The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.

I think there's a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable.

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.

You are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. And in that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, ‘What is it?’ In that moment art can be created.

What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.