Great article. I've gone back to that thought "Everything we do is to alter our consciousness" since my first highs.

I went to a church for a concert recently and I was struck with the lengths these people went to in order to alter their consciousness without "drugs". Highly emotionally charged speakers work everyone up. Food and coffee are practically fetishized. There's a nice (albeit kind of unnatural/forced) sense of community that hits certain primal emotional triggers. So yeah, everyone's trying to altering their consciousness.