“The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.”

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.

Culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.

And I’m just kind of blowing through this. And everybody’s, like, happy, and giving thumbs up.

The winds of God’s grace are always blowing, it is for us to raise our sails.

The breeze of grace is always blowing on you. You have to open the sails and your boat will move forward.

The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.

Blowing up buses will not induce the Israelis to move forward, and neither will the killing of Palestinians or the demolition of their homes and their future.

If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn’t run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces.

The road to national rebirth is a hard one, but there is no other.