Questioner: [Paraphrasing a line from the teaching, "Transpersonal Psychology":] "When you get transpersonal you are transpsychological" -- nah. That is true of the psychology you talk about, but it's not true of all psychology. Many psychologies do teach disidentification, which is why they call themselves transpersonal. Transpersonal psychologists would agree with what you say about identification with a construct. It's pretty easy to say "psychology has nothing to do with spirituality" if you then ignore all the psychology that contradicts what you're saying.

No doubt it is news to no one that planet Earth is in a period of escalating interlocking crises. We need a response that addresses all the hidden as well as the obvious dimensions of these crises—before they spin out of control into irretrievable chaos. (For the moment, let us leave aside the geophysical crises, including climate change, increasing seismic activity, and the ozone holes, as well as pollution, radiation poisoning, mass extinctions of species, increasing solar flare activity, and the like. They cannot be dealt with effectively so long as the current political system endures.) The system is in process of collapsing of its own weight, its own internal contradictions. At the same time, spontaneous social movements are arising on a global scale that are confronting the system and increasing the level of stress to the breaking point. Our concern is to assure the optimal outcome of this titanic face-off.

The crisis we face at the sociopolitical level is one of legitimacy of authority. The OWS movement (Occupy Wall Street) and the Indignado movement in Spain and other anti-austerity movements all over Europe, following on the so-called Arab Spring, not to mention student movements and general protest movements in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are simultaneously rising to a crescendo.

There comes a point in the journey of the unfoldment of consciousness when every narrative appears ridiculous. This includes so-called scientific, philosophic, and psychoanalytic discourses. It includes, therefore, even this sort of discourse about the inanity of all discourse. The symbolic veil over the Real shreds itself like an oppressed monk setting himself on fire.

In one of the late Terence McKenna's most famous discourses about a DMT trip he took, he emphasizes how elvish voices kept telling him, "don't abandon yourself to amazement." I found that amazing, in fact utterly astonishing. He goes on to say that they commanded him to pay close attention. But one can both pay attention and be in a state of full-on astonishment at the same time. Some have taken literally his advice not to give way to amazement. But that is more often the command of the superego. How can we not be in amazement, astonishment, at every moment? Astonishment is what creates natural DMT in the brain. In fact, there is a lovely book that emerged from the Kashmir Shaiva yoga tradition, probably a thousand years ago, recently translated into English, and given the title The Yoga of Delight, Wonder, and Astonishment. In this teaching, otherwise known as The Vigyana Bhairava, it is revealed that the most direct path to Liberation is precisely through surrendering to astonishment.

There is a misguided effort to plan for education in the twenty-first century, as if our dying civilization will last another hundred years. This is an example of whistling past the graveyard. It is unlikely that planetary cultural collapse can be put off past 2013, given the perfect storm of cataclysmic events that is unfolding all around us. We do our children a terrible disservice if we do not prepare them for the death of our current age and the transition to the next one—and to do it with accelerated intensity.