Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet. - Terence McKenna

I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want.

What in the world is going on, what is going on? I mean what does it mean to be incarnate in a human body, in a squirrely culture like this, trying to make sense of your heritage, your opportunities the contents of the culture, the contents of your own mind? Is it possible to have an overarching viewpoint that is not somehow canned or cultish or self-limited in its approach, in other words, is it possible to cultivate an open mind and sanity in the kind of society and psychological environment that we all share? And it grows daily and weekly, as you know, harder to do this, weirder to integrate more on your plate, to assimilate and I certainly don’t have final or even merely final answers. I think it all lies in posing the questions in a certain way, in feeling the data in a certain way. And one of the things I try to convince people is it’s not necessary to achieve closure with this stuff. And in fact any ideological or belief system that offers closure, meaning final answers, is sure to be wrong, sure to be self-limiting, sure to be inadequate to the facts. So one of the ideas I’d like to put out is the idea that ideology is not our friend, it is not a matter of choosing from the smartest board of ideologies and rejecting the flawed, the self-contradictory and this over simple, in favor of the un-flawed, the complex enough. Where is it written in adamantine that semi-carnivorous monkeys can or should be capable of understanding reality? That seems to be one of the first delusions, and one of the more prideful illusions of human culture, that a final understanding is possible in the first place. Better, I think, to try and frame questions which can endure, and leave off searching for answers, because answers are like operating systems, they’re being upgraded faster than you can keep up with it.

We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless. What do all these things have in common? They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values. So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because it's an impulse to return to what is felt by the body — what is authentic, what is archaic — and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling.

And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That's what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment — these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience