“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 major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer

If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.

The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

I don’t know what life is like without cannabis, I hear there is such a thing.

To realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable.