Excerpted from the book,
"A Song, A Dance & 23 Tricks With A Banana"
by Neil Pike

We humans (when all is said and done) are really just glorified (some would say degenerate) animals. We deny or ignore this of course... anything to maintain the illusion of superiority... but ultimately it's pretty obvious. Watch those two aggro drunks in the pub baring their teeth and puffing their chests out in a classic display of mammalian territorial dominance... "I'm the top dog in this pub!" "No, I am!!". Watch our world leaders as they strive to impress, conquer and rule (all in the name of freedom and prosperity). There's not much difference really. Except that you can always walk away from a couple of unpleasant drunks.

No, there's little doubt that we're not all that different from a pack of monkeys with the alpha male beating his chest and baring his arse or a flock of chickens with the rooster crowing. It's all really a question of scale... when we fuck up we're likely to take a large slice of the chicken coop with us... that, and our unfortunate lack of awareness that we even live in a coop. But why is this so? Why are we so damn unaware of our place in life? How did we become so divorced from our intrinsic connection to the world that we live in?

The human brain is an amazing thing, a potent and very facile tool. With this awesome piece of biotech (and our opposable thumbs), humans have risen rapidly through the ranks of evolution, cutting a broad swathe and levelling the playing field practically beyond recognition (or habitability).

Starting with the discovery of fire, we soon dominated large sections of our natural environment and set off on a path of discovery that ultimately led to such wonderful innovations as the wheel, writing, tools, the personal computer, mobile phones, portable deep fryers, chainsaws, Barbie dolls and weapons-grade plutonium. Yep, we're clever monkeys all right but it's not really the size of our brains that seems to make the difference. It's more a kind of trick of awareness that somehow allows us to separate ourselves from the rest of the universe, thereby achieving the detachment and objectivity to create such wonderful artifacts... not to mention the various sciences that we've also cultivated over the last millennia or so.

Until recently this was not such a problem. Most civilizations that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution took regular time out from this "separated" sense of awareness to enjoy a good stiff dose of "oneness". Often this was institutionalized in religious rituals or celebratory festivals. Usually it involved the ingestion of one mood altering substance or another. The monks, mendicants, priests and pilgrims might prefer to attain an altered state through meditation, prayer, fasting or flagellation but for your average thick-skinned peasant a potful of magickal brew was a far more reliable and quicker means to attain that ol' sense of universal unity. Truth to tell, in most healthy cultures the religious leaders would be gobbling the local "sacrament of choice" AS WELL as praying, meditating, chanting etc...

These regular ritual rendezvous with the universe somehow helped to keep us poor crazed humans in balance. There's nothing like a good whack of... oh... let's just say magick mushrooms (though there's any number of different substances that'll teach essentially the same lesson) to remind us of our place in the greater scheme of things... not to mention the interdependent, totally connected nature of all life on the planet. At the end of these "refresher courses" the tribe could go back to the standard sense of human separation and continue to create tools and artifacts safe in the knowledge that they were a part of the world they lived in (and as such were not about to screw it up).

Somewhere in the last few hundred years though we stopped getting high and ever since then things've been going from bad to worse. Technological innovation has sped forward, medical developments have increased our lifespan and ensured that lots more of us survive and science has split the atom, flown us to the moon and cloned a sheep.

Now at the dawn of the 21st Century, we find ourselves poised on the verge of a massive human-induced ecological catastrophe, woefully overpopulated, declaring never-ending war on our less fortunate neighbours and living in a society where chronic pathological depression, cut-throat materialism and self-obsessed, compassionless greed are viewed as the normal human condition. Is there something wrong with this picture?

One of the more interesting (and perhaps hopeful) innovations of modern science (aside from LSD) has been quantum physics... a "hard science" that somehow keeps arriving at the same basic conclusions that the mystics, shamans and acid heads have been muttering about for... well... millennia. And as time goes by and quantum science influences and becomes incorporated in the other "hard sciences", it's interesting to watch the lab-coat boys join the party.

It's like a bunch of horn-rimmed specialists have been approaching a flickering light from different directions, none even really aware of the others but each in turn becoming more and more conscious of the fact that the light they've been studying holds the kernel of truth that they seek.

As they get closer they gradually realize that other quite different specialists are coming to the same conclusions... looking at the same light even though they've always been convinced of the singular uniqueness of their own particular branch of science.

Finally they get really close and realize that the light they've been studying is actually an open wood fire and that it's surrounded by a motley bunch of meditators, mystics, witch doctors and trippers all staring intently at the flames. A wild-eyed, wooly-haired Albert Einstein looks up slowly and says to the specialists "It's all one, man".