The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.

If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.

Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity.

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?