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.
Daniel PinchbeckThe plants that produce visions can function- for those of us who have inherited the New World Order of barren materialism, cut off from our spiritual heritage by a spiteful culture that gives us nothing but ashes- as the talismans of recognition that awaken our minds to reality.
Daniel PinchbeckI 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.
Daniel PinchbeckOur normal human tendencies are distraction and dissipation. We begin one task, then get seduced by some other option, and lose our focus. We drift away from what is difficult and we know to be true, to what is comfortable and socially condoned.
Daniel PinchbeckThrough the last centuries, the effort of capitalism has been to take all the things that were human relations and turn them into monetary exchanges.
Daniel Pinchbeck