“Reality is made of words.”

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?

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.

We are caught inside a mystery, veiled in an enigma, locked inside a riddle

We are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral – get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player.

The surface of things is not where attention should rest.

When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.

It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.

In most states you can get a driver’s license when you’re sixteen years old, which made a lot of sense to me when I was sixteen years old but now seems insane.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.

If he had 30 points, nine rebounds and eight assists, I can tell you exactly how he did it, what type of shots he made and who he passed to.

A bachelor is a guy who never made the same mistake once.

And we knew that all of the other leagues were at home and millions of people were watching. So it made it a special day to play on Christmas.

She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin’ orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.