Quote collection
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"It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection."
"Even a billion people is too much. There's no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew."
"It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind."
"The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant."
"We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time."
"The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety."
"Why does mathematics describe nature. That's a deeper question than most."
"It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are in the presence of the mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide."
"We can't sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten."
"It's getting funnier because everybody's categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don't make sense."
"The content of the dialogue with 'the Other' is a content that indicates that man's horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, 'the body is the placenta of the soul'"
"Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist."
"The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous."
"The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along."
"I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That's not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky."
"Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics."
"Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century."
"The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future."
"Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It's a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure."
"We've painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare - triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights - or a leap to an entirely different level. We've taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom."