If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.

I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. ... I think that these plants 'take people' as much as people take the plants. ... When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it.

But technology is the real skin of our species. Humanity, correctly seen in the context of the last five hundred years, is an extruder of technological material. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization; we put it through mental filters, and we extrude jewelry, gospels, space shuttles. This is what we do. We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects. All our tool making implies our belief in an ultimate tool. That tool is the flying saucer, or the soul, exteriorized in three-dimensional space.

I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.

What we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.