1 “We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”
2 “We are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral – get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player. You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
3 “The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.”
4 “Claim your place in the sun and go forward into the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the programme of a living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.”
5 “Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”
6 “There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives.”
7 “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”
8 “The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.”
9 “One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.”
10 “Not to know one’s true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.”
11 “The surface of things is not where attention should rest.”
12 “I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.”
13 “Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?”
14 “If the words ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ don’t include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth the hemp it was written on.”
15 “How do we fight back? By creating art.
16 “Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.”
17 “Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants.”
18 “Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?”
19 “For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.”
With Ken Thompson 