"There is something more. It is now clear that new developments in many areas - including mind-machine interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, and data storage, image and retrieval techniques - are coalescing into the potential for a truly demonic or an angelic self-imaging of our culture. Those who are on the demonic side of this process are fully aware of this potential and are hurrying full-tilt forward with their plans to capture the technological high ground. It is a position from which they hope to turn nearly everyone into a believing consumer in a beige fascism from whose image none will escape.

The shamanic response, the Archaic response, the human response, to this situation should be to locate the art pedal and push it to the floor. This is one of the primary functions of shamanism, and is the function that is tremendously synergised by the psychedelics. If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergise the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever-more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.

If we are serious about an Archaic Revival, then we need a new paradigmatic image that can take us rapidly forward and through the historical choke point that we can feel impending and resisting a more expansive, more humane, more caring dimension that is insisting on being born. Our sense of political obligation, of the need to reform or save the collective soul of humanity, our wish to connect the end of history with the beginning of history - all of this should impel us to look at shamanism as an exemplary model. In the current global crisis we cannot fail to take its techniques seriously, even those which may challenge the divinely ordained covenants of the constabulary"

*

"You don't examine obsessive behaviour; you just do it. You let nothing get in the way of your gratification. This is the kind of life that we are being sold at every level. To watch, to consume, and to watch and consume yet more. The psychedelic option is off in a tiny corner, never mentioned; yet it represents the only counterflow directed against a tendency to leave people in designer states of consciousness. Not of their own designs, but the designers of Madison Avenue, of The Pentagon, of the Fortune 500 corporations. This isn't just a metaphor; it is really happening to us.

Looking down on Los Angeles from an airliner, I never fail to notice that it is like looking at a printed circuit: all those curved driveways and cul de sacs with the same little modules installed along each one. As long as the Readers Digest stays subscribed and the TV stays on, these modules are all interchangeable parts within a very large machine. This is the nightmarish reality Marshall McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis and others foresaw: the creation of the public as herd. The public has no history and no future, the public lives in a golden moment created by a credit system which binds them ineluctably to a web of illusions that is never critiqued. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow style changes that are conveyed through the media. It is a world of pornographic wealth and slavish consumerism where in the participants become nothing more than the petrified object of their own unrequited desires. Lurking beneath the glistening surface of their perpetual lust for enterprise exists a strange brand of horror - the freedom from meaning. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off the symbiotic relationship with the Gaian matrix of the planet. This is the consequence of lack of partnership. This is the legacy of imbalance between the sexes; this is the terminal phase of a long descent into meaninglessness and toxic existential confusion.

The credit for giving us tools to resist this horror belongs to unsung heroes who are botanists and chemists, people such as Richard Schultes, the Wassons, and Albert Hoffman. Thanks to them we have, in this most chaotic of centuries, taken into our frail hands the means to do something about our predicament. Psychology, in contrast, has been complacent and silent. Psychologists have been content with behaviourist theory-making for fifty years, while knowing in their hearts that they were doing potentially fatal disservice to human dignity, by ignoring the potential of psychedelics."

Terrence Mckenna