out to create an "extravagant thought experiment" centering around the Mayan prophecy that 2012 will bring about the end of the world as we know it, "the conclusion of a vast evolutionary cycle, and the potential gateway to a higher level of manifestation." More specifically, Pinchbeck's claim is that we are in the final stages of a fundamental global shift from a society based on materiality to one based on spirituality. Intermittently fascinating, especially in his autobiographical interludes, Pinchbeck tackles Stonehenge and the Burning Man festival, crop circles and globalization, modern hallucinogens and the ancient prophesy of the Plumed Serpent featured in his subtitle. His description of difficult-to-translate experiences, like his experimentation with a little-known hallucinogenic drug called dripropyltryptamine (DPT), are striking for their lucidity: "For several weeks after taking DPT, I picked up flickering hypnagogic imagery when I closed my eyes at night ... In one scene, I entered a column of fire rising from the center of Stonehenge again and again, feeling myself pleasantly annihilated by the flames each time." Pinchbeck's teleological exploration can overwhelm, and his meandering focus can frustrate, but as a thought experiment, Pinchbeck's exotic epic is a paradigm-buster capable of forcing the most cynical reader outside her comfort zone.
http://www.amazon.com/2012-Return-Quetzalcoatl-Daniel-Pinchbeck/dp/B000ZJTRDM/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199310462&sr=8-2
