One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.

The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.

Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.

Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.

Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman's relationship to a psychoactive plant.

Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That's where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.