We want freedom. We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon. We want freedom from drought and weather, freedom from the movement of game, the growth of plants, freedom from control from mendacious popes and kings, freedom from ideology, freedom from want. This idea of freeing ourselves has become the compass of the human journey.

I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.

To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.

At still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst.

The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation.

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

Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular.