Thus, we may have experienced no more than a brief abandonment of the dominator style—a brief tendency toward a true dynamic and conscious equilibrium with nature, at variance with our primate past and too soon crushed beneath the chariot wheels of historical process.

later, cynical intelligence operatives.

ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms to induce ecstasy, dissolve the boundaries of the ego, and reunite the worshiper with the personified vegetable matrix of planetary life.

It is to Paracelsus, the famed “father of chemo-therapy,” that we can trace the revival of interest in opium. The great sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist, medical reformer, and quack advocated and used opium on a lavish scale.

Most people are addicted to some substance and, more important, all people are addicted to patterns of behavior. Attempting to distinguish between habits and addictions does damage to the indissoluble confluence of mental and physical energies that shapes the behavior of each of us.

morphine set the pattern for the modern “hard

Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts.

While Napoleon struggled with the prevalence of cannabis use in Egypt, new intellectual forces were stirring in Europe. Romanticism, Orientomania, and a fascination with psychology and the paranormal all combined with the well-established upper-class craze for opium and the opium tincture, laudanum, to create a climate in which the reputed

Patterns of government funding for research make it virtually certain that “Caesar will hear only what is pleasing to Caesar.”