People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.

I'm fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you're getting somewhere.

It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.

There is no dualism in the world of light. The conventions of relativity say that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light, but if one tries to imagine the point of view of a thing made of light, one must realize that what is never mentioned is that if one moves at the speed of light there is no time whatsoever... One exists in eternity, one has become eternal... One is then apart from the moving image; one exists in the completion of eternity.

Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. . . . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.

We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.