You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.
I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.
The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind.
Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.
Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.
This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.
Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.
Just because you have a nut theory it doesn't mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there's a limited pool there that we're all after.
Eschaton comes from the Greek word 'echatos', which just means the end.
On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven't the faintest idea. The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, Zen sort of personality that I never believe a word it says. I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.
It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.
What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.
I spend as many hours a day as I possibly can smoking cannabis
I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.
The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.
The main thing going on in the 20th century is a dissolving of boundaries, all the boundaries that historical civilization put in place.
This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.
In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.
We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don't matter. And that now doesn't matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human.
The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.
Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.
The 'person' is not an interchangeable part. The 'citizen' is. ... The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It's what the hippies were.
And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.
I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.
The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.
