Only psychos and shamans create their own reality.

I am convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline, there would be no higher life, as we know it, on this planet. ... We are all cells of a much larger body, and like the cells of our own body it is hard for us to glimpse the whole pattern of the whole of what is happening, and yet we can sense that there is a purpose, and there is a pattern...

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful.

Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien.

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules.

What we are looking for are middle size ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they're incomprehensible.

I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we're surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what's out there.

We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don't matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building to the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all it what it's really all about.

What life, I think, is supposed to be about, is the reclamation of the primacy of direct experience. And that means: sex, and psychedelics, and dancing, and conversation, and good eating, and lots of exercise, and travel, and attention to – what Wittgenstein called – the present at hand.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises.

It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.

The boundary dissolution is alarming to the ego. It doesn't like that feeling and it tells you that you are dying. Psychedelic voyagers have to learn to just when that red switch goes on, you just reach out and turn it off. You say, oh no its set wrong, I'm not dying, but it tells you that you are dying because the ego very strongly identifies with the equilibrium of physical body. And as the physical body begins to slide into the intoxication, the ego is saying, what's happening Here! Wait a minute! I'm losing coherency.. This is not Good! You made a mistake! JOE ! JOE! We need help Joe! Its coming apar...
Chill, chill its going to be alright. So you have to discipline yourself that way. That the dissolving of the ego which is the dissolving of this maladaptive behaviour pattern that has made our sexual and social politics so complicated. In other words, the ego is not a good thing. Its existence in each one of us is so expressed a form is a symptom of neurosis. Cultural neurosis... and the psychedelic dissolves the ego, but the ego protests noisily while this is going on. And people who are very ego dependant, if they have a psychedelic experience they usually only have one, and then they say 'well that was like going nuts, I hated it, I just hated, it was just awful'. Because they are very strongly identified with the ego. Another person who isn't so strongly identified with the ego, could look at the identical experience and say that it was a wonderful liberation, it was just the quintessence of freedom and light and openness. So when I say that we are pathological and that we need to take strong medicine to fix ourselves. I don't mean the kind of medicine where you can't feel it working. I mean the kind of medicine where you CAN feel it working.

Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.

Unexamined cultural values & limitations of language have made us unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.

My technique is don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

The engineers of the future will be poets.

As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.

If nothing lasts, then the conclusion is that the felt presence of immediate experience must be what life is for.

There was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of ahh.. beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.
At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.
But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience is that nature seeks to communicate.

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.