Michael Rose

“Wilson’s early trip reports with peyote and belladonna are valuable artifacts from a first-generation psychedelic explorer's point of view. Five years before the “summer of love,” when LSD hit America's consciousness, Wilson was engaged in the bohemian tradition, in the manner of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Fitz Hugh Ludlow, author of The Hasheesh Eater (1857), of exploring one’s mind with psychotropic drugs. Wilson’s article took an unexpected turn, however, when he reported that several weeks after his first peyote trip he started having sexual feelings for “a young boy.” He continued that the attraction was so intense that he’d get an erection just driving past his house. Wilson knew that the boy was heterosexual and wouldn’t be into being hit on by an older guy, so he went no further than observing the gay fantasies as they arose and then drifted away. He didn’t panic at the thought that he may have suddenly turned gay, nor did he let the fantasies of being with a “young boy” overwhelm him. He wrote that he observed his thoughts and feelings with self-compassion as they moved through his consciousness. The article concluded with his report that a few weeks later, just as suddenly as it arrived, his attraction to this young person abruptly ended.141”
― Gabriel Kennedy, Chapel Perilous: The Life & Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson

“Being included in a ceremony wasn’t easy, for it was only permitted to enquire about the mushrooms ‘when evening and darkness come and you are alone with a wise old man or woman whose confidence you have won, by the light of a candle held in the hand and talking in a whisper’. The mushrooms themselves had to be picked”
― J.M.R. Higgs, I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary

“To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value—the occasional side roads and wrong roads, the delays, “modesties,” seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. All this can express a great prudence, even the supreme prudence: where "nosce te ipsum" would be the recipe for ruin, forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, making oneself smaller, narrower, mediocre, become reason itself.

Morally speaking: neighbor love, living for others, and other things can be a protective measure for preserving the hardest self-concern. This is the exception where, against my wont and conviction, I side with the “selfless” drives: here they work in the service of self-love, of self-discipline.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe