I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience is like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.

The shaman is not merely a sick man, or a madman; he is a sick man who has healed himself.

The right idea is not enough. What is necessary is the lightning strike of true gnosis.

Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a tranformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, "that's a bird, baby, that's a bird," instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock irridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we're five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words.

Part of the ego-dominator pathology is to demand closure out of everything. There is no closure. You have to learn to sit with the messiness of the mystery.

Now this has become, or is in the act of becoming I hope, the guiding paradigm of the culture, because what the shaman is, is the person who is still, and it's men and women, the person who is still in touch with this organic intelligence that lies behind nature.

There's an entire universe inside you.

The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.

The thing that I think psychedelics do that addresses this problem and many many problems or choke points in our ideological effort to understand what's going on, is, the contribution that they make is that they dissolve boundaries. And culture-- I mean, the word 'virtual reality' was used as we went around the circle. Culture IS the sanctioned virtual reality. And it is put place by the machinery of local language, you see. And so then you're born into this circumstance, and you're told, you know, 'You are a male child. You are a citizen. You are a citizen of the United States. You are a Christian. You are a Jew. You will go to college. You will do this...' And this you never question. It's called the social contract. It hasn't gone unnoticed by Western philosophers. It's just, it's gone unnoticed by those of us who are its foremost victims. They try to tell you that you're in a social contract, but when you ask to see your signature on the document, they tell you that you were born into this contract. Well, what the hell kind of contract is that? It means that you were born into a kind of enslavement to a linguistically empowered paradigm, a virtual reality within which you will walk around your entire life, you know, congratulating yourself on its accomplishments and ignoring its contradictions and weaknesses.

So what psychedelics do, and why they are in all times and all places such social dynamite, is, they dissolve the cultural machinery. Doesn't matter, you know, head-shrinking Amazon native, Hassidic Jew, Chinese merchant in Singapore, whoever it is, the psychedelic dissolves their cultural construct and puts them in touch with the fact of being an organism. Being an organism is like what you get when you take off your real clothing. Not THIS clothing, but the clothing of language, programming and assumption. Then you find yourself within the context of organism, outside the context of culture.