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.

In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.

The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we've all been hungering for.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

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.