Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.

The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.

I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.

It seems to me that it is psyche in a way that has become occluded by the perverse development of language.

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules

So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It's not my friend. It's a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.