“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.”

One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.

There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.

The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.

The Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.

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.

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.

Obamacare is a private mandate that will drive billions to the insurance industry, much like the auto insurance mandate.

White-collar crime has been marketed – billions of dollars have been put in to have us be bored by it.

Terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.

The new naval treaty permits the United States to spend a billion dollars on warships-a sum greater than has been accumulated by all our endowed institutions of learning in their entire history.

We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war