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.

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.

There is no mundane dimension really, if you have the eyes to see it, it is all transcendental.

All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.

Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it's going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet