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. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being. This is the basis of all magic.

Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make upon reality, other people, or language.

Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.

The surface of things is not where attention should rest.

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

As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As individuals, it's hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

How do we fight back? By creating art.

I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.

I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.

Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe.

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

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 problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.

The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous.

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

Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.

Nothing comes unannounced, but many can miss the announcement. So it's very important to actually listen to your own intuition rather than driving through it.

Art's task is to save the soul of mankind.. anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.

Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality. After all, if it's there it doesn't require your belief- and if it's not there why should you believe in it?

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 Imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.

You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.

The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.

What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.

The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information

Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.

What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, ... and THIS is big news!

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.

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.

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.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.

The monkey body has carried us to this moment of release, but we are coming more and more to exist in a world made by the human imagination.

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.

If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.

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.

We live in condensations of our imagination

We are like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects...All our tool-making implies our belief in an ultimate tool.

We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity.

What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.

All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.

History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.