Even before Humphrey Osmond introduced the term “psychedelic”, there was a common phenomenological description of psychedelics; they were called “means of expanding consciousness”. In my opinion, this is a very good description. Take a look at our planetary situation. If the expansion of consciousness does not arise on the horizon of the human future, what will the future be like? In my opinion, the propsychedelic position is most fundamentally threatened by the establishment, because, if it is thoughtfully and deeply thought out, it is an anti-drug position, an anti-addiction position. And do not be mistaken about this: it is a drug case. How will you be anesthetized? Or say otherwise, how conscious will you be? Who will be conscious? Who will be unconscious?

We need a convenient definition of what we mean by “drugs”. A drug is what causes untouchable, obsessive, and habitual behavior. With obsession, behavior is not examined, not viewed, it is simply manifested. And nothing will be allowed to stand in the way of satisfaction. This is the kind of life for which we have to pay at all levels. Be alert, consume and be alert again and consume. The psychedelic choice stands alone, somewhere in a modest corner, and no one ever mentions it, however, it represents the only countercurrent of the tendency to leave people in “constructed” states of consciousness. But not in their own design, but in the design of Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, five hundred Forchun corporations. This is not just a metaphor – this is how it really happens to us.

Looking at Los Angeles from the aircraft, I note every time that it looks like some kind of printed circuit: all these winding roads and dead ends, all with the same small modules installed in them. Since there is a subscription to “Readers Digest” and television, all of these modules are interchangeable parts inside a huge machine. This is the nightmarish reality that Marshall McCluen, Wind Lewis and others foresaw: make the flock out of the public. The public has neither history nor the future; the public lives in a golden moment created by a credit system that inevitably entangles it with a web of illusions that have never been criticized. This is the final consequence of breaking the symbiotic connection with the matrix of the planet, the matrix of Gaia. This is a consequence of the lack of community; it is a legacy of disharmony between the sexes; it is the deadly phase of a long immersion in meaninglessness and a poisoned existential confusion.

The honor of giving us the means of resisting this horror belongs to unsung heroes — botanists and chemists, such as Richard Schultz, Wassons, and Albert Hoffman. Thanks to them, in this most chaotic of centuries, we have received into our weak hands the means that allow us to do something in our predicament. Psychology is smugly silent. Psychologists have been content with the construction of theories of behavior for fifty years, realizing in their hearts that they are potentially a fatal disservice to human dignity, ignoring the possibilities of psychedelics.