One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.

To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.

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

Cultivate an ongoing stream of self-description, telling yourself what is happening. Get used to the idea that mind can penetrate the immediate surface of being and reveal the tactile density of it as a manifold whose measure cannot be immediately taken by the eyes, that it's deep, it's connected, it's complex. Everything holds within itself the anticipation and the memory of everything else.

The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.

You're immortal as long as you live.