Hi folks,

Please check out this short film. I have been working on it for a while. I think it is a brilliant work of animation, directed by Joao Amorim of Curious Pictures. If you like it, please forward it to your friends and networks:

postmoderntimes.com/

"Welcome to Postmodern Times, a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global consciousness and techniques for social and ecological transformation. Our first episode, "Toward 2012", introduces the project, explaining concepts from the best-selling book, "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) by Daniel Pinchbeck, in the author's own voice. Future segments will focus on shamanism, sustainability, alternative energy systems, the Mayan Calendar, quantum physics and synchronicity, human sexuality, and a host of other subjects."

Also, my new Conscious Choice column has just been posted. I have enclosed the first few paragraphs below. The entire piece is here: consciouschoice.com/2007/08/...0708.html

August 2007 | Prophet Motive
The Sexual Revolution, Take Two
By Daniel Pinchbeck

For the last few years, I have been exploring the nature of sexuality, love, and relationships, both personally and philosophically. When I separated from my last partner, I realized that I did not feel that monogamy was working for me as a model. Yet I also knew that I craved long-lasting, deep, and sustainable relationships. Since then, I have sought to reconcile my conflicting yearnings, and wondered if other models of relationships are possible or desirable.

Just as we are undergoing a second stage of the process of shamanic initiation that was curtailed at the end of the 1960s, we have entered a wiser and more integrated phase of the Sexual Revolution that crested thirty-five years ago. A more conscious approach to erotic relationships requires a sympathetic awareness of the differences between men and women, and an acceptance of individual distinctions as well. In the 1950s, the scandalous Kinsey Report on human sexuality revealed the vast variety of human sexual experience, and showed that a huge number of people sought intimate contact outside of the confines of their marital relationships. The opening of sexuality in the 1960s led to deflationary decadence in the disco culture of the 1970s, and a pop cultural ambience of constant stimulation and insatiation that the philosopher Herbert Marcuse called "repressive desublimation."

We are still struggling with millennia of negative conditioning — Judeo-Christian guilt, shame, and original sin — around the subject of sexuality. We also belong to a culture that denigrates bodily pleasure and intimacy. In our culture, infants are separated from their parents as soon as they are born and placed in hospital nurseries. In tribal and aboriginal cultures, infants tend to be almost inseparable from their mothers' bodies for the first years of their life. As Robert Lawlor notes in his book Earth Honoring, absence of touch in early life may have long-lasting psychological consequences: For aboriginal peoples, happiness is a natural state of being. For denizens of the modern industrialized world, happiness tends to be a distant and almost unattainable goal.

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Also a new feature is up on Reality Sandwich about urban homesteading, also an interview with Alex Grey.

www.realitysandwich.com/node/443

Become an Urban Homesteader
Homegrown Revolution

On our little urban farm in the heart of Los Angeles we produce food, hack our house to generate power and recycle water, plot revolution and build community. You can too. Trust us, once you eat a sweet tomato still warm from the sun, or an orange-yolked egg from your own hen, you will never be satisfied with the pre-packaged and the factory-farmed again.