“The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.”
Quote collection
People Quotes — page 891 of 5018
“I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I'm forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.”
“It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.”
“I discovered early in life a stunning truth that's made my life very complicated in its wake, but that I still think is true, and it's that people are very easy to love.”
“By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.”
“People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.”
“In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.”
“What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.”
“What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.”
“In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, painted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.”
“I can't think of a society on Earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want anything to do with.”
“Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena.”
“Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.”
“Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I've been telling people recently is that until there's animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.”
“This is what magic is. It's being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.”
“There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.”
“Never drink more than one cocktail before giving a talk. True, the drinks may relax you, but they may also slur your speech and blur your memory, making you wonder who are all those people out there and why are they staring at you?”
“We're finding that very well-educated people, people who have done everything right, are behind, really behind. And they are hoping they can stay in the labor market, but a word that's used in other countries that isn't used here is very apt here.”
“And our conception that the way we can mitigate the fact that people don't have retirement savings can be more work, or working longer, or just sort of staying in the game for longer is really a false hope. And it's a false promise.”
“Worship is the highest act of which a person is capable. It not only stretches us beyond all the limits of our finite selves to affirm the divine depth of mystery and holiness in the living and eternal God, but it opens us at the deepest level of our being to an act which unites us most realistically with our fellow people.”