Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.

The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.

It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas. . . . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.

Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.

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.

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.

So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.