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.

The kinds of mystical experiences that I have had definitely convinced me that I was able to get out of time. I have had experiences, or brief glimpses, of being able to see the future and then come back into time, and then go into extraordinary realms of the past.

The self is fundamentally an illusion arising as a reflection of the soul in matter, much as a clear lake at midnight reflects the moon.

When you start to try to understand everything in terms of words, the understanding of the words becomes the experience, and the experience gets lost.

Chemistry comes about through the transformation of earth, air, fire and water. All chemistry is just movement within those things, and so we experience the joys and the sorrows of hot and cold, and dry and moist, because of these chemical transformations. In a similar way, we create and experience a world of time, space, motion and energy, through our intuitions, our thoughts, our sensing and our feeling.

We all get out, maybe for longer than we wish, because we all pass this mortal coil more or less and so we certainly get a chance to experience it again, and we've experienced it before we were born. So it's more or less our natural place of being, unless you believe that the only time you're conscious is when you're alive.

Quantum physics really begins to point to this discovery. It says that you can't have a Universe without mind entering into it, and that the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.