“When you shed the cultural operating system, then essentially you stand naked before the inspection of your own psyche.”

Don’t worry. You don’t know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin’ out loud. It’s a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.

Your memories are eroding away. The futures you anticipate, will mostly not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. And it’s not necessarily some kind of ‘Be Here Now’ feel-good thing because it doesn’t always feel good. But it always feels. It is a domain of feeling. It’s primary.

Behind us: the unknown. Before us: the secret.

Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman’s relationship to a psychoactive plant.

Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.

Being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know… You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You’ll have that!

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity.

Every click of the cosmic clock brings us closer to the process for which the planet called us into existence.

The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it’s not treated – if there’s not pharmacological intervention – it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.

Nature is not mute, it is a man who is deaf.

The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.

We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.

Everybody knows that fraternities are a normal culture in all colleges. It exists in all colleges. President Clinton was a member of a fraternity. In fact, anybody who goes to College in the United States is a member of a College fraternity. There is absolutely nothing evil or occultic about fraternity.

Another way of judging the value of a prophet’s religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.

Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.

I’ve always been multi-cultural myself. I’m not black and I’m not white and I’m not pink and I’m not green. Eartha Kitt has no color, and that is how barriers are broken.

Music is more objective, I think, than a lot of art is, but a surprising amount of it is cultural.

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing culture in our land.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice.