Psychedelics Quotes

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
― Terence McKenna

“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.”
― Terence McKenna

“LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.”
― Timothy Leary

“Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.”
― Terence McKenna

“...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.”
― Federico Fellini

“I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.”
― Harry Nilsson

“Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn't seem out of place on a Hallmark card flow with the force of revealed truth.

Love is everything.
Okay, but what else did you learn?
No - you must not have heard me; it's everything!

Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To resaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright...”
― Tom Wolfe

“Lao Tzu once said, 'Nature doesn’t hurry, yet everything is accomplished.'

A single seed planted, eventually becomes a garden in time – when things get tough, tend to the garden in your mind.”
― Jennifer Sodini

“Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind. That continent has been rediscovered in a time of great peril for ourselves and our world. Is this coincidence, synchronicity, or a cruelly meaningless juxtaposition of hope and ruin?”
― Terrence McKenna

“I am everything – information, a noun.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Shrooms are full of shit. That’s the whole story. Grown in shit, it’s their essence: they try to humble you in these ways that bring you down to their level.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Consciousness is a tricky thing.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Mescaline is good. Mescaline is progress.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“The mind, unfettered by the constraints of the ego, dances with the cosmos in ecstatic union”
― J. R. Damon, Sun Circle: a magickal solar grimoire

“A well-tended fire doesn’t just burn for a night—it provides warmth, light, and sustenance long after it has been carefully maintained. The same is true for psychedelic experiences.”
― G. Scott Graham, Engagement: The Missing Component in Psychedelic Therapy

“I lost all contact with the surrounding world, which completely disappeared…The awareness of my everyday existence, my name, my whereabouts and my life disappeared… I tried hard to remind myself of the existence of the realities I used to know, but they suddenly did not make any sense… There was no biographical or transpersonal content, images, archetypes…none of these dimensions seemed to exist, let alone manifest. I had no concepts, no categories for what I was witnessing (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“My only reality was a mass of radiant swirling energy of immense proportions that seemed to contain all existence in a condensed and entirely abstract form. I became Consciousness facing the Absolute. It had the brightness of myriad suns, yet it was not on the same continuum with any light I knew from everyday life. It seemed to be pure consciousness, intelligence, and creative energy transcending all polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and demonic, terrifying and ecstatic, creative and destructive…My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved; I became one with the Source. I retrospect, I believe I must have experienced the Dharmakaya, the Primary Clear Light, which according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, appears at the moment of our death (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“…Some timeless time later, dreamlike images began to emerge, the solar system, the Earth…the last to emerge was the sense of my everyday identity and awareness of my present life. I was sure that I had taken a dose that was excessive and that I was actually dying… I believed I was experiencing the bardo, the intermediate state before my rebirth in the next incarnation. Then I was seeing and experiencing many scenes from my past lives, playing out karmic history in my body but at the same time in a state of profound bliss, completely detached from these dramas (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“All the elements were there: the frozen feeling bubbling up and permeating my body like quantum foam fizzing up to engulf the fragmenting mind, the feeling of acceleration, my dissolving self urging me to let go, to surrender, as I was sucked into the visionary maelstrom. … The experience was far more austere (than in the earlier trials – ed.) Reality is a hallucination generated by the brain to help make sense of our being; it is made of fragments of memory, associations, ideas, people you remember, dreams you’ve had, things you’ve read and seen, all of which is somehow blended and extruded into something resembling a coherent conscious narrative, the hallucination we call “experience.” Dimethyltryptamine rips back the curtain to show the raw data before it has been processed and massaged. There is no comforting fiction of coherent consciousness; one confronts the mindless hammering of frenzied neurochemistry (McKenna, Dennis. The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss – My Life with Terence McKenna. St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press, 2012, p. 160).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“The fundamental importance, for the recovery of people in Western industrial societies who are sickened by a one-sided, rational, materialistic world view, is today given primary emphasis, not only by adherent to Eastern religious movements like Zen Buddhism, but also by leading representatives of acedemic psychiatry”
― Albert Hofmann, LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science by Albert Hofmann

“The fundamental importance, for the recovery of people in Western industrial societies who are sickened by a one-sided, rational, materialistic world view, is today given primary emphasis, not only by adherents to Eastern religious movements like Zen Buddhism, but also by leading representatives of acedemic psychiatry”
― Albert Hofmann, LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science by Albert Hofmann

“As the nicotine addiction seizes control, your definition of a “sh*tty day” begins to broaden.”
― Dawid Mazurkiewicz, Santa Was Real: Becoming Nicotine Free: The Art of Time Shifting, Ex-Pressing and Perceiving

“Preparation for ultimate death is to be aware that your highest and most intense form of life is accompanied by, and conditional upon, a series of small deaths all the time. We have to be dying to these obsessive memories..”
― Aldous Huxley, Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

“Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that most characteristc plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is the mental disorder due to a chemical disorder?”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Don't waste your money on an ayahuasca enlightenment journey to Peru. All you're doing is allowing your primitive mind to take over while you're awake. You can let it do so in sleep quite nicely and without the puking and insect-ridden dangers of Amazonian encounters.”
― Steven Lesk M.D., Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness

“Not knowing how he had come to sit behind the steering wheel, he considered driving into town for help but was too fucked up to walk much less commandeer Emma’s truck. The hike into the canyon where her body would be—500 feet beneath the Claw and at least a 90-minute jog from the truck—was too much to consider, the stream requiring being forded at least a dozen times. Paralyzed by indecision and the horror of seeing her jump, he pounded the steering wheel with palms, tears soaking his face, collecting like dew drops in the wiry strands of his beard. “What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? Goddammit Emma…”
Desiring nothing other than to have her back, he felt the urge to lie down on the seat and cry himself into oblivion, having no more control over himself than he had over the way Powerball had spun the universe, spitting out random equations from a spinning cage. So maybe, his mind conspired, she didn’t jump and was still wandering around the Claw, lost, searching him out. But the image of her stretching her arms wide and leaping was crystalline in its authenticity, tangible and substantial.
She’s not here. The voice returned, stripping earthly context from reality. Go look somewhere else.
“...the other half found me stumbling around and drunk on burgundy wine,” the tape player shattered his thoughts as though someone had thrown a large rock through the windshield, the engine suddenly idling. Like it just happened on its own, there was no way he’d touched the key. Fumbling for the cassette deck’s knobs, he watched his hand disappear into the dash, lacking mass or substance, sensation, an immaterial thing dangling uselessly from the end of his arm. Outside the truck, the mountain and trees pivoted, the world turning on a spindle, the turnout giving way to the meadow and the rutted path back to the gate. Gooch watched the speedometer needle bounce back and forth, wind tumbling the dashboard trash and debris so that everything danced against the windshield in time to the music.
“I’ll get up and fly away….”
― James R McQuiggin, A Rare and Different Tune: Book Two in the Powerball Trilogy

“I’ve had conversations with it where I say, ‘Show me what you are for yourself; what are you really?’ ... and after about 15 seconds, you say, ‘Call it off! I’m not ready!”
― Terence McKenna