The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.

Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe.

The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.

To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.

I'm as against restricting access to drugs as I am to burning books. It offends me in the same way.