And that we cannot go to space with our feet in the mud. Nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an eco-sensitive hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth unless we fuse these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia oppositorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is the thing that the entheogens, the hallucinogens, deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade.

You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That's how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.

Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.

A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.

Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.