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.
Not to know one's true ...
Quotes from the same author
The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.
Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.
The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.
Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.
In the way that the 15th Century discovered the New World, the 20th Century discovered the parallel continuum.