But what happens instead is that you get squeezed into the birth canal. Then the paradise turns into hell, strangulation, pressure. You are literally being squeezed to death. To ask the fetus at that point to conceive of the wonderfully satisfying life it is going to have 40 years hence, as a stockbroker living in Bel Air collecting minor works of cubist art, is ridiculous. Because that’s not where we’re at at the moment.

So I believe that, culturally, we are in the birth canal and everything appears to be being destroyed. The oceans, the atmosphere, the very integrity of our own bodies because of all these diseases, idealogical contamination – you name it. But we simply must push forward. It’s a forward escape.

We can never go back to the game-dotted plains of archaic Africa. That’s gone. It’s all gone. The only way out is forward.

– Terence McKenna