Next week, after holding the article for months and nearly killing it, Rolling Stone is publishing a feature article on me (on-sale August 24). I await this with a mingling of excitement and trepidation. For the last years, since I realized the potential magnitude of the importance of the material I was exploring, I have hoped to function as a good messenger and communicator of these difficult ideas to the public. Because of the radical nature of the paradigm I am offering, I felt that this required scrupulous integrity on my part, and have done my best to adhere to that.

I think that "2012" is pretty rigorous in exposing my own faults rather than holding myself up as some kind of paragon or guru. However, it is one thing to expose your own faults in your own language and your own way, and another to have an outsider come in to do it for you! Above all, I am concerned that the article - which I have not read yet - does not do justice to the book's content and philosophical approach, but sensationalizes and trivializes my perspective instead. In any event, the Rolling Stone piece will bring the concept of a global consciousness shift in relation to the Mayan Calendar end date in 2012 and the post-modern resurgence of shamanism to a much broader audience. The piece is likely to be a watershed moment in the mainstreaming of a number of different ideas - including ayahuasca shamanism and the Mayan and Hopi prophecy cycle. It will be interesting to see the results.

Of course, from my perspective, the raising of consciousness around these issues is actually part of the prophetic foretelling, inseparable from the process of evolving planetary awareness, on a scale that can hopefully jump from countercultural to global in the matter of a few short years.

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A beautiful late season crop circle appeared just a few days ago: www.cropcircleconnector.com/2006...lhamp ton/etchilhampton2006b.html