A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.

Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.

This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.

The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.