What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.

All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.

We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.

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.

I don't think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.