"The repression of chaos, and the resulting obstruction of imagination, has led to the development over thousands of years of the serious, perhaps fatal, ecological problems that we have today. The growth of this problem beyond all bounds, with few people even trying to do anything about it, suggests denial and a lack of imagination. This is an artifact of a cultural flaw that came along with patriarchy." -Ralph Abraham

"Questions of values, ethics, and personal meaning are repressed under the holy banner of practicality and living in the real world." -Michael Toms

"Imagine if the Japanese had won World War II and had introduced into American life a drug so insidious that 30 years later the average American was spending five hours a day "loaded" on the drug. People would just view is as an outrageous atrocity. And yet, we in America do this to ourselves. And the horrifying thing about the "trip" that television gives you is that it's not your trip. It is a trip that comes down through the values systems of a society whose greatest god is the almighty dollar. So television is the opiate of the people. I think the tremendous governmental resistance to the psychedelic issue is not because psychedelics are multi-million dollar criminal enterprises - they are trivial on that level. However, they inspire examination of values, and that is the most corrosive thing that can happen." -Terence McKenna

"Americans have been silenced by toys and gizmos." -George Carlin

"I think there's a kind of adolescent alchemical phase in human development - a dangerous age from fifteen to twenty-one, where you'll either kill yourself, sell yourself out, or actually find something worth doing with your life." -Alex Grey

"Religion preys on those who are full of guilt and fearful of death. The importance of finding one's path has led many into the dens of deception. So many people have turned their souls over to a god in the hope that they will not disappear when they die. The tactic of the dark lord of evil, whether manifested in Babylon or America, is to instill guilt and fear into the hearts and minds of the human prey, then offer a route of escape which promises your only possible forgiveness, or hope, is what they are telling you." -James Arthur

"One of the reasons I like to make this argument about the mushroom and the extraterrestrial is to show people how one can see things differently. If things can be seen that differently, how many ways can they be seen differently? Try to get people to stop waiting for the president to enlighten them. Stop waiting for history and the stream of historical events to make itself clear to you. You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your own responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding. It doesn't do you any good to know that somewhere in some computer there are equations that perfectly model or perfectly don't model something that is going on. We have all tended to give ourselves away to official ideologies and to say, "well I may not understand, but someone understands." The fact of the matter is that only your own understanding is any good to you. Because it's you that you're going to live with and it's you that you're going to die with. As the song says, that last dance you dance, you dance alone." -Terence McKenna

"Priests and politicians speak with forked tongues, out of one side comes the illusion of tolerance and understanding, while the other side says you had better believe what I believe or you are in trouble." -James Arthur

"How can it be that a world so rich with resources can still be a world where poverty and hunger are still in such great abundance? Those who seek fortune from the exploitation of other human beings seem to be the pillars of the planetary hierarchy. The governments with their holy contractual ceremonies, the churches with their vast wealth, the bankers and money brokers who run the economy so the rich and powerful get more rich and powerful, while the poor are ground into destitution and middle class collapses into obscurity. This very same governmental/religious/capitalistic hierarchy that is destroying the planetary environment, disguised as those very institutions that are supposed to be helping it, is grabbing up property ownership under the guise of turning public lands into preserves (this in America). This follows the very same patterns that have recurred throughout history - greed, corruption, and fascism waving the illusionary flag of freedom." -James Arthur

"Just remember that freedom does not say you are only free to do what you are told to do." -James Arthur

"Which, after all, was more likely to happen first: the spontaneously generated idea of an afterlife in which the disembodied soul, liberated from the restrictions of time and space, experiences eternal bliss, or the accidental discovery of hallucinogenic plants that give a sense of euphoria, dislocate the center of consciousness, and distort time and space, making them balloon outward in greatly expanded vistas?... We have to remember that the drug plants were there, waiting to give men a new idea based on a new experience. The experience might have had, I should think, an almost explosive effect on the largely dormant minds of men, causing them to think of things they had never thought of before." -Mary Barnard

"All this evidence forces us to re-evaluate our position toward genuine spirituality, which is based on direct personal experience. However, a necessary prerequisite is to differentiate clearly between spirituality and religion. Western religious life is to a great extent based on faith and belief, rather than direct experience. If we are "believers," we go to church, and we listen to a sermon by an appointed representative of the church who might or might not have had any direct personal experiences. This person reads or talks about experiences that happened to some people two thousand years ago." -Stanislav Grof

"One of the main functions of mainstream religion is to protect people against direct experience of God." -Carl Jung

"In the last fifty years, the world's population has doubled. We have lost over half a billion people due to starvation. We have lost untold numbers of species, we don't even know how many. The world has spent over fifteen trillion dollars on weapons during that time. The global problems that we are facing - pollution, starvation, ecological degradation, overpopulation - are in each and every case a product of human behavior.
The state of the world now reflects the state of our minds. What we call our global "problems" are actually "symptoms" of our individual and collective mind states. If we are to be effective in transforming the crisis we face, we must work, not only to reduce overpopulation and feed the hungry, but to reverse the psychological states, limitations, and perceptual distortions that allowed us to create these things in the first place. We are going to have to work in both arenas, in the world, and in ourselves, if we are to effect a healing.
If we look back at the world and its insanity, we can see that it reflects our own insanity. A central element of this insanity is our belief in our separateness, that we are, as Alan Watts called it, "skin encapsulated egos." Therefor, our motivation is "me, mine, number one."
What contemplative practices train for, and what entheogens sometimes induce, are mystical experiences that embody a recognition of our unity - with all humankind, with all life, and with the cosmos as a whole. From this experience of unity, there arises spontaneously a compassionate concern for and desire to help others." -Roger Walsh