"...just a ride." - Bill Hicks

Rigorous Intuition (v. 2.0): Are You Being Served?:

"...In altered states, the shaman and the mystic shed his or her "skin-encapsulated ego," as Stanislav Grof calls it, in a transpersonal experience of undifferentiated unity. "In the extremes," Grof notes in Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, "it is even possible to experience an extension of consciousness, which is so enormous that it seems to encompass all of humanity, the entire human species.... in rare instances, it is possible to experience consciousness of the entire biosphere, of our planet, or the entire material universe."

But in the normal course of our lives, the human ego serves as a temporary "fiction suit" through which consciousness experiences the world. Consciousness tries us on for size. And consciousness, so conceived, has an insatiable thirst for experience. Which means we get played.

If so, we are not being taken for a ride. We are the ride. And it's a thrill ride."