“My senses discovered the infinite in everything one summer night in Pennsylvania a quarter century ago, and sometime later in Hawaiʻi, as the lustral beams of moonlight danced over a tropical sea; then later still, high in the remotest mountains of Oaxaca, when mighty Tláloc’s lightning bolts raged in the heavens and crashed into Mother Earth in the valley far below; and in the towering Ecuadorian forests of Sacha Runa, to the soothing melody of a shaman’s whistled icaro, and the dry rustling rhythm of his leafy fan. For I have been privileged to be initiated into the sacred realm of the entheogens, sacramental plant teachers of countless generations of the family of humankind; have been vouchsafed a fleeting glimpse beneath Our Lady Gaia’s skirts; have imbibed the amrta of Indra, the ambrosia of the Olympian gods, Demeter’s potion; have for brief blessed instants gazed into Lord Shiva’s blazing third eye. Having been graced by these and other holy visions, my life has been transformed and enriched beyond measure… I have become an initiate to the sacred Mysteries of antiquity, what the ancient Greeks called an epoptes, one who has seen the holy.”