Quotes from Michael Pollan

a daily reminder of nature's abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are turned into delicious things to eat.

Eat Your View!

Andrew Solomon, in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, traces the links between addiction and depression, which frequently co-occur, as well as the intimate relationship between depression and anxiety.

savikalpa samadhi, in which the ego vanishes when confronted with the immensity of the universe during the course of a meditation on an object—in this case, planet Earth.

An act as quotidian and practical as making your own sauerkraut represents nothing less than a way of engaging with the world. Or rather, with several different worlds, each nested inside the other: the invisible world of fungi and bacteria; the community in which you live; and the industrial food system that is undermining the health of our bodies and the land.

Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides."* The guidelines represent a

This guy is lying on the couch right there where you are, with tears streaming down his face, and I'm thinking, how absolutely beautiful and meaningful this experience is. How sacred. How can this ever have been illegal? It's as if we made entering Gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums, or sunsets!

To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction.

The loudest and most authoritative voices in the debate over psychedelics in the 1960s were precisely the people who knew the least about them.

It seemed to me not too much to ask of a meat eater, . . that at least once in his life he take some direct responsibility for the killing on which his meat-eating depends.

Some scientists have raised the possibility that consciousness may pervade the universe, suggesting we think of it the same way we do electromagnetism or gravity, as one of the fundamental building blocks of reality.

And then there is the ego, perhaps the most formidable creation of the default mode network, which strives to defend us from threats both internal and external.

So don't drink your sweets, and remember : There is no such thing as a healthy soda.

Psilocybe cubensis, one of the more common species of magic mushroom.

Our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy ,is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers , and who further could distinguish among them and remember where in the landscape they'd seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were blind to their significance.

Both the mushroom and its psychoactive compound were unknown to science until the 1950s, when the psilocybin mushroom was discovered in southern Mexico, where Mazatec Indians had been using "the flesh of the gods," in secret, for healing and divination since before the Spanish conquest.

Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical." Self

The existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.

LSD too, it is easy to forget, was derived from a fungus, Claviceps purpurea, or ergot.

these remarkable mushrooms produce, in addition to spores, meanings in human minds.

The myriad new connections that spring up during the psychedelic experience as mapped by the neuroimaging done at Imperial College and the disintegration of well-travelled old connections may serve simply to shake the snow globe, in Robin Carhart-Harris' phrase, a predicate for establishing new pathways.

allowing him to conduct clinical research on LSD in the United States—this even though he had a third-grade education

great writers stamp the world with their minds, and the psychedelic experience will forevermore bear Huxley's indelible imprint.

neuroscience might have at last found the address for the "But enough about you" center of the brain.