“You are not naked when you take off your clothes. You still wear your religious assumptions, your prejudices, your fears, your illusions, your delusions.”

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It’s the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

Capitalism is going to deal itself out of existence, but before it does that, you’re gonna pay $50 for a latte, because inflation is going impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough,

Worrying is betting against yourself.

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.

Whatever be the qualities of the man with whom a woman is united according to the law, such qualities even she assumes, like a river, united with the ocean.

Guard yourself against accusations, even if they are false; for the multitude are ignorant of the truth and look only to reputation.

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Photography has the power to undo your assumptions about the world.

Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it’s being done right now.

I’d always thought the world was a wish-granting factory.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.

The most seditious is the most cowardly.