Altered Perception Quotes

I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown.

Once you've been backstage at a theater, the theater is never the same for you. Once you've noticed the crack in the vase, the vase is never the same for. Once you've seen a friend do something appalling, the friendship is never the same. That does not mean you won't go to the theater, or keep the vase or the friend. You can choose.

DMT was a gaseous wax that you could smoke that gave you a 20-minute psychedelic high. You'd inhale it. And then when you'd exhale—poof, you'd be high. I saw Buddha, man. I know that sounds like no big deal. But I saw a gigantic holographic Buddha — correct in every way! Buddhas can be very intricate — these drawings that you see in books. Thousands of details were included in this Buddha. Where did they come from? I didn't make them up. I can't even draw, you know? I could barely spell cat, you know? And there it was. And I thought, Wow — the power of the mind, you know?

When I was on acid, I would see things like beams of light and I would hear sounds that sounded an awful lot like car horns.

Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.

I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.

Straight edge is everything about a personal decision to not live my life under the influence or not being aware. I pretty much don't like anything that alters my view of reality or my perception or my grasp.

Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time.

Surrealism to me is reality. Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.

Little by little things began to assume a new aspect. The sense of insecurity vanished, words came of themselves, I was no longer so painfully conscious of everything I said. I drank on and felt the great soft wave approach and embrace me; the dark hour began to fill with pictures and stealthily the noiseless procession of dreams appeared again superimposed on the dreary, grey landscape of existence.

And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again. The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.

I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.

I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.

I kinda like messing with perception a little bit. Kind of what drugs do sometimes, and drinking. I mean, you know, you mess with your mind a little bit to see life from different angles. Within reason, if you can handle it.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

Perception is transformed, and a new reality is born.

The schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill. I have been told by people who have been through the mad experience how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna from Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is difficult not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone comes back to us again.

Once the blinders are off, it's rather hard to go back to seeing things the way you used to.

And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.

Revelations: A curious record of the visions of a drug addict.

and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it's giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water.

The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.

Impressionism is simply twenty minutes into LSD.