Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which… - Terence McKenna

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions. When you shed the cultural operating system, then, essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche…and it’s from that position, a position outside the cultural operating system, that we can begin to ask real questions about what does it mean to be human, what kind of circumstance are we caught in, and what kind of structures, if any, can we put in place to assuage the plan and accentuate the glory and the wonder that lurks, waiting for us, in this very narrow slice of time between the birth canal and the yawning grave. In other words we have to return to first premises.

Wife beating without alcohol is like a circus without lions.

It's pretty simple, the ethical life—it's just demanding. … The moral life does not consist of wheat grass diet, or affirmation, or any of that. The moral life is—unless you're at Esalen—you should clothe the naked, you should feed the hungry, comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, and there are a couple of other obvious things to be done. It's not about how many prostrations you do, or what lineage you've associated yourself with, or how much cholesterol is in your diet. And somehow, we have confused the ethical and moral dimension with the dimension of physical practices—probably because we have been too infected by the memes of tired Asian religions that long ago gave up moral philosophy in favor of rotational activity. Because the social problems of Asia are overwhelming. That's a response to an overwhelming human tragedy, the quietude of Asian religion, I think.