Our present view of government, our avoidance of allegiance to high spiritual powers, and our exclusively scientific understanding of our world will continue to guide our thoughts and activities in the future and bring us to a complete collapse

Religion, in any usual meaning of the term, ceased to exist in America long ago. Indeed, any higher deity exists for Americans only insofar as he or she can guarantee great sex, lots of money, social prestige (read celebrity), a winning football team, and someone to hate.

We have to out-think what it is that we are challenged by that oppresses us or whatever it is. The first act of freedom and liberation is the act of taking our intelligence back, taking our imagination back, our ability to think, that is the first step towards conscious liberation.

Crystal clear tears of salt Come when my heart talks with sadness The tears flow my emotional rivers It’s no damn use to pretend Pain will not rise again

Humans are not in the world to succeed, to be more secure, to tame the Earth, to build big commercial structures or crash into them to find God; humans are not here to become comfortable, to purify themselves or anybody else, to become immortal or get their way.

If initiation is about culture and the modern world desires initiation, it will have to redefine itself.

All modern people, no matter how superior or remote they feel themselves to be from this reality experienced in Long Life, Honey in the Heart, are suffering lives whose severe political and spiritual amnesia are the direct result of their having been raised by people whose ancestors were in the exact same way run over and torn from their original languages, music, clothing, and spiritual relation with the ground that fed them. This recognition should never be left idle as a simple understanding stored in the back of our minds and soon forgotten. This reality must be faced, habitually recognized in our every action, and continually healed over and over through collective capacity to not only feel and express the grief we find there, but to turn the grief into a life-promoting energy source that spiritually and practically fuels new cultures no longer dedicated to deadening our natural ability to think and feel, but able to live mortally and ecstatically in love with the ground that gives us life.

Without custodianship of cultural substance, the elders knew that the world would become filled with meaninglessness.