Stop consuming images and start producing them.

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.

The way to break the cycle is to make a decision. Once you make this decision, it’s like flicking a switch in your psyche. Instantly, your life changes.

The world is made of language, and if you know the laws that govern language, you can make of it what you will.

We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it’s worth.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas.

The world is like an anesthetic… people are not going beyond the superficial to the meaning of life — they don’t even ask that question because they’re living in a world of not feeling.

If you don’t smoke cannabis, you may spend your evening balancing your checking account. If you do smoke cannabis, you may spend your evening contemplating the causes of the Greek Renaissance.

The way you know that a culture is in trouble is that it teaches the young children how to think, and not what to think.

If you don’t have some kind of plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.

We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.

You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep-seated need to believe.

It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds.

It is the imagination that argues for the divine spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World’s Soul into all of us.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

It’s not a matter of whether psychedelics will be integrated into society, but how. Will we integrate them like a glider pilot, gracefully and with careful attention to our instruments? Or will we integrate them like a kamikaze pilot, crashing in flames?

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.

The world is not made of atoms, it’s made of stories.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about.

If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.

The cost of sanity, in this society, is a certain level of alienation.

The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.

The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words.

The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.

Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you.

Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.