A lot of things occurred to me with shamans in Peru.There were a number of different kinds of experiences that you learn from doing ritual and taking ayahuasca [a common tropical forest hallucinogen] is the key to understanding the native consciousness and perception of the world with the Peruvian shamans that you wouldn't get unless you had been with them, but every shamanic tradition, including the Native American tradition of medicine and cleansing ritual, like the Sun Dance or the sweat lodge.

There is an ability to move and transform things. I think each human being has that power, and it's often one that we are willing to relinquish to others.

I am not talking to you from the point of view of just wishful thinking, or imaginary craziness. I'm talking to you from a deeper basic understanding - quantum physics really begins to point to this discovery, it says that you can't have a universe without mind entering into it, the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.

What I thought was unreal now, for me, seems in some ways to be more real than what I think to be real, which seems now to be unreal

Reality includes both the past and the future, but existence includes only the present and is totally dependent on the reality of past and future universes. Without them there is no existence now.

When I speak or when I offer ideas and explain how the universe seems to work from the point of view that I've understood, it seems to give people a lift - an unshackling or freeing.

It came to my mind that in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, in Indian spiritual literature, and in the Bhagavad Gita, and when I started reading about outstanding yogis and people of exceeding spiritual power such as Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda, they all had the ability to do what we would call - I don't know what you would even call it - psychic phenomenon, magic, transform objects, be able to perceive the future, the past and the present simultaneously.