"All through my childhood, I felt certain that something extraordinary--absolutely amazing and out of the ordinary--was going to happen to me. The world seemed bursting with a secret that nobody would divulge, and someday this tremendous mystery would be revealed. Simply because they were older, I assumed that all adults had passed through this portal into the miraculous essence of existence, although they never spoke about it. As I approached adolescence, I begun to suspect that my deepest hopes were going to be unfulfilled. By the time I went to college, I had realized, to my horror, that "maturity" meant accepting constraints and being bound to a limited career path, rather than blossoming into a deeper dimension of possibility and wonder. This was a painful shock.
I now suspect what I felt is a nearly universal disappointment for young people in our world; I was yearning for initiation into a culture that had abandoned it....
Personally, my youthful sense of being cheated of some deeper potential melted away once I discovered shamanic practices as an adult, and explored visionary states of consciousness in traditional ceremonies... Through this work I restored the primordial connection to the sacred that I had lost after my childhood, as well as my original sense of wonder, and this was tremendously healing and empowering. Through my own shamanic journeys, I realized that modern culture was facing an initiatory crisis on a global scale. We have created a planet of "kidults," perpetual adolescents trapped by material desires, with no access to higher realms and little sense of purpose or moral responsibility...
As Westerners, each of us has to follow a personal path to recover the numinous for ourselves, shedding our self-limiting beliefs and narcissistic complexes in the process."
-Daniel Pinchbeck, "Toward 2010: Perspectives on the Next Age"


"from my point of view the only breakdown was the delusion that I was in control of my life. All the walls -- of identity, ambition, and security, of any illusion that I knew who I was, or where I was, or that I had any clue at all what was happening in life -- all of this collapsed like an obsolete civilization and permitted eternity to course through me as never before. Insofar as apocalypse derives from the Greek apokalyptein, meaning "to unveil," this was some version of my personal apocalypse, and since apocalypse is the etymological antonym of hell, which derives from the Latin helan, meaning "to veil," the only thing to mourn was the liberation from my own illusions." -Tony V, Reality Sandwich website