No culture on earth is as heavily narcotized as the industrial West in terms of being inured to the consequences of maladaptive behavior. We pursue a business-as-usual attitude in a surreal atmosphere of mounting crises and irreconcilable contradictions.

We're not going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.

If you sit down with a person, or a watermelon for that matter, when you're stoned and sing into it, the quality of the hallucination is such that there is a way of thinking about it where you could say, 'This is an acoustical hologram of the interior of their body.'" I don't say that.I just say, "My goodness isn't it strange that I seem to be able to see inside of the watermelon when I'm doing this.'

The word 'self' is as great a mystery as the word 'other'. It's just a polarity between two mysteries.

Culture is another dimension.

Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.

There is nobody who is so enlightened that they don't need to work on themselves.