The desire to find a higher purpose is the same desire that draws people to join cults. If an individual is more inclined to lead than to follow, he can start his own following. Although Strieber's case is extreme, it is also typical. Patterns laid down in childhood by trauma and neglect lurk beneath all such pursuits, spiritual, political, artistic, sexual, or financial.

Well-known for his horror fiction, Strieber underwent some extremely unusual personal experiences in 1985 and wrote a book called Communion, after which his name became synonymous with alien abduction. Yet Strieber is far more than just a man who claims that aliens did strange things to him. This is Part One of a two-part article.

Carlos Castaneda was called "the godfather of the New Age" by Time magazine. He has also been denounced as a hoaxer, opportunist, and liar. But there is simply too much in the books of obvious merit for me to believe that he made it all up.

As we seek to experience our primal/cosmic natures, the imagined solution may only be compounding the problem. If the (ab)use of entheogens were decimating our own individual "biospheres" and preventing us from having full access to our faculties, this would exactly mirror the ways in which our disconnection from the environment has affected the Earth's biosphere.