The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang. ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It's the limit case for likelihood.

In 1948, television was introduced, and millions and millions of people lead larval, low-awareness, warehoused lives mainlining an electronic drug straight into their brains.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.

Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.

Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.

Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.