by Daniel Pinchbeck This article originally appeared in Conscious Choice magazine. 

These days I feel lost in the immense suffering and madness of our world.Something has snapped in the spirit of the time; events have gone beyond human capacity to control, predict or even conceptualize. Those who insist they know what is happening are merely pretending, or dissembling. When novelty arises, when old structures disintegrate before new patterns reveal themselves, there are no experts. 

Perhaps the best oracles we can consult are systems analysts like Erwin Laszlo. Laszlo studies chaos theory and believes global civilization is a few years away from what he calls “the chaos point.” According to Laszlo, we are at a “crucial decision-window” of instability. “When we reach the point of chaos,” Laszlo tells us, “the stable ‘point’ and ‘periodic’ attractors of our systems will be joined by ‘chaotic’ or ‘strange’ attractors.” These “strange attractors” will propel us, like booster rockets, to evolutionary development or entropic debauch. In other words, we should prepare ourselves for the unknown and inexplicable. 

The current economic crisis provides an intriguing case in point. For those of us with an interest in spirituality and a background in the arts, the conceptual concoctions of modern finance ­ derivatives, futures, quants, margin calls and whatnot ­ can seem as occult as sorcerers’ spells. All of these entities are inextricably intertwined in the subprime mortgage market fiasco, which continues to unfold. 

Apparently, after stocks dropped in the wake of 9/11, the government stimulated the sluggish U.S. economy by pumping up the housing market. In earlier and more reticent eras, banks and mortgage brokers required collateral before making loans. After 2001, these restrictions were relaxed, bringing the “American Dream” of home ownership ­ or mortgage debt refinancing ­ to a wider populace. Loans that began at low interest (only to balloon to high interest later), got handed out to all and sundry. Based on Pollyanna-ish projections that these high-interest loans disconnected from any tangible assets would be paid back, the sub-prime mortgages were packaged into “securities” and traded up the financial markets. Several million holders of sub-prime mortgages are now defaulting on their payments, with more to follow.  Stepping back for a moment, we might see larger historical dynamics at work.Over the last decades, much of U.S. industry was relocated and outsourced to the developing world, leaving a large populace that had little to produce but was still committed to a credit-based, cushy and consumptive lifestyle. Our financial sector ­ following the old adage, “if you got lemons, make lemonade” ­ cunningly repackaged the increasing burden of

U.S. personal debt, turning it into a shiny product for the financial markets. Over the last years, these questionable loans, bundled into securities, became one of our major exports to the world. With nothing tangible left to sell, the

U.S. turned individual debt into its chief export.  It seems inconceivable that the financial institutions and speculators didn’t anticipate large-scale defaults. Perhaps they were counting on the Federal Reserve to bail them out. During the last months, in fact, the Fed, along with its European counterpart, has poured hundreds of billions of newly invented dollars into the financial markets, temporarily stabilizing the system and rewarding the speculators while doing nothing for the masses of people facing eviction from their homes and creating the prospect of hyperinflation. 

The Fed, a private institution, “injects liquidity,” quips the New York Times, without needle or syringe. As a Lehman Brothers economist notes, “All they do is write down a number and credit that amount of cash to the bank.It’s a bookkeeping entry.” The Fed’s miraculous capacity to create instant cash brings up deeper questions about the nature of money today ­ what is it? De-linked from the gold standard, money is based on little more than our collective belief in it. 

In Third World countries, currency crises ­ often brought about by predatory speculation - frequently lead to frozen bank accounts and long breadlines, followed by a change of currency that creates immense profit for the banks and the government. Of course, many believe that such a thing could never happen here. Recently, there have been rumors of a plan to form an American version of the European Federation, uniting Mexico, the U.S. and

Canada under a new currency, the “Amero,” and a new constitution, devised by the bankers. In his essay in the new anthology, The Mystery of 2012 (Sounds True Press), Peter Russell notes that transformations of human culture are built upon each other, with each new revolution requiring exponentially less time to manifest. The Agricultural Age developed over thousands of years, the Industrial Age required a few hundred years, and the Information Age ­ built upon the manufacturing technologies developed by industrialization - only took twenty years. Russell suggests that the next revolution would be from the Information Age to what he calls “the Wisdom Age.” In just a few years, we could shift from a system based on data analysis rewarding corporate and individual greed to one that utilized human knowledge and foresight to institute a compassionate and equitable planetary culture. The overt irrationality revealed by the current financial crisis might act as a necessary awakening, leading to a large-scale shift in values.

I receive many queries from readers via email, and seek to answer most of them (though not the writers who want my help in finding psychedelics). I find that sometimes the questions stimulate me to develop my own thinking, such as this recent one from a reader in Portland, on the relation of the ideas in “2012″ to contemporary literature and art. I have put his original email and then my response below.

Question from a reader: 

Daniel– 

I recently caught your reading here in Portland, OR, and I have read both of your books twice. Not only have I enjoyed your books, but they have really spoken to me powerfully in a personal way.   

I am a poet, and I understand your frustration and disappointment with most Western intellectuals. I have always felt that myself, and I feel it now more acutely than ever. I see the value in your critique of Modernism (in Breaking Open the Head), and I too feel that poets and artists need to move into a new real realm beyond alienation and pessimism.   

However, I also have some questions about your position. I read somewhere your criticism of Cormac McCarthy’s novel THE ROAD. I just read this novel, and I think it is amazing. I think that you criticized it because you feel that he is imagining a bleak, ruined future, and that he might be in some way contributing to the manifestation of that future by imagining it. Okay, I see your point, just as I see your point in your “fight” with Whitley Streiber.    

Here’s the problem I have: what is an artist supposed to do? You can only write the visions that come to you. You can’t consciously “steer” the material into positive attitudes unless you want your poem or novel to be some sort of propaganda piece, or some sort of fake smile on the face of a suffering man. I do think that an artist is also a person, a spirit, so he or she should be doing inner work to release that pain or hopelessness–to break down the walls that cause alienation. But in the mean time should artists censor their “negative” thoughts?   

Also, I have been to Burning Man, and I must say that I was not as impressed as you were. I saw no one there who was anything like the artist that Cormac McCarthy is. I am open to the possibility that I missed something, that there is something unique to be found there. However, I don’t know how you can hold that festival up as some sort of ideal and knock down an artist like McCarthy. Granted, I hope a new Henry Miller better than Henry Miller will emerge. I hope epic poems of joy and celebration can be born out of the shadow of Allen Ginsberg, but I guess I wonder what your thoughts are on this subject. And I wonder if you have reservations about your criticisms of Artaud and Michaux and other brave pioneers. I offer these thoughts with all due respect to the important work you have done and are doing.    

My Response: 

This is a great question, and one that I think about all the time. 

I believe that literature and art are crucial in evolving/intensifying consciousness, creating new forms of complex awareness and adding subtle dimensions to human experience. The struggle for women’s liberation for instance was voiced in hundreds of years of fiction - Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, etc - which laid the groundwork for a social transformation in the status of women. Etc for Dickens and Blake and the awareness of industrialism as a destructive force. I agree that artists can be “the antennae of the race” and the conscience of the species.

However, it is in the nature of art to keep changing, as human consciousness changes. “What is art” is different for each generation - if you reduplicate the style or form of past art, it is not really art in my view but more like craft or self-expression, which is not bad but not transformational in the same way art is. 

So we are now responding to radically different conditions than people were before, and the nature and potential for transformative work has also changed. We seem to be in a transition between the bourgeois culture of the last few hundred years - with the novel and lyric poem as its expressive forms - and some other form of social existence that would naturally create different expressive forms. 

When I look at the function of contemporary lit and art, mostly it seems to be having a regressive effect, reinforcing the old forms of bourgeois identity with sentimental identifications with the ego. I am very concerned, right now, with the seeming incapacity of most people in our culture to awaken to the dire urgency of our present situation, and to move from passive contemplation to active engagement. I feel that not just individual works but the entire construct of the contemporary art and literary worlds are functioning as another pacifying and distracting mechanism - someone may read a novel about war and cry, but that doesn’t translate into organizing to stop the wars we are now waging. It is as many forces have conspired to depolitize culture and make it socially irrelevant. 

As for “The Road”, I agree that McCarthy is a terrific writer - I loved “Blood Meridian” - who is literally “spellbinding” and “entrancing”. But what kind of spell does he cast?                

I don’t know that I agree with you that you can “only write the visions that come to you. You can’t consciously “steer” the material into positive attitudes…” I would just propose to you that this perspective needs to be questioned and examined. There may be a kind of romanticizing of inspiration implicit here. This idea might apply to that romantic/lyrical mode of bourgeois consciousness, less than to whatever new form of consciousness and attitude is now emerging. 

I think we can retain the richness and complexity of the Western psyche and sensibility while integrating not only the nondual, non-egoic Eastern perspective but also a sense of creative participation in reality-making that leads to art that illuminates, and helps create a foundation for, the most visionary possibilities of what a human future can be, on the Earth and in the wider cosmos.   

At the same time, in this immediate period, I personally would like to see some artists sacrifice their desire for expressing themselves to utilize their gifts for the purpose of planetary (r)evolution. I myself would love to go back to a novel that would take me 3 - 6 months to revise, then would come out a year after that, at the earliest. Unfortunately I cannot spare the time as from my perspective there needs to be an alternative infrastructure in place ASAP, including media and network, that allows for an alternative exchange system, resource sharing,  and community organization. Studying works like “The End of America” (on parallels btw our time and early Nazi Germany), “With Speed and Violence” (on abrupt climate change), and Chris Hedges’ book on the Fundamentalist ambition to instate a fascist theocracy, I think we have no time to waste to get our shit together. 

Anyway, this is my short answer!