Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.

The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.

Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.

I would argue that it's almost better to do heroin than to watch TV. At least when you're doing heroin you're responsible for your own reveries and thought processes. When you're mainlining TV what is it but endless messages to fetishize products?

If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.

The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

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.