The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.
Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic.
In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.
The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.
I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That’s the odd paradox of it.
The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.
And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.
Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.
What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It’s a kind of tuneless singing.
Could any symbol be any more appropriate of the ambiguity of human transformation? What mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it Stropharia cubensis, or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.
The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.
I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.
The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.