The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.

I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.

So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.

The same organizational principles which called us forth into self-reflection have called forth self-reflection out of the planet itself. And the problem then is for us to suspect this, act on our suspicion, and be good detectives, and track down the spirit in its lair. And this is what shamans are doing. They are hunters of spirit.

I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.

I'm meeting my obligations, somehow, always have, without ever truly working, without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the man. Of course I had to deal dope to do this!

And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.