Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness

Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.

But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.

For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.

Well, you could almost say, I suppose, that the scientist seeks what is similar between any two days, or bluebirds, or glaciers. And the poet seeks what is different. The artist seeks to celebrate the unique.

It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.

I don't believe that shamanism without hallucinogens is authentic shamanism or comfortable shamanism.