History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it's over . . . in a sense.

There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules

It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.

Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has infested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it. . . . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.

That's the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.

We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.