{"quotes":[{"text":"Hmm. I think love is about loving all things, to treat each and every thing and every one as a sovereign being that’s free to make its own choices.","author":"Michael Sanders","tags":["ascension","ayahuasca","cosmos","entheogens","freedom","happiness","infinity","joy","liberation","love","meditation","philosophy","psychedelics","sovereignty","spirituality"],"id":16411,"author_id":"Michael+Sanders"},{"text":"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...","author":"Tom Wolfe","tags":["acid","drugs","lsd","psychedelics","spiritual","spiritual-growth","tripping"],"id":16877,"author_id":"Tom+Wolfe"},{"text":"LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.","author":"Timothy Leary","tags":["drugs","politicians","psychedelics","squares","straights"],"id":28715,"author_id":"Timothy+Leary"},{"text":"When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they're just costumes with zippers.","author":"Steven Kotler","tags":["everyday-life","identity","monday-morning","psychedelics","role","roles"],"id":47290,"author_id":"Steven+Kotler"},{"text":"The collective unconscious, the same as other transpersonal phenomena, is evidence that our mind is not an isolated entity but is constantly in touch with other minds as well as with the world around us. We are never entirely detached from the outside world; never entirely enclosed within our skin. Our mind and our body resonate with our environment, including other people in our environment. Our mind is coherent with the world, and when we do not repress the intuitions that link us with other people and with nature, we can become aware of our oneness with the universe.","author":"James Oroc","tags":["collective-unconscious","drugs","psychedelics"],"id":63560,"author_id":"James+Oroc"},{"text":"For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music, as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge'. But now I knew contemplation at its height.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["mescalin","perception","philosophy","psychedelics"],"id":73752,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"},{"text":"However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction process—of all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situations—for example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you.","author":"Thomas Metzinger","tags":["nonduality","perception","phersonal-identity","psychedelics","realism","reality"],"id":89632,"author_id":"Thomas+Metzinger"},{"text":"If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher.","author":"Cameron Adams","tags":["anthology","consciousness","psychedelics"],"id":103211,"author_id":"Cameron+Adams"},{"text":"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.","author":"Aldous Huxley","tags":["art","creativity","experience","psychedelics","visionary"],"id":115783,"author_id":"Aldous+Huxley"},{"text":"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.","author":"Harry Nilsson","tags":["acid","drugs","psychedelics"],"id":181016,"author_id":"Harry+Nilsson"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":30,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}