Deep down, nobody wants a job to occupy his or her time. We want a mission that inspires us.

As a German philosopher writing in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, Marcuse understood the sleep inducing force of indoctrination, its power to make people forget and forfeit their own real interests. "The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible," he wrote. "The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful."

According to Buddhism, each person is a Buddha who has forgotten their original nature. If we in the pampered West, having grown up with so many advantages, could not claim our own health and our agency, preferring to see ourselves as helpless victims, then who would do it? Who would take responsibility for the world?

I don't really advocate for psychedelics. I don't really think anybody needs to do them, or has to do them. For me, they were the only way I could have cracked open my own spirit in a way.

I think that the more people go through their own personal initiations, the less collective destruction may be unleashed on the planet.

Individuals who are really inspirational are always what changes history. Gandhi had a bunch of good ideas, and he led a non - violent revolution that transformed India.

A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we've denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways.