“What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.”

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.

If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature’s larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.

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?

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

I look at the newspapers, and I cannot believe most of the stories I read. Bernie Madoff, who actually screwed millions of people for billions of dollars.

We have a combined population of half a billion people; peaceful trade-friendly borders that are the envy of the world.

As we’re on the verge of a major $1 billion boost in our annual cash flows that we expect to come from three major projects Geismar, Gulfstar and the Keathley Canyon Connector all of which have reached the commissioning stage here in the fourth quarter.

Iran is going to get between $50 to $55 billion in oil revenue, which is unheard of in the history of the revolution.

The 2.5 billion adults [around the world] without access to financial services are disproportionately women and young people.

They are simply not capable of promoting the indigenous economy. Many billions of dollars flooded into Afghanistan, but without any significant effect.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to win against the NFL. It’s a billion-dollar business, it’s hard to win against it.