Book excerpt: In this unsparing tour of the perils and promises of the current era, visionary author Daniel Pinchbeck helps us understand that we don't need to wait for the dawning of the next age to radically change our perspectives. In the years since his pioneering work 2012, Daniel Pinchbeck has touched a legion of readers hungry for insight and guidance about new ways of living amid the crises of the current moment. Notes from the Edge Times collects Pinchbeck's most penetrating recent columns, articles, and essays that amount to an extraordinary mosaic view of the hopes, nightmares, and signs of breakthrough that mark our present era. Pinchbeck examines the current economic collapse (an event he had foreseen by many months), radical political and ecological alternatives, the uses of psychedelics for spiritual insight, the revival of the sexual revolution, unexplained phenomena such as crop circles and the Norway spiral, the imminent (and often-misunderstood) question of 2012, and what it means to be an artist in a time of radical change. Pinchbeck's virtuosity as a social critic, on full display in these pieces, is his ability to illuminate real and serious questions within unconventional topics that most literary intellects are unwilling to touch, from secret weapons systems to extrasensory abilities to the intelligence of plant life. In Notes from the Edge Times, Pinchbeck does more than critique present-day questions and conflicts; he provides fresh ideas for living more consciously now, and for constructing our own more enlightened futures, even as the world around us faces profound environmental, social, and spiritual challenges