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Pinchbeck vs Strieber – Apocalyptic Smackdown

By Gregon

This week on Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland radio show, author Daniel Pinchbeck was scheduled for a chat about his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Amazon US and Amazon UK). What eventuated though was a heated argument, after Daniel accused Whitley of being…

…in league with alien presences that don’t have the best interests of the human species at heart…the result is an intense and revealing discussion as Pinchbeck accuses Strieber of encouraging disaster by having a ‘negative’ view of the future and Strieber accuses Pinchbeck of preferring a fantasy that seeks to ignore the laws of nature.

In the washup to this interview, both Whitley (in his journal entry “War in Dreamland!“) and Daniel (in a new blog entry at Reality Sandwich) have commented about this toe-to-toe. And if all that’s not enough for you, Regan Lee gives her observations about the brouhaha.

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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13 Comments

  1. I want to hear the interview!
    I’ve read both Strieber and Pinchbeck’s comments, and also Regan Lee’s opinion. It’s interesting because, incredibly simply put, it seems like Pinchbeck is attacking Strieber for being a pessimistic man who thinks the world is going to hell, we can’t do nothing about it, and because of this Strieber may have this morbid desire to see the Apocalpyse unfold; even more, Pinchbeck thinks thoughts like these CAN actually inffluence either our social perspectives or even reality itself, much like The Secret’s thesis.

    And on the other hand, Strieber attacked Pinchbeck for being too naive in thinking everything will turn out to be ok if we just have happy happy thoughts (you know, like in that Ren & Stimpy episode, you remember that one?).

    I think both men had a wrong judgement about each other. And the main reason they went so over the edge is because they differ on the nature of the entities Strieber’s claims to have had contacted all these years. Are these aliens good or bad?

    From what I’ve read (and surely poorly understood) from Strieber’s arguments over the years, it appears to me that in the end IT DOES NOT MATTER if these beings are indeed evil, because he believes that a negative energy or inffluence can have a positive outcome in our lives, but ONLY if we have an active role in it instead of being completely passive. In other words, we have to choose.

    Castañeda writes about something simmilar when he deals about what he calls “Los Pinches Tiranos” (The F***ing tyrants). Basically the F. Tyrants are all those characters in your life that have left you with deep scars in your psyche; they are the playground bullies, the yelling boss, the unloving parent, you get my meaning. Castañeda argues that, for a “warrior” a tyrant is a marvelous opportunity to gain inner strength, if we prepare ourselves for the battle, we carefully plan our strategy, and if we rid of our self-esteem. In that sense there’s a lot we can learn from these harsh masters, and their lessons can be the best we can have in life.

    That’s why Strieber says of his alien friends, but Regan Lee suggests this has more to do with Strieber’s catholic backgrounds, hence his “need” for being punished to attain “salvation”. This I think can be disputed.

    So, I think Pinchbeck could be right when he goes saying that 2012 could be a wonderful opportunity for mankind of we harness it a-la CARPE DIEM; we couldn’t (and shouldn’t!) wait for 2012 as a matter of fact, we should try to change our world TODAY, right now, we should BELIEVE that we have the power to do it, because no God or space Brother is going to save it for us; and that’s where he fails to realize he actually AGREES with Strieber.

    But we have to be realists here. No matter what we choose to do TODAY to change the world, there will be unavoidable consequences and a price we’ll have to pay for our past mistakes. Even if we chose to forget about fossil fuels right now, the havok in our economy and our planet will be felt for decades to come; even if americans would choose to get out next week of Iraq, the blood and the suffering of the iraqi people would not cease like in a videogame, it will take many years for all the animosity between the different religious factions to settle. I think that’s Strieber’s position, so I don’t think that’s being pessimistic, any more that it should be avoided to tell a cancer patient that in order to save his life, he will have to suffer chemotherapy and maybe even the loss of a limb.

    The real tragedy would be NOT to do anything, because that way it won’t matter one bit if we feel confidant or pessimistic about the future. We would remain as cattle.

    —–
    It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
    It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

    Red Pill Junkie

    1. Castañeda’s tyrants
      >>”Los Pinches Tiranos” (The F***ing tyrants)

      That’s an interesting surprise. In the English edition, they’re called ‘petty’ tyrants, meaning ‘unimportant’ and/or ‘small-minded’. Actually, I always took ‘petty tyrants’ to mean people who are ‘important only in their own minds’, and ‘only important in your life if you’re foolish enough to allow them to be’.

      Somehow, the Spanish edition’s ‘Pinches Tiranos’ seem a lot more intimidating.

      Kat

      1. Castañeda is spanish
        I first began reading Castañeda’s book in the “original” english, since he published them all in the US first; so I read “Teachings of Don Juan”, “Journey to Ixtlan”, “A Separate Reality” & “Tales of Power”, which are considered the most important, all in english. BTW my dog seemed to enjoy Castaneda’s writing too, it was a labrador and ATE the cover and several pages of “Journey…” to my utter dismay and embarrasment, since it was a book from my college library! 🙂

        Then I began to find other books by him in mexican editions, and found the prose style was more direct, the language much more natural of course, since the plot of the books happens in Mexico most of the time. And so, whether by direct instruction of Carlos or not, the language in the mexican books was much more… crude. I imagine the people in charge of the translation were eiter students of him but I can’t be certain of that.

        —–
        It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
        It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

        Red Pill Junkie

        2. Castañeda
          Hi RPJ,

          Even further off topic, what is your (and Kat, too) take on Castañeda’s work regarding whether it is autobiographical in any significant way or merely well written fiction?

          I read them all when they first came out, but reached the point where I couldn’t gain much value from them, because they became ever more fantastic and therefore unbelievable at the root.

          Xavier Onassis

          1. It kind of doesn’t matter to me.
            Hi Xavier and Kat.

            The first chapter of “The Eagle’s Gift” is kind of blurry in my memory Kat, but I do remember it was one of the most shocking books I had read of him. Bear in mind that after the first four books, I wasn’t able to read the next in the proper order. I found one of his books by accident… or maybe the books FOUND me, who knows?
            But what I found shocking about “The Eagle’s” proposition was this concept of a life force that gave conscience to sentient creatures so it could feed from them at the moment of death. The idea of a cold heart.less universe that neither hated me nor loved me was something I found very difficult to accept because of my catholic roots. But there were times when depression would engulf me, that I accepted this notion of a cruel world devoid of God as truth.

            Getting to your question Xavier, I like many others, read the first 4 books and concluded it very well could be all based on “real” facts. That Don Juan indeed existed and was the teacher of Carlos. I progressed with the next books and as you well put it, they became even more fantastic, but I could still accept them because I kind of perceived in the pages an idea I was also finding in other sources: the concept of parallel universes and the capacity of humans to expand our level of consciousness to “enter” these realms.

            This was the time I saw the first “Matrix” movie, which you might have guessed had a GREAT impact in me, because I immediately linked it whith what Castañeda was saying. In my mind Don Juan was Morpheus, Carlos was Neo, and the red pill was the plants of power that Don Juan first used to “jolt” the senses of Carlos’ body. The idea of bending “The Matrix” was the result of using your WILL; and finally when Neo sees the agents and the Matrix as they relly were (lines of code/energy) it was exactly like in Carlos’ accounts of seeing the world as lines of energy and humans as “eggs” of light. It all made sense in an utter weird way to me.

            But then something happened, Castañeda DIED! How could this be?? Did he follow Don Juan’s path? Or did he die from a cancer he had suffered for a lot of years? The papers showed a photo of Carlos, and I couldn’t believe it, he was OLD! He was FAT! Was this the image of an impeccable warrior? I didn’t know what to think.

            So I began reading about people who knew Carlos, and there was a clear division between the people that believed he lived his life by the rules he described in his work, and the tales of people that though he was nothing but a clever CON artist that had a close group of women which satisfied his sexual urges.

            Did Don Juan exist? Was it all a lie? Truth is I don’t know. Maybe Carlos was at first in contact with that which he described as “The Separate Reality”, but it was a brief period, and to mantain his popularity and book sales he continued to distort true accounts with fiction. I sometimes think that could have been the case with alleged contactee Edward Billy Meier…

            But you know what? Ind the end it does not matter to me if all was the fruit of his imagination. That would only make me admire him more for his talent as a story-teller. And it does not matter that he could not follow his own “recipes” because I think that does not rip them of validity, and there’s a lot to be gained when you try to live your life as an impeccable warrior conscious of your own mortality. There’s a valuable lesson in trying to fight with your need to defend your self-importance.

            Pure fiction or not, there really is POWER in these teachings.

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

          2. My take on Castañeda’s work
            >>what is your (and Kat, too) take on Castañeda’s work regarding whether it is autobiographical in any significant way or merely well written fiction?

            Power corrupts, and relative power corrupts relatively.

            I think the first 3 books were based on his interactions with Tribal American medicine men in the US. But even those first three books were fictionalized to a degree, though far less than his later books. For instance, in Native American Church, you don’t have to come up with your own peyote song (prayer) — you can buy casette tapes full of them. When he wrote about ‘Don Juan’ seeing crows as omens, that actually referred to seeing eagles. And (sorry, RPJ) I don’t think any of it took place in Mexico – the parts that were real all took place in the southwest US.

            Books 1 and 2 are worthwhile to get people to question their habitual thinking and concensus reality.

            Book 3 – A Separate Reality – is a worthwhile lesson on what happens after you do question — you can never go ‘home’ again, because your perception of yourself and other people has changed too much.

            Books 4 and 5 are worthwhile lessons in how to deal with the petty tyrants in your life. It’s too bad that many of the people who sought out Castañeda after reading his books failed to remember those lessons when dealing with him.

            He may have intended for book 6 to be a lesson in how to deal with primal fears, but, particularly with regard to the fear of death, I don’t think he succeeded in dealing with those fears in his own life, and the book reflects that.

            Book 7 (and maybe 8 too – I forget) was supposedly a lesson about the energy bodies (etheric, astral). However, under certain conditions, its all-too-easy to see and experience things that you don’t fully understand. Problem is, when you’ve got a publisher and the public constantly begging you for another book, and bills to pay at your ‘compound’, and synchophantic lovers and ‘students’ talking to you about your ‘legacy’, you tend to convince yourself that you do understand.

            His last book? That’s what happens when you allow yourself to grow so egotistical and self-indulgent that you think to yourself, ‘I’m so grand, I could write a whole book full of nothing but pure manure, and it would still be published, and the fools would still buy it.’ Or, perhaps it was actually written by someone else.

            I once heard it said that the true definition of an impeccable warrior is one who has the courage to know their Self. Like Carlos, most of us humans just aren’t there yet. Most of us are still at the stage where we could sincerely devote a lifetime (or more) to that proposition, and we’d still fall short. That’s not to say such effort is fruitless — there’s promise in that aspiration. It may not seem like it at times, but imho, human consciousness is growing by leaps and bounds, and eventually we’ll achieve that goal, both individually and as a group. And when that day comes, we’ll all throw our graduation caps in the air in celebration, and new stars will twinkle in the heavens.

            Ha! – And some say I’m not a romantic…

            Kat

          3. Beautiful
            Great review of Castañeda’s work.

            Yes, probably he was most inffluenced by peyote cults of the southwest US than by the mexican indians of the Sonora desert. Castañeda said Don Juan was yaqui, but the yaqui don’t have a peyote tradition. Peyote ingestion is found among the raramuris (tarahumaras) in Chihuahua, and also among the huicholes in Jalisco/Nayarit.
            It’s possible also that he was inspired by the figure of María Sabina to come up with the character of Don Juan. Although maybe María Sabina is more linked to the character of Don Genaro Flores (which is my favorite in the books BTW).

            I haven’t read all of the books by him, I’m still missing 1 or 2 (like I said, I sort of wait for the books to come to me). I did read the last one, and I also read the books by Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner, who were two of the women in Carlos’ inner circle. Both are presumed to be dead now, and no one knows nothing of the whereabouts of Carol Tiggs, the nagual-woman.

            If anything, Castañeda was a master in forging his own myth, which he acted so well that maybe he ended up fooling even himself.

            I remember there was this movie with John Hurt, that was loosely based on Castañeda’s first book, it was very good but it’s really difficult to understand.

            There is one thing that has always fascinated me about Castañeda’s books: his accounts of slowly re-constructing the events he claimed to have experienced when he entered the stages of “non-ordinary reality”. It was probably just a re-telling of the old stories he had wrote in the past books, which I find rather daring, this idea of throwing all the rules and facts established previosuly to create a more fantastic philosophy. But still I find there’s a great deal of simmilarity between this slowly progression of what he claimed was a bringing to ordinary memory the events he experience in a state of increased conscience, and what alleged abductees like Whitley Strieber also claim to experience when they slowly begin to remember all these encounters with aliens, which also happen in a state of non-ordinary reality. That’s interesting to me.

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

          4. The Dark Side of Castaneda
            The Yaqui don’t smoke peyote. They were were quite annoyed when busloads of Californians rocked up with dog-eared copies of Castaneda’s books, wanting to smoke peyote and commune with Don Juan. “We don’t smoke peyote,” repeated the Yaqui, but still people seek them out for hallucinogenic vision quests, completely ignorant of the facts.

            A lot of other aspects of Castaneda’s story don’t add up, and as many have pointed out, everything he teaches in his books can be found in a decent religious philosophy section of a well-stocked library (Castaneda had the University of California at Berkeley at his disposal, enough said).

            In the beginning, Castaneda may have started out with sincere intentions — but in the end, he was an egotistic cult leader no different to Charles Manson, Jonestown or the President of Scientology.

            Here’s a terrific article questioning the authenticity of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan story.

          5. Yep!
            “but in the end, he was an egotistic cult leader no different to Charles Manson, Jonestown or the President of Scientology.”

            Indeed. Beware of masters who promise freedom through the route of slavery.

            But he was a good storyteller. For that I’m grateful to him. You have to learn to take the good and leave the bad in everything life throws in your path. I read “Teaching’s when i was passing through a very bad phase in my life, and it really was a great help, specially what Castañeda wrote about “a path with heart”.

            —–
            It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
            It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

            Red Pill Junkie

  2. “Smackdown” etc.
    Hi, I commented earlier but it didn’t go through. I like the quote presented here, and agree with it. I just think, applied to Whitley’s visitors, it’s giving “them” too much credit. Maybe not, however. It’s all just our take on someone else’s experience.

    The Orange Orb
    http://orangeorb.blogspot.com

  3. Post Scriptum
    Well, I just finished hearing Strieber’s interview with Pinchbeck, although there was a moment when it seemed the roles changed and the interviewee became the interviewer! (Ouch)

    From what I heard it seems that Daniel had wanted to express his viewpoint on what he perceives as a “shadow projection” by Strieber’s remarks, in the sense that Whitley believes there’s a real threat of a huge die-off in the future; not in 2012 of course, both men concurr they use that date as a time frame but they didn’t sound like they expect anything particular to happen EXACTLY on Dec. 21, 2012.

    As to why Daniel chose to express his sentiments about Strieber on a radioed interview, given that he apparently has been the guest of Dreamland on other occasions, it puzzles me.

    But it pleased me that both men at least agreed on the fact that NO ONE knows for sure what’s going to happen, on 2012 or any particular date for that matter. They both speculate based on their personal experiences, the things they have studied, and their own conclusions.

    And it is important to note that by the end of the interview Pinchbeck DID apologize to Strieber, although by then it was apparently too late, since Whitley remained angry at his guest (understandable of course).

    Hopefully both will be able to resolve their differences in the future, so they can continue to have interesting debates, even if they don’t agree 100% with one another.

    —–
    It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
    It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

    Red Pill Junkie

  4. Strieber Vs Pinchbeck
    Pinchbeck definitely came off better than poor Whitley, who wound up sounding like a petulant teenager. And yet PB did go in for the kill for no apparent reason, and frankly, WS’s argument is a helluva lot more persuasive, or would have been if he’d kept his head. My question is, why is a dieback necessarily a “negative” thing anyway? This is such a humancentric POV, and unworthy of a supposed cosmic culture prophet such as PB. I think WS nailed him as much as he got nailed: PB may not be terrified, but he does appear to be slightly in denial.

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