Quotes About Psychedelics

psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity.

By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience.

If we limit psychedelics just to the patient," she explains, "we're sticking to the old medical model

a cross between a spa/retreat and a gym, where people can experience psychedelics

What had been as recently as 2010 a modest gathering of psychonauts and a handful of renegade researchers was now a six-day convention-cum-conference that had drawn more than three thousand people from all over the world to hear researchers from twenty-five countries present their findings.

What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one's ego—that may be the key to changing one's mind.

coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.

Psychedelics are for those of us who aren't so innately gifted.

Though reading is no substitute for hearing McKenna expound his thesis (you can find him on YouTube), he summarizes it in Food of the Gods (1992): Psilocybes

Aren't we identical with our ego? What's left of us without it? The lesson of both psychedelics and meditation is the same: No! on the first count, and More than enough on the second.

Katherine MacLean, the former Hopkins researcher who wrote the landmark paper on openness, hopes someday to establish a "psychedelic hospice," a retreat center somewhere out in nature where not only the dying but their loved ones can use psychedelics to help them let go—the patient and the loved ones both.

Carhart-Harris suspects that the loss of a clear distinction between subject and object might help explain another feature of the mystical experience: the fact that the insights it sponsors are felt to be objectively true—revealed truths rather than plain old insights. It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person's opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on psychedelics has lost.

Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

the experience of psychedelics is powerfully influenced by one's expectation; no other class of drugs are more suggestible in their effects.

whenever we hired someone, they would receive a couple of LSD sessions as part of their training

the potential of psychedelics to improve brain function.

the second possible explanation for the noetic sense: when our sense of a subjective "I" disintegrates, as it often does in a high-dose psychedelic experience (as well as in meditation by experienced meditators), it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is subjectively and objectively true. What's left to do the doubting if not your I?

For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences. Speaking of lines, psychedelics in the 1960s did draw

depatterning factor." There are times in the evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adaptation. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a population.

Hoping to escape those associations and underscore the spiritual dimensions of these drugs, some researchers have proposed they instead be called "entheogens"—from the Greek for "the divine within.

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.

Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.