2012: Time for Change Documentary Review

 Hey folks, thought I'd share this review with you, originally posted on Evolutionary Landscapes:

"This question of what will happen in 2012 may just be the wrong question, and we should just be asking: what are we going to bring about?"

I finally got around to seeing Daniel Pinchbeck's film, and I have to say that it was enjoyable and surprisingly inspiring. Pinchbeck gets some big shots to talk in the film, including the musician Sting, the consciousness teacher Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Dennis McKenna (brother of Terence McKenna). This documentary is in many ways a summary of his book, 2012: the Return of Quetzalcoatl and his latest publication, Notes From the Edge Times. It begins with an animation of the Mayan creation myth, which tells us how the gods created various "types" of humans, each with some defect that forced the gods to destroy them. We were once clay, wood, and now modern humans. Will we face the same demise as previous human ages?

Pinchbeck explores how our modern, industrial and materialist culture has disconnected itself from essential ways of knowledge, long forgotten in premodern cultures. In context, many of these cultures have had a lot to say about our own age. 2012 is the end of a calender cycle, and a cyclical shift in world ages. How can we as secular Westerners integrate this forgotten knowledge to make this transformation positive?

The majority of the movie explores the un-sustainability of modern industrial civilization, and then goes into how we can re-invision civilization and gear our tech-savvy culture towards ecological solutions (permaculture, city farms, etc). One of the interesting people was Bernard Lietaer, author of The Future of Money. He puts forward the idea that our hierarchical money system is an unsustainable model. Instead, he suggests that we adopt alternative, decentralized money systems, based on "open source" philosophy and cooperation (a kind of ecological monetary system).

"Prophecy and history become the same thing."

One of the most interesting topics I found in this documentary was the discussion of prophecy and time. The idea that a prophecy is something that exists in some distant, linear point is misleading, for the ancient Maya, and many pre-modern societies had a different conception of time than we do. The past, present and future are interdependent cycles. One of the interviewees mentioned that we are in the "space of no time." The knowledge of the future is gained from the past, "if we are present, we can see the future."

Halfway through the film, Pinchbeck describes his psychedelic journeys and how they helped transform his own worldview.

"It was one of the experiences I had... that shamans are actually capable of accessing this other form of knowledge, or awareness, that you couldn't access through ordinary channels."

The lack of initiation in our culture, Pinchbeck suggests, is one of missing components of our time. He also notes that this may be why the 60's were not capable of making a total transformation of our civilization. We lack the elders and the shamanic wisdom that is present in indigenous cultures. The psychedelic experience helps us become aware that we are "stewards" of nature, and without this recognition, we are ever at risk for destroying ourselves. But how to re-imagine civilization?

Buckminster Fuller gets a good portion of time in this documentary. "The Leonardo Da Vinci" of the 20th century, he reimagined the Earth as a whole system. He believed we already had the technology and resources to transform the world, but we had to have a "design revolution" in which we would "do more with less." His inventions, though some of them are a bit quirky, are quite visionary for the time (mid 20th century, hinting at the green revolution yet to come).

At this point of the documentary, I was reminded of many of the other visionaries, like Tesla, who were something like seer-scientists. When we invoke the imagination, through the invention of technology and architecture, we summon forth previously un-manifested dimensions of being that exist in what Carl Jung called the "collective unconscious." Simple, human imagination is a participation with this greater reality. So when we, even as a secular culture, "invent," we simultaneously invoke and participate in a creative act with the eternal. Of course, becoming conscious of this, as Barbara Marx Hubbard suggests, may be a new and important component of the Great Work.

In other words, just as the first civilizations were a great act of invoking the imagination and the unconscious, we are now in the midst of an even greater invocation on a planetary scale.

The documentary also explores Dean Radin's scientific studies on ESP, David Lynch and transcendental meditation, and Richard Register's ecological city design (among many others). It dips its toes into such a variety of fronts, but I think a coherent theme is taking place: we need to re-imagine civilization, and integrating forgotten forms of knowledge can help us take the first steps to an entirely "new age" of human society that has never existed before, and that is up to us to create. I recommend this film as it gives one a wide glance at what many people are doing at many transformative fronts in society.

Teaser Trailer:

First ten minutes of the movie: