"We need to eliminate the unconscious mind. This is what it comes down to, folks. We cannot in an era of thirty minute delivery of thermonuclear weapons from anywhere to anywhere. We do not have the luxury of carrying around with us the enraged bull primate. We cannot afford the luxury of the unconscious. The hidden motives. The unexamined drive. The misunderstood acquisition. The only way we can correct our cultural situation is by returning to an archaic style. This is what societies always do when they’re slammed to the wall. When the medieval world collapsed on itself, they returned to the classic modes of Rome and Greece, and created classicism. Classicism was created in the fifteenth century, for gods sake. There hadn’t been a Roman around for a thousand years.
When a society gets into trouble, it reaches back. We’ve got trouble in River City, big trouble. We have to reach further back. Further, further. Egypt won’t do, the Nazis tried that.
We have to go back to this high, archaic shamanism. Which is a hard pill to swallow, for both individuals and society, because we’ve made illegal this possibility because it is threatening to the dominance of the ego. The ego cannot exist in the presence of a psychedelic religion, or a psychedelic option.
To my mind, this is the real issue behind this asinine drug war. We’re not going to have an epidemic of heroin use or addiction if they legalize all this. But we are going to have people experimenting with their consciousness."
~ Terrence McKenna
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