This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.

I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.

A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.

Apparently there is a great discovery or insight which our culture is deliberately designed to suppress, distort, and ignore. That is that nature is some kind of minded entity. That nature is not simply the random flight of atoms through electromagnetic fields. Nature is not the empty, despiritualized , lumpen matter that we inherit from modern physics. But it is instead a kind of intelligence, a kind of mind.

And I don't mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.