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“Sigmund Freud wrote that “there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, our own ego.” Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists. The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“It’s a useful habit never to believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own.”
― Halldór Kiljan Laxness, Independent People

“Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations—a kind of controlled hallucination. This raises a question: How is normal waking consciousness any different from other, seemingly less faithful productions of our imagination—such as dreams or psychotic delusions or psychedelic trips? In fact, all these states of consciousness are “imagined”: they’re mental constructs that weave together some news of the world with priors of various kinds.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“My opinion has always been this,” he said, “that you ought never to give up as long as you live, even though they have stolen everything from you. If nothing else, you can always call the air you breathe your own, or at any rate you can claim that you have it on loan.”
― Halldór Kiljan Laxness, Independent People