My personal, metaphysical belief is Vedanta, which is that ultimately there is a singular consciousness. It's like a Hindu metaphysics, that basically we're all like characters in a play that consciousness is putting on to discover its own creative capacities.

I think a lot of people who were addicts are actually people who had that strong innate need to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness. But because our society has turned into this destructive culture of these horrible drugs that nullify you, they have that experience in a negative way. And then they lose that capacity forever, to have it in a positive way.

According to Buddhism, each person is a Buddha who has forgotten their original nature. If we in the pampered West, having grown up with so many advantages, could not claim our own health and our agency, preferring to see ourselves as helpless victims, then who would do it? Who would take responsibility for the world?

Through the last centuries, the effort of capitalism has been to take all the things that were human relations and turn them into monetary exchanges.

I don't really advocate for psychedelics. I don't really think anybody needs to do them, or has to do them. For me, they were the only way I could have cracked open my own spirit in a way.

My personal, metaphysical belief is Vedanta, which is that ultimately there is a singular consciousness. It's like a Hindu metaphysics, that basically we're all like characters in a play that consciousness is putting on to discover its own creative capacities.

Individuals who are really inspirational are always what changes history. Gandhi had a bunch of good ideas, and he led a non - violent revolution that transformed India.