Our relatedness with other living forms provides us something we sorely need: a reverence for the life of all creatures great and small, and an expanded view of our place in nature__ot as rulers over it, but as participants in it.

Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic, and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life__ meaning and made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grandchildren. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural style.

[Some scientific] experiments_tell us that what we consider the objective world depends in some measure on our own conscious processes. There is no fixed eternal reality_ true understanding is not to be achieved with the rational mind.

The face of everyone in mine,the oneness with every blade of grass,the flight with the flocks in the sky, the dance with the clouds across endless skies.The strength with every tree,rooting deep into mother earth,springing forth into the heavens,extending branches of gratitude and love....Such a privilege, honor and grace,such a gift and joy.

The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. It means to establish one's territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride regardless of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one's own behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible. -Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves, Singing Over The Bones, P10.

They might be drugs that alter the states of consciousness, or they might be states of transcendence reached in meditation. They might be moments of orgasm, or fugue states, or day-dreams that take you momentarily to a rewarding fantasy and escape from responsibility. All of these are treasures of the spirit or psyche that allow exploration along paths which are undefined and completely individual.