There is this persistent theme in all of these notions that death is made more easy, whatever that means, if you've learned the territory before you get there. And you know, in the Mahayana Buddhist situation it even becomes as extreme as saying; 'life is essentially a preparation for death, a studying of the maps of a learning of the skills a packing of your picnic basket so that when you get out there and demons are sniffing you up one side and down the other you don't bungle your mantras'.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

Spaceflight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, the hallucinogenic experience. This is the way engineers get high. They go to the moon!

We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.

That's what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you're dealing with.

Our medium is meat, but we are made of information.