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The mind begins to boggle at unnatural substances as things paradoxical and incomprehensible.

Drugs shouldn't be used for recreation although they can be, but ultimately the point of psychedelics is to put you in touch with the powers of the universe.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

Alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical drugs are legal, but they can hurt a lot of people.

Through all of history mankind has ingested psychedelic substances. Those substances exist to put you in touch with spirits beyond yourself, with the creator, with the creative impulse of the planet.

An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable.

We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.

The drug or cult has major if not exclusive sources of brain rewards.

The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.

Whether you are a genius or an idiot, a thief or, like me, a Zen priest who has cultivated the mind for 30 years - the mind anyway is subject to conditions.