Philip

“I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“4 Important Questions to Continually Ask Yourself:
“How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?”
“What am I not saying that needs to be said?”
“What am I saying that’s not being heard?”
“What’s being said that I’m not hearing?”
― Jerry Colonna

“He grasped for hope in Emerson's vision of natural polarities, in which all things are balanced by their opposites—darkness by light, cold by heat, loss by gain.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend

“Humboldt believed it is only with our feelings, our senses, and our imaginations—that is, with the faculties of human subjectivity—that we can ever penetrate nature’s secrets. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice” that is “familiar to his soul.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics