Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.
The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.
Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants
Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.
The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.
What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.
Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.
Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.
Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.
What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.
It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.
The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.
I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.
In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it's good to stick to the natural ones.
I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.
What we need to change is our minds, that's the part that's doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.
What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.
An interesting thing about drugs is often, when a new drug is discovered, it takes a long time to figure out how do you do it.
Apparently, in the Avesta classical period no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.
I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.
The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.
The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for.
Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.
History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.
Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book.
My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It's a kind of tuneless singing.
Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.
Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.
The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.
It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.
I'm not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I'm an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.
Television, while chemically non-invasive, nevertheless is every bit as addicting and physiologically damaging as any other drug.
For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.
I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.
The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.
And what is the primary datum? It's the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.
Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.
I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.
What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.
The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.
We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
Inform yourself, inform your children, talk to your friends! And let's try to make a better, stonier world than the one we inherited!
I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.
Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.