In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can’t be told.
Culture as we’re practicing it is causing a lot of pain.
People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
And I don’t mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.
Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?
How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?
DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don’t want to know about it.
It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.
It’s a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.
To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.
One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.
Memory training is great psychedelic training.
There’s something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.
Alcoholism isn’t a disease. It’s a failure of self-image.
I can’t think of a society on Earth where people don’t take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.
At the interface of the say-able and the unsay-able is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that’s what I think it’s important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.
This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you’re taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there’s nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.