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?

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.

We live in a culture where everything tastes good but nothing satisfies.

I think a lot of people who were addicts are actually people who had that strong innate need to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness. But because our society has turned into this destructive culture of these horrible drugs that nullify you, they have that experience in a negative way. And then they lose that capacity forever, to have it in a positive way.

The drive to Black Rock City from San Francisco leads through the Nevada flatlands, past the jittering neon sadness of Reno.

Cynicism is something that is part of the media production of a certain type of subjectivity or consciousness that is passive and disempowered, cynical, fatalistic, pessimistic.

It is the difficult, but unavoidable, task of the modern individual to assimilate consciously all of the contents - from darkest degradation to profoundest purpose - contained in the psyche.