“Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.”

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

How do we fight back? By creating art.

We are led by the least among us – the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It’s the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you’re gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough,

Worrying is betting against yourself.

We’ve painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare – triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights – or a leap to an entirely different level. We’ve taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.

Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies.

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

And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.

The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.

Against necessity, against its strength, no one can fight and win.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God.

No one who goes against her can win.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

We are at a good level. Our secret is that we play the same way against each opponent.

It’s impossible to protect your kids against disappointment in life.

A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.