The Beatles, they brought a whole new dimension to pop music. Of course, the psychedelic period is much more interesting to me, starting with 'Rubber Soul' and on to the 'White Album.' Great, great records. I was such a Beatles fan. I was very sad when they broke up.

I'm a very keen baker; I pride myself on my cakes. I go along the classic sponge line, but I like to jazz it up: I've made some psychedelic birthday cakes.

I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience 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.

When you take into your life the gnosis of the light-filled vegetables, the psychedelic plants that have stabilized the sane societies of this world for millennia, the first message that comes to you is: 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.

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip-the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs.

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.

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.

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era ' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane provides moments of buzzy fun but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters it may be the whitest straightest most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.