psychedelic culture Quotes

'Psychedelic' means mind-expanding.

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.

I've never met anybody who's had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the Sixties, and I've never met anybody who had any problem. I've had bad trips, but I've had bad trips in real life. I've had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant; I don't have to take anything.

It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are in the presence of the mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide.

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."

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.

What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

There's not enough psychedelic stuff on TV. I want the world to be a bit weirder than it is. I hate reality, so I hate reality TV. But I love Columbo.

I've tried everything. I can say to you with confidence, I know a fair amount about LSD. I've never been a social user of any of these things, but my curiosity has carried me into a lot of interesting areas.

The western mind, because of it's unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.

I know LSD; I don't need to take it anymore. Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley.

I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn't mushroom and envelope the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive.

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.

Milla Jovovich introduced me to [anthropologist and author of the Don Juan series of books involving shamanic peyote rituals] Carlos Castaneda because I was all into the hallucinogens for a minute.

We were very fortunate to have a a little time in history when LSD was still legal and were able to experiment with drugs just like we were doing with music.

My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.

I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful. . . . This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.

The Sixties, of course, was the worst time in the world to try and bring up a child. They were exposed to all these crazy things going on.

Inevitably out of the psychedelic experience emerges not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism, that's the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process.

Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.

I think it's obvious that the psychedelics are demonized and illegalized by our society because somewhere in our society are controlling minds that realize that these substances have the potential, have the power to unpick the controlling hierarchy.

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

I think the real test of psychedelics is what you do with them when you're not on them, what kind of culture you build, what kind of art, what kind of technologies... What's lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the rest of life, the atmosphere, the ecosystem, the past, our children's future. If we were feeling those things we would not be practicing culture as we are.

The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it.

The difference between psychedelia and digitalia ages will seem like a smooth blending in years to come and will be a mere blip on the screen.