The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.

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

Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.

The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.

One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?