Inquiry Into The Subconscious

"Much of our culture continues to reject psychedelics, which can act as psychic amplifiers, while dismissing psychic phenomena as either nonexistent or meaningless. This rejection may be based on deep-rooted psychic processes, protected by subconscious motivations. Our cultural conditioning tends to support a willful ignorance, based on the impulse to preserve the materialist worldview, and the system of values it supports, from any danger. The possibility of establishing a radically new understanding of the nature of the psyche, supporting age-old beliefs, threatens the underpinnings of a culture obsessed with acquiring wealth, goods, and status.  If we were to discover that other aspects of reality deserved our serious consideration, we would have to reexamine the thrust of our current civilization; entire lives and enormous expulsions of energy could seem misdirected or even wasted.  As I deepened my own explorations, as layers of conventional beliefs fell away, I found I was finally approaching the questions that had eluded me during the course of my life -- questions I had not even believed I had the right to ask.  Even if it required isolation from the mainstream, I preferred to sacrifice my beliefs and preconceptions, along with the comforts and status they afforded, rather than cling to a set of inherited values that I increasingly suspected to be false." Daniel Pinchbeck, 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl.