“It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know… You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You’ll have that!”

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.

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.

You’re immortal as long as you live.

The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.

No one knows enough to worry.

Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.

The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.

How do we fight back? By creating art.

Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

Success is a poison that should only be taken late in life and then only in small doses.

Success happened little by little for me. I tasted the flavor of fame in small doses: I started at 10 years old when I won a music contest; I was performing at birthday parties, company meetings.

I think we need a huge dose of love.

In America most everybody who’s Italian is half Italian. Except me. I’m all Italian. I’m mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.

Rather than us trying to change girls in order to fit into the common mold of what we think a CEO looks like.

CEOs of top companies could probably use a dose of not-asking-for-raise behavior and less self-entitlement.

And they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.