I find myself standing in the midst of an eternity, a vast and inexhaustible present. The whole world rests within itself -- the trees at the field's edge, the hum of crickets in the grass, cirrocumulus clouds rippling like waves across the sky, from horizon to horizon. In the distance I notice the curving dirt road and my rusty car parked at its edge -- these, too, seem to have their place in this open moment of vision, this eternal present. And smells -- the air is rich with faint whiffs from the forest, the heather, the soil underfoot -- so many messages mingling between different elements in the encircling land. ... Things are different in this world without "the past" and "the future," my body quivering in this space like an animal. I know well that, in some time out of this time, I must return to my house and my books. But here, too, is home. For my body is at home, in this open present, with its mind. And this is no mere illusion, no hallucination, this eternity -- there is something too persistent, too stable, too unshakable about this experience for it to be merely a mirage...

• David Abram

...lighten up. It's only death. We all get to meet him (or her?) at some point. Why not get to know death a little earlier, buy him a drink, slap him on the back, and fake him out? There are things worse than death, such as a full-compliance tax audit by a dyslexic IRS agent or maybe even discount prostate surgery in Monrovia. It helps to look at the big picture when understanding just what might kill you and what won't. It is the baby boomers' slow descent into gray hair, brand-name drugs, reading glasses, and a general sense of not quite being as fast as they used to be that drives this whole survival thing. Relax: You're gonna die. Enjoy life, don't fear it.

-Robert Young Pelton

The fundamental reality of the universe is a continuum, a unitive field or fabric, of both energy and consciousness, that is beyond time, space and all forms, and yet somehow mysteriously within them, simultaneously transcendent and imminent. In traditional Asian religions, this unitive field is variously referred to as Tao, or Atman-Brahman, or Tantra (the "web" of "fabric") or the "jeweled net of Indra." Some Native North Americans refer to it as Wakan-Tanka, the all-pervading Creator Spirit. In the traditional Anglo-Saxon religion of the British Isles, it was called the wyrd, an invisible network of magical forces. In theistic religions like Christianity, this oneness corresponds to what is called the Godhead, i.e., beyond the personal deity. In the systems language of postmodern science it is seen as an infinitely complex system of interrelationships, or "web of life." At the level of the planet Earth, this integrated whole is referred to as Gaia -- the name of the ancient Greek Earth Goddess that has become the name of the whole Earth considered as a purposive intelligence living superorganism.

• Ralph Metzner, Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca pg. 252

I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. - Etienne de La Boetie

If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed. Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor, or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently Western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition, I mean, it isn't going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition, that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendence, is confirmed, it's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past of the universe, and the evolutionary egression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future, this is what shamanism is always been about, a shaman is someone who has been to the end, it's someone who knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture and learned and embedded language, into the domain of what Wittgenstein called "the unspeakable," the transcendental presence of the other, which can be absanctioned, in various ways, to yield systems of knowledge which can be brought back into ordinary social space for the good of the community, so in the context of ninety percent of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery I believe, and what shamans are, I believe, are people who have been able to de-condition themselves from the community's instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors and so forth and so on. Shamanism is not a religion, it's a set of techniques, and the principal technique is the use of psychedelic plants. What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female, and so forth and so on. So, what shamans have to do is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world. The planet has a kind of intelligence, that it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind, I mean I think it's fairly profound, it's fairly apocalyptic. History is ending. I mean, we are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the eschaton. History is the shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for those of us who will live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably since the birth of the universe. The twentieth century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept. If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed. The emphasis in house music and rave culture on physiologically compatible rhythms and this sort of thing is really the rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, that sound, properly understood, especially percussive sound, can actually change neurological states, and large groups of people getting together in the presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic community of bonding that hopefully will be strong enough that it can carry the vision out into the mainstream of society. I think that the youth culture that is emerging in the nineties is an end of the millennium culture that is actually summing up Western civilization and pointing us in an entirely different direction, that we're going to arrive in the third millennium, in the middle of an archaic revival, which will mean a revival of these physiologically empowering rhythm signatures, a new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature, to feminism, to ego. All of these things are taking hold, and not a moment too soon.

– Terrence Mckenna, Re:Evolution

People all over the world are mourning the ascension of Bush to his second term as president... that's something to feel encouraged about, even as all this pomp and circumstance of the inauguration goes on. -Howard Zinn