“Amazonian shamanism is inseparable from sorcery and magic. Native practices are embedded within an animistic worldview in which plants, animals, rivers and mountains have spirits. Natural beings are sentient and intentional, feel emotions and hold grudges. Their worlds are enchanted worlds, insofar as they relate to their environment as one would relate to a community of subjects, as opposed to a collection of objects.”

“If set, setting and context are important, narrative and discourse are crucial. Psychedelics don’t do many things just ‘on their own.’ Our experiences never happen in a vacuum. There’s always a fundamental interaction between pharmacology and context, chemistry and language, a molecule and the infinitely malleable realms of the human imagination (or ‘Spirit’).”

“There is a crack in everything that you can put together: Physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is, and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.”

“Learning to be comfortable with radical uncertainty and epistemic humility and diversity allows us to be more inclusive, empathetic and tolerant of each others's needs, beliefs and interpretations while protecting ourselves from an inflated sense of purpose and self-importance, obsessive and maladaptive self-analysis, plant-medicine consumerism, potential cult-like dynamics, institutionalized gaslighting and, of course, psychedelic narcissism.”