Altered States Quotes

“A dream is the key that unlocks the mysteries of the waking world...”
― Juliet Marillier, Cybele's Secret

“I can’t reveal the mystery to either saint or sinner; I can’t state at length what I’ve said curtly; I achieve an altered state that I can’t explain; I have a secret that I cannot share.”
― Omar Khayyám, Quatrains - Ballades

“Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“I am not my opinion of myself, I am not anything I can describe to me. I am only a part of a large system that cannot describe itself fully; therefore, I relax and I am in the point source of consciousness, of delight, of mobility, in the inner spaces. My tasks do not include describing me nor having an opinion about the system in which I live, biological or social or dyadic. I hereby drop that "responsibility".

I am much more than I can conceive or judge me to be. Any negative or positive opinions I have of me are false fronts, headlines, limited and unnecessary programmes written on a thin paper blowing about and floating around in the vastness of inner spaces.”
― John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: Looking into Inner Space

“They luxuriated in the feeling of deep and all pervading satisfaction, a feeling of knowing absolutely that all was well with the world...Not only were all things possible, but all things were theirs.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect these alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have a threatening or exotic aspect.”
― Michael Crichton, Travels

“During the 1980s, a remote viewing project called Stargate was done at Fort Meade. It used binaural beat tones, transmitted through earphones, that altered brain waves. A hemi-sync that device played two different frequencies into each ear was found to produce altered states of consciousness. Perhaps this technology was derived from these experiments done in the 1960s on MKULTRA subjects.”
― Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“One of my relatives invented the sensory deprivation tank. Appropriately, most of my family has never seen or heard of him.”
― Ryan Lilly

“Suppose now one of your hands hot, and the other cold, and that they are both at once put into the same vessel of water, in an intermediate state, will not the water seem cold to one hand, and warm to the other?”
― George Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

“When I first tried a sensory deprivation tank, people thought I had lost my mind. In fact, I had found it.”
― Ryan Lilly