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

“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

“What’s left after the wave
is not yours to own—
but you can sit beside it.
The sage holds what arises
as one might hold water:
open hands,
no fists.”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

“The edge is not the end.
It’s an invitation.
The sage feels the tremble
and does not retreat.
Discomfort is not danger.
It’s data.
It’s where your old limits meet
what might grow next.”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

“The sage does not separate the sacred
from the ordinary.
They rinse the bowl
as if it mattered.
They fold the towel
as if it were prayer.
The ceremony isn’t over
because the altar is gone.
It continues
in how you touch the day.
Wash the dishes slowly.
Feel the heat in the water.
Notice the sound of soap against porcelain.
This is presence.
This is integration.”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

“Who’s behind those eyes?
Who’s watching from within?
You are not the features.
Not the aging.
Not the effort.
Not the mask you sometimes wear
to be loved or understood.
You are the one who sees.
The one who stays.”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

“The breath is not a tool.
It is a threshold.
In…
a return.
Out…
a release.
Each breath holds a world:
The body remembering now.
The moment asking for nothing.”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

“Stillness is not empty.
It is full of everything you’ve been avoiding.
The sage does not fear the echo.
They sit inside it
until it becomes a song.
When the world stops talking,
your mind gets loud.
The list, the memory, the ache, the fear—
all rise like smoke
in a windless room.”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

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

“The sage does not return unchanged.
They integrate.
You are not the same.
Not because the medicine worked.
But because you did.
You sat with your shadow.
You stayed through the storm.
You chose the harder honesty.
This wasn’t an escape.
It was a re-entry.”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

“The sage does not confuse the seed
with the tree.
You are not one version of yourself.
You are many.
The one who doubted.
The one who tried.
The one who left.
The one who stayed.
The one who kept showing up,
even when no one noticed.”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

“You scroll.
You feel.
You judge.
You click.
But do you pause?
Do you see what you’re chasing?
Do you notice what’s pulling you?”
― G. Scott Graham, The Tao of Psychedelics

“We have been witnessing a rebirth of psychedelic research since the early 2000s. Due to the fact we are in what many people call the Psychedelic Renaissance, one cannot help but draw comparisons to the European Renaissance that spanned the 15th and 16th centuries. An equally significant age, one that started around the same time and lasted another century or so, was the Age of Discovery. If we are in a Psychedelic Renaissance, and keeping in mind that history regularly repeats itself, it would be reasonable to assume that a parallel set of activities with matching enthusiasm will happen, what I call the Psychedelic Age of Discovery.”
― A. M. Houot, RISE OF THE PSYCHONAUT: Maps for Amateurs, Nonscientists and Explorers in the Psychedelic Age of Discovery

“Let us consider a sad illumination. The Manhattan office worker moves througha clutter of factory-made, anonymous furniture to a plastic, impersonal kitchen, tobreakfast on canned, packaged anonymous food-fuel; dresses hirself in theanonymous-city-dweller costume, travels through dark tunnels of sooty metal andgray concrete to a dark metal room, foul with polluted air. All day s/he deals withsymbols that have no relevance to hir divine possibilities. This person issurrounded by the dreary, impersonal, assembly-line, mass-produced, anonymousenvironment of an automated robot, which perfectly mirrors hir “turned off’awareness.

When this person “turns on,” s/he sees at once the horror of hir surroundings. Ifs/he “tunes in,” s/he begins to change hir movements and hir surroundings sothat they become more in harmony with hir internal beauty. If everyone inManhattan were to “turn on” and “tune in,” grass would grow on First Avenueand tieless, shoeless divinities would dance or roller-skate down the carlessstreets. Ecological consciousness would emerge within 25 years. Fish would swimin a clear-blue Hudson.”
― Timothy Leary, Your Brain Is God

“Every single thing here
has decided I belong to it now”
― Abyssino

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important -- creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.
-- Steve Jobs”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

“Aldous Huxley wrote his beautiful book The Doors of Perception after only one mescaline trip, and he took psychedelics only ten times during his life.* Similarly, when the great historian of religion Huston Smith published his collected reflections on psychedelics, Cleansing the Doors of Perception, he had taken LSD only a half dozen times. After that, he said, "The utility seemed to go down quickly and the bummers increased," leading him to adopt Alan Watts's advice: "When you get the message, hang up the phone." This book is about what happens if you don't hang up the phone.”
― Christopher M. Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven

“All my life I have had a passionate desire to understand how our universe works. Why are our lives the way they are? Why is there so much suffering in life? Is there a larger intelligence operating in the universe, and if so, toward what end? What is the purpose and project of existence? In our culture's current materialist paradigm that reduces everything to physical matter, these questions are considered beyond the pale of genuine knowledge, and attempts to answer them are seen as being purely speculative enterprises. In my sessions, however, I was given the opportunity to explore these questions in exercises of profound experiential instruction choreographed by a vast intelligence. I was shown things that stunned and transfixed me, was allowed to experience things that completely reframed my understanding of existence.
What philosopher could turn down such an opportunity?
As this journey deepened, I found myself entering a spiraling love affair with this intelligence, a Being so vast I can only describe it using the vocabulary of the Divine even while the sessions themselves were repeatedly demonstrating how limited and childlike our historical conceptions of the Divine have been. I agree with Jonathan Goldman who in speaking of ayahuasca said, "The rituals of the Daime are not meant to be an 'experience,' but rather to provide a chance to interact intimately with a Divine Being of unimaginable intelligence, compassion, clarity, and spiritual power."* I do not know the limits of this Being and I hesitate to even call it a "Being" at all. As I have experienced it, it is the fabric of existence itself. I think of it as the generative intelligence of our universe, the Mind of the Cosmos-both transcendent source and manifest body of existence, beyond all categories of He or She yet infinitely more than any It.
Knowing that I could sustain the deepest intimacy with this intelligence for only a few hours on any given day and that I had no control over which session would become one of these magical days, I kept driving forward. When the communion opened, it was so intense that at the end of the day I would feel supremely fulfilled and at the same time achingly bereaved because I could not stay with my Beloved.
Everyone must choose a name for the Absolute, a title that approximates its truth, power, and beauty. Though I will use many terms to describe it in this book, in my heart of hearts I call it my Beloved. Once held in her embrace, once dissolved into her radiant splendor, I was hers forever. I will be hers until my last breath and after still. If my description tilts toward the feminine, it is because of two things-the specific story of creation that emerged on this journey and the love that reuniting with this reality awakened within me.”
― Christopher M. Bache, LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven