I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.

One way to think about what psychedelics are is as catalysts for language development. They literally force the evolution of language. You cannot evolve faster than your language because the language defines the culture of meaning. So if there's a way to accelerate the evolution of language then this is real consciousness expansion and it's a permanent thing. The great legacies of the 60's are in attitudes and language. It boils down to doing your own thing, feeling the vibe, ego-trip, blowing your mind.

The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.

In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.

We are going through the eye of the needle; make sure you leave what you don't need behind

I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety. Anxiety sells.

Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.