One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.

What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.

I’ll try to be around and about. But if I’m not, then you know that I’m behind your eyelids, and I’ll meet you there

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.

Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. . . . Who do you think you are that you should worry, for cryin' out loud. It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is, in fact, a form of hubris.

I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.

Astonishment is the proper response to reality.