Quotes About Psychedelics

When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

Things are pretty strange in this world and people do it many ways and you are just an atom in a galaxy of possibilities and your opinions and your science and 'What I think' and all that, is just so much noise in a very complex and busy world. And its that same humbling perception that comes out of psychedelics. It just shows you, you're very parochial.

The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional and spiritual values rather than products. This is terrifying news.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander into a casino any time of the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla - on a flaming neon cross that suddenly turns into a pinwheel, spinning the beast around in wild circles above the crowded gambling action.

If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher

There is that sense that we have to all come together, the challenges have become so great for the human species that it's going to take all of us to find our way out. One of the ways to achieve this goal, of course, is to expand the freedom of religions so that those people who use psychedelics within their religious practise are able to do so. -Rick Doblin

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

Religion seemed as good an escape route as any, plus it was conveniently compatible with psychedelics.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

Drugs shouldn't be used for recreation although they can be, but ultimately the point of psychedelics is to put you in touch with the powers of the universe.

It was an unknown thing, a lot of people had very bad trips and I like to be in control.

One of the side effects of good psychedelics is you can't remember how much you took.

I don't like alcohol, but I still like to mess around with other stuff occasionally. I think it's important I take mushrooms and acid. They're certainly not addictive, so I can't rule that out.

Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key -- it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.

It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people.

Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, considered microdosing the most neglected area of research. Hofmann microdosed LSD often for the last few decades of his life. He remained sharp until he died at 101. He would take it when he was walking among trees. In Jim's opinion, microdosing psychedelics does a far better job than a whole class of drugs we now call "cognitive enhancers," most of which are simply derivatives of speed.

What I'm finding is that microdoses of LSD or mushrooms may be very helpful for depression because they make you feel better enough that you do something about what's wrong with your life. We've made [depression] an illness. It may be the body's way of saying, 'You better deal with something, because it's making you really sad.

Turn on, tune in and drop out.

People ask me how many times I've taken LSD--and I don't count. But it's the same thing when they ask me how many times I've made love. The answer is, not enough.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out