“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.”

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.

Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world’s community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.

For art to be ‘unpolitical’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group.

There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.

Inflict the least possible permanent injury, for the enemy of to-day is the customer of the morrow and the ally of the future

The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind, and is always sure of finding new and unforseen allies in continuing its martyrology.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

We should be wary, particularly with our closest friends and allies, of breaking down the trust and confidence that lie at the foundation of relationships.

We must rely on our allies and foreign governments to share information and data to secure our country.