I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.

The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.

The overriding problems are brought on by the existence of the ego, a maladaptive behavioral complex in the psyche that gets going like a tumor. If it's not treated - if there's not pharmacological intervention - it becomes the dominant constellation of the personality.

To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.

Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.

One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?