Quotes from Daniel Pinchbeck

We live in a culture where everything tastes good but nothing satisfies.

In shamanic cultures, sychronicities are recognized as signs that you are on the right path.

Deep down, nobody wants a job to occupy his or her time. We want a mission that inspires us.

The plants that produce visions can function- for those of us who have inherited the New World Order of barren materialism, cut off from our spiritual heritage by a spiteful culture that gives us nothing but ashes- as the talismans of recognition that awaken our minds to reality.

As I wandered the streets in a desolate funk, I would ask myself the impossible, the embarrassing, the ultimate childish question of Why? - Why this city? Why this life? Why anything? Of course I knew that "why" was a question you were supposed to stop asking around the age of ten but I couldn't free myself from it.

We live in a world of media overload and data smog, where everything distracts us from everything else. Yet underlying this noisy assault, our culture offers us nothing transcendent. No deeper meaning, no abiding hope. In my crisis, every facet of the contemporary world seemed part of a diabolical mechanism carefully designed to keep people from wondering about the real purpose of their endless frantic activity.

I realized that most thoughts are impersonal happenings, like self-assembling machines. Unless we train ourselves, the thoughts passing through our mind have little involvement with our will. It is strange to realize that even our own thoughts pass by like scenery out the window of a bus, a bus we took by accident while trying to get somewhere else.

Corporations took our innate impulse toward dissent and our desire for meaningful change, and transmuted them into effective sales tools for their products.

The origin of human consciousness as well as the mystical experience may have been linked to humanity's use of visionary plants. In the Rig Veda, one of the earliest collections of Vedic Sanskrit hymns from India, there is frequent mention of a plant called soma, which, when drunk, produced marvellous seemingly entheogenic effects.

Being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking.

as Henry Miller once put it, "The goal of life is not to possess power but to radiate it.

The drive to Black Rock City from San Francisco leads through the Nevada flatlands, past the jittering neon sadness of Reno.

He was always on the lookout for the secret core of primitive ritual and magical belief hidden within the seemingly "rational" processes of modernity.

On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior concentrating "to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm . . . To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry.

other words, we are brought up within a system that teaches us to postpone, defer, and eliminate most incoming sense data in favor of a future reward. We live in a feedback loop of perpetual postponement. For the most part, we are not even aware of what we have lost.

Carl Jung wrote: "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

No science can explain the drawn-out phases of a large-dose ibogaine trip, the twenty-hour passage from vision to insight, experienced almost universally.

Once one has experienced emptiness, he is not likely to fall back to egoic thinking, unless he has an impulse to ignorance.

To me, the more I thought about it, the more the dream seemed, intuitively, real—a victory over a residue of her psyche by my unconscious self.

He saw thinking as a form of intoxication.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2009)

the modern world, the artist took over the role of the shaman. To enforce one particular mode of consciousness, modern humanity forfeited all direct contact with its nonhuman shadows.

I grew up in a very artistic, cultured home, but without any kind of spirituality. My parents were secular materialists, so I saw art as having an alternate value.

Individuals who are really inspirational are always what changes history. Gandhi had a bunch of good ideas, and he led a non - violent revolution that transformed India.