The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.

To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.

Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.

These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.

I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!