Most people who've never experienced non-ordinary states of consciousness and only hear them described tend to try to describe them in terms of the logical, rational way of looking at things, the so-called scientific explanation, which often leaves a lot lacking and doesn't really fulfill understanding the experience at all.

The old alchemy, or what was just called alchemy, has a history. Most people, if they've been trained in sciences, think of alchemy as the precursor to chemistry. Back in time, people were called alchemists and they worked for kings and rich people, smelting metal and trying to change base metal into gold, because the king wanted to be richer.

The place where...knowledge occurs is the present. That which recognizes the present is mind.

Learning to see love and to express that love is the purpose of living this life. What's real has love at its heart; the universe is constructed from love, and that love is very much tied to our power of attention and imagination.

I think a lot of psychological healing tends to work on that basis. We go into the unconscious to find what's holding you back, so to speak, and I think there is an unconscious body image that may be responsible for the unhealing that's taking place.

In the Greek way of dealing with alchemy, which was earth, air, fire and water, these were the objective qualities. Within the objective qualities - things of earth, air, fire and water - are our subjective experiences of hot, cold, dry, and moist.

I describe the variety of different kinds of experiences I had, from seeing into the future to being inside the body of a bird and feeling the bird consciousness, to being in a plane of existence with beings that do not exist on this planet at all. And I described my experiences to shamans who started to laugh, saying, "Oh, we know those guys."