exploration of consciousness Quotes

LSD...reinforc ed my sense of what was important-creat ing great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.

I brought something back from those experiences [with drugs] which made me softer, open to other ideas. And I've learned from listening to other people talk about their experiences, from listening to Bill Hicks or reading Terrence McKenna or Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. But there's always some dumb cop out there who says "We don't need another legal drug and there's psychological addiction and blah blah blah."

We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories].

I was looking for something and I wasn't sure what it was. [After experimenting with] certain funguses, I had a psychedelic experience where I looked up at the clouds and went, 'Oh!' I realized that we all have our own power, and that whatever I wanted to do, I had to make happen.

People have a right to get stoned. They have a right to think and explore their own minds. This is as intimate a part of their being as their sexuality. Any culture which mitigates that is clearly afraid of a full and fair and open dialogue about what reality is and what real human values ought to be.

An artist paints, dances, draws, writes, designs, or acts at the expanding edge of consciousness. We press into the unknown rather than the known. This makes life lovely and lively.

Inner space is the real frontier.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

The way of learning is none other than finding the lost mind.

I don't understand why I do what I do. I don't understand why I act anymore. But I do know that I love it, and that I find it really interesting and satisfying to enter into other worlds and explore different ways of thinking.

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.

... A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is like a beautiful hand with long fingers reaching out to pluck a perfect fruit, without error,for the accurate eye knows well it is growing just there on the branch, while Ulysses is the fumbling of a horned hand in darkness after a doubted jewel.

Timothy Leary and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “After midnight, all things are possible.

I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil ? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it ? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control.

I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.

The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

Drugs took me to places; they were like portals. It's kind of a cliché, but they were like portals to altered states of consciousness into ways of imagining the world, or seeing a world beyond this world, or seeing a world beyond this world that I might not have gotten to unless I discovered meditation and a very deep, intense spiritual path based on contemplation and meditation.