One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.
The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.
Why does mathematics describe nature? That’s a deeper question than most.
The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.
Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.
Plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.
If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it’s an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.
For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.
Wherever we press beyond the thin curtain of rationalist culture, we discover the incredibly rich, erotic, scary, promising presence of this intelligent Other, that beckons us out of history, and says, you know: ‘The galaxy lies waiting.’
The “just say no” campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.
Culture is a simplification and a lie. It’s the currency by which fools navigate the world. Smart people get beyond it.
We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern...
Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse.
The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
You’re immortal as long as you live.
Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.
As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.
What is needed, is an awakening.
Worrying is betting against yourself.
We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle.