I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.

We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.

Shamanism is not some obscure concern of cultural anthropologists. Shamanism is how religion was practiced for its first million years. Up until about 12,000 years ago there was no other form of religion on this planet. That was how people attained some kind of access to the sacred.

If you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code are ALL freaks. They work for capitalist dogs, of course, because we all do, but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me.

It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.