Daniel Pinchbeck could very well save our hides. His new book, How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation, elevates itself well beyond the kind of doom tract that increasingly clutters bookshelves (and movie screens) these days, as humanity senses with ever-growing alarm its impending all-systems collapse.

On the contrary, while Pinchbeck explains with terrifying clarity that we’ve crossed the line on at least four of the nine planetary boundaries that will, short of immediate action, spell our demise—climate change, loss of biodiversity, ozone depletion, nitrogen pollution—the 50-year-old author has stuffed How Soon Is Now with a dazzling array of practical, if radical, solutions, all of them well within reach if historical precedent is anything to go by. By the end of its 265 urgent, breathless, inspired pages, you might actually feel weirdly uplifted, maybe even hopeful.

When the Straight reaches him by phone, mind you, Pinchbeck is an exhausted man, wheeling through New York City by cab after an eight-hour flight from London, having wrapped up the European leg of a tour that brings the author to Vancouver for a speaking engagement at Banyen Books early next month. As such, he’s ready to get a little blunt about the prospects of a book that imagines a future based partly in mystical anarchism.

“It took me so long to do this book,” he begins, “and I feel it’s so important, and at this point I’m kind of sad because I used to be more part of the mainstream media and I’m finding it more difficult to get a hearing, so far. I see Milo Yiannopoulos getting interviewed all over the fucking place with his book that he made a lot more money for, and this is what the culture is fucking focused on. You spend nine years trying to figure out how to get out of this mess, and you can’t even get a review in the English newspapers. It sucks!”

Amazingly, while Pinchbeck speaks, Yiannopoulos is actually facing the ignominious end of his tenure as the alt-right’s favourite comic hate-troll, losing that book deal thanks to his somewhat confused position on pedophilia. It’s a synchronicity that Pinchbeck will surely relish once the news reaches him, since How Soon Is Now is more than just a practical guide to outsmarting apocalypse. The author’s core argument is that we stand at the threshold of a sort of mass spiritual awakening—“a rite of passage or initiation for our species as a whole”, he says—forced by a raft of mounting crises that postindustrial civilization has willed into existence out of “a deep well of suppressed grief over our assault on the biosphere”.

In a book exploding with its author’s erudition and dizzying in its scope, this is as good a place as any for further interrogation. Pinchbeck’s ideas about political and technological reform­ are relatively easy to grasp, such as the repurposing of global corporate infrastructure to altruistic ends. It’s the more esoteric side of How Soon Is Now—developed from his encounters with psychedelics and shamanism described in 2002’s Breaking Open the Head—that arguably presents the hardest challenge to readers steeped in secular materialism. Some will balk at Pinchbeck’s assertion that “in quantum physics, we are realizing the union of Western science with Eastern metaphysics.”

“The fact is that I don’t personally have to demonstrate to myself that there’s an underlying consciousness in reality that’s somehow psychic in nature, as Carl Jung expressed in his work, and as many others have expressed, because I’ve had so much direct experience of it,” Pinchbeck offers. “Trying to find a way to understand it that fits into a scientific paradigm I believe is something that will happen and is happening. Now you even have people like Elon Musk, the transhumanists, or Cambridge philosophers talking about the simulation hypothesis, which is basically exactly the same thing that eastern mysticism says, that the world is like a maya or a lila­—a divine play or a cosmic illusion.”

Earlier in our conversation, Pinchbeck mused that the malevolence (his word) embodied by Yiannopoulos and the wounded child Donald J. Trump could be seen as a “contraction before the expansion in the birthing process” of an enlightened human community. Thirty minutes later, one of those guys was finished. Let’s entertain the idea that inside our shared cosmic illusion, with the right intentions, now can be much sooner than we think.

Daniel Pinchbeck will speak and sign copies of How Soon Is Now at Banyen Books on March 5, beginning at 11:30 a.m.