Psychedelic Experience Quotes

I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself. ~ Terence McKenna

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind. ~ Terence McKenna

The notes sound like they're coming from inside your mind ... It was the closest thing to a psychedelic experience I've ever had. ~ Robin Pecknold

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech. ~ Terence McKenna

The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip. ~ Terence McKenna

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree. ~ Terence McKenna

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind ~ Timothy Leary

What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. ~ Terence McKenna

All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact. ~ Terence McKenna

I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate. ~ Terence McKenna

The music was intended to replicate or even enhance the mind-altering experiences of the psychedelic drugs. They were using electric guitars, wah-wah pedals, loop music to create ostinato patterns, electric organs, synthesizers (nobody even had any idea what that was at the time, but it was cool to throw it into a conversation), electro-mechanical polyphonic tape replay keyboards, fuzz box effects, backward tapes, you name it. Anything went ~ Karl Wiggins

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen. ~ Terence McKenna

Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it. ~ Terence McKenna

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. ~ Terence McKenna

I think of going to the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going to the Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figured out what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way the Body Works itself into Nature. ~ Terence McKenna

That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth. ~ Bill Hicks

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. ~ Terence McKenna

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. ~ Terence McKenna

Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena. ~ Terence McKenna

My first psychedelic experience with Aldous still directs my life today. ~ Laura Huxley

Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort. ~ Terence McKenna

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego. ~ Terence McKenna

It's the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed. ~ Pete Townshend

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade. ~ Terence McKenna

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work. ~ Terence McKenna

Nobody can have your psychedelic experience for you; you just have to screw your courage up and raise the cup to your lips or smoke the pipe or whatever it is and face what's in there. ~ Dennis McKenna

Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality. ~ Terence McKenna

This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience. ~ Terence McKenna

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show. ~ Timothy Leary

Unless you can guide the mind inward, and take the attention beyond the comprehension of mind, and directly experience life, you never reach to the ultimate truth of life. ~ Roshan Sharma

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. ~ Terence McKenna

Without an understanding and a familiarity of the psychedelic experience you should be sued for fraud if you're practicing psychotherapy. ~ Terence McKenna

I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience because I think people should be informed of their birthright, and I feel very antsy around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. It makes me as antsy as the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience. It's a strange kind of protective denial. ~ Terence McKenna

Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience. ~ Terence McKenna

The Gaian mind is what were calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet - and without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set. ~ Terence McKenna

There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them. ~ Terence McKenna

The thing that seemed to me so important about the psychedelic experience was that it happened to me. I wasn't reading John Chrysostom or Meister Eckhart. And so I assumed that I am a very ordinary person, therefore, if it happened to me it could happen to anyone. ~ Terence McKenna

No wonder psychedelics are threatening to an authoritarian religious hierarchy. You don't need faith to benefit from a psychedelic experience, let alone a priest or even a shaman to interpret it. What you need is courage - courage to drink the brew, eat the mushroom, or whatever it is, and then to pay attention, and make of it what you will. Suddenly, the tools for direct contact with the transcendent other (whether you call it God or something else) is taken from the hands of an anointed elite and given to the individual seeker. ~ Dennis McKenna

What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet. ~ Terence McKenna

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience. ~ Terence McKenna

The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience. ~ Terence McKenna

It's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it. ~ Terence McKenna

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. ~ Terence McKenna

Was it possible that a single psychedelic experience - something that turned on nothing more than the ingestion of a pill or square of blotter paper - could put a big dent in such a worldview? Shift how one thought about mortality? Actually change one's mind in enduring ways? The idea took hold of me. It was a little like being shown a door in a familiar room - the room of your own mind - that you had somehow never noticed before and being told by people you trusted (scientists!) that a whole other way of thinking - of being! - lay waiting on the other side. All you had to do was turn the knob and enter. Who wouldn't be curious? I might not have been looking to change my life, but the idea of learning something new about it, and of shining a fresh light on this old world, began to occupy my thoughts. Maybe there was something missing from my life, something I just hadn't named. ~ Michael Pollan

Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. ~ John Lennon

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. ~ Terence McKenna

We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous. ~ Terence McKenna

Don't ever let your day end in "could haves" and "should haves." Life is meant to be one experience after another. Say yes to everything that is good for you. ~ Toni Sorenson

Since - in my belief system - we each get only one go-round here on planet Earth, it is the task of the writer to interpret, examine, and reflect on the specifics of their one and only life experience. ~ Merrill Markoe

Innocence to experience. Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. ~ Stephen King

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions. ~ Albert Einstein

The body is a field of ideas and it is a field of interpretations and when you change your experience of your own identity to a spiritual being, the body expresses the physical manifestation of that spiritual reality. ~ Deepak Chopra

Those of us who are working with these strange substances trying to find the best way of using them, both in the treatment of illnesses and for the exploration of the human mind, need men like Bishop to come forward and explain that our purposes are serious and good, to emphasize that this is not a diversion, an amusement or an attempt to relieve people of their spare cash.

-Robert Dickins ~ Cameron Adams

The secret of creativity is then to place yourself in situations where you've got to be creative, but this is done only when one doesn't know in advance that one will have to be creative. This, in turn, is so because we underestimate our creative resources; quite properly, we cannot believe in our creativity until we experience it; and since we thus necessarily underestimate our creative resources we do not consciously engage upon tasks which we know require such resources; hence the only way in which we can bring our creative resources into play is by similarly underestimating the difficulty of a task. ~ Albert O. Hirschman

But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion ~ Mitch Albom

[I] had very high hopes for Israel and it's lived up to and surpassed what I had in mind ... I've had such an eye-opening experience - a really nice glimpse into the culture and lives of Israelis and the Jewish people. ~ Omar Benson Miller

Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future. ~ George Herbert Mead

In my conscious life, though, I cannot honestly say I feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud to be black and ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I understand how those words got into the racial discourse, but I can't sign up to them. I'm not proud to be female either. I am not even proud to be human - I only love to be so. As I love to be female and I love to be black, and I love that I had a white father. It ~ Zadie Smith

The longer the waiting, the longer the wondering. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A new Member requires the experience of his first session in the House to teach him how to hang up his overcoat and take his seat in a manner befitting a gentlemen. ~ John A. Macdonald

To become balanced, meditate on the heart center in the center of the chest. There you will experience happiness, refinement, sensitivity, beauty, laughter. ~ Frederick Lenz

(As your experience about writing accrues) you learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had. ~ James Baldwin

Have you noticed how children never bypass a puddle of water, but jump, splash, and slosh right through it? That's because they know an important truth: Life was meant to be lived; puddles were meant to be experienced. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting.
Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu ... ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrikes. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: 'My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.' That is the tone of innocence. ~ Whittaker Chambers

Followers of Jesus stake their claim on the firm belief that God will one day heal the planet of pain and death. Until that day arrives, the case against God must rely on incomplete evidence. We cannot really reconcile our pain-wracked world with a loving God because what we experience now is not the same as what God intends. Jesus himself prayed that God's will "be done, on earth as it is in heaven," a prayer that will not be fully answered until evil and suffering are finally defeated. ~ Philip Yancey

Time is lost when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I want to be the one who makes stories, I want to hurt the way I get hurt, I want to experience how does it feel to be a cheater, a liar, a betrayer, to come up with quick stories to hide the faults, to know that I've hurt someone still blame the person for being mad but damn! I turn out to be the loyal one all the time who makes all the efforts to continue the relationship and stay honest and it hurts as fuck! ~ Himmilicious

Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished - only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina. ~ William L. Shirer

Our culture encourages women to nurture men, making it predictable that many experience a seductive empathy for abusive men, as well as the misguided hope that love can obliterate an ugly past. ~ Leslie Morgan Steiner

You never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. ~ Marilynne Robinson

If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. ~ C.S. Lewis

I want to experience everything heaven offers, but most of all, I want to hear those never-ending songs again. ~ Don Piper

Based on my experience as a prosecutor in Miami, illegal immigration is one of the most critical issues facing this country. As a prosecutor, I felt the burden of it. I think what's important ... is for the state and the federal government and for local governments to work together to do everything possible to control illegal immigration in a comprehensive way. ~ Janet Reno

The problem is, hope is the thing that can't be reined in by rules or pinned down by bitter experience. It's a blessing and curse. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

That experience is the parent of wisdom is an adage the truth of which is recognized by the wisest as well as the simplest of mankind. ~ Alexander Hamilton

I love doing animation - mainly because you get to over-act. They're always saying "more," "louder," "bigger," "huger" and you just turn it lose. Plus, doing animation voiceovers, I have learned so much, and it's always good in your career to discover something you didn't know, and to learn to do things differently. So it's a fascinating experience. ~ David McCallum

Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satisfied. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for the children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and the torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony. Their prison terms were so long that no one even thought of the time when he would go out into freedom. Men with exceptional Intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

Life is not about receiving. It is about giving, knowing that someone might learn, understand or grow that little bit from the experience ~ Peter Ellis

Here in your heart, deep in your soul, resides the universe's collective wisdom, waiting for expression through your life's experience. ~ Robbie Vorhaus

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. ~ Tom Robbins

Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time ~ Thomas S. Kuhn

If the multiverse turns out to be the best explanation of the fundamental physical constants, it would not be the first time we have been flabbergasted by worlds beyond our noses. Our ancestors had to swallow the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, eight other planets, a hundred billion stars in our galaxy (many with planets), and a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. If reason contradicts intuition once again, so much the worse for intuition. Another advocate of the multiverse, Brian Greene, reminds us:
"From a quaint, small, earth-centered universe to one filled with billions of galaxies, the journey has been both thrilling and humbling. We've been compelled to relinquish sacred belief in our own centrality, but with such cosmic demotion we've demonstrated the capacity of the human intellect to reach far beyond the confines of ordinary experience to reveal extraordinary truth. ~ Steven Pinker

Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos. ~ Kenneth Tynan

Mutual defensiveness moves parents and children away from intersubjective experience and joint influence and into a desire to gain control of the situation. To ~ Daniel A. Hughes

People won't see Imagination in something that doesn't relate to their experience because of their own mental limitations. I want people to escape the expected and ordinary, to escape the regular expectations of a story, and truly step into a different world of literature. ~ Lionel Suggs

Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive. Traditional development and delivery frameworks such as waterfall are often ineffective. In contrast, Scrum is a value-driven agile approach which incorporates adjustments based on regular and repeated customer and stakeholder feedback. And Scrum's built-in rapid response to change leads to substantial benefits such as fast time-to-market, higher satisfaction, and continuous improvement - which supports innovation and drives competitive advantage. ~ Scott M. Graffius

Using technology, we have redefined ourselves in such a way that our immediate surroundings and relationships, our immediate sensory perceptions of the world, are much diminished in relevance. We have trained ourselves not to be present. We have extended our bodies, created enhanced selves that might be called our "techno-selves." Our techno-selves are both bigger and smaller than our former selves. Bigger in that we have tremendous powers to communicate with the invisible world. Smaller in that we have sacrificed some of our contact and experience with the visible, immediate world. We have marginalized our direct sensory experience. ~ Alan Lightman

Once a person gains experience and a good reputation, it takes less and less money to create bigger and bigger investments. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

I have found in my years of work that getting stuck is a rather ubiquitous theme and shows itself in a multitude of ways, affecting and even arresting personal development, intellectual discovery, scientific progress and political and religious innovation. It is quite clear and evident that humans get stuck, and stubbornly so, but can souls? From years of experience, I can say that indeed our aerial selves, composed of unique personalities and free will can and have lost their way at times. ~ Stephen Poplin

Nat realised they had a lot of talking to do, but she did question Isabella's timing. In her experience, matters of the heart should not be discussed when one party had a silicone cock strapped to their waist while the other's mouth went dry at the thought of it entering her. ~ Harper Bliss

She's efficient and well liked, but keeps to herself. Quiet. Which is a rare and commendable female trait, in my experience. She works harder than the other two clerks, but gets paid less. ~ Kerrigan Byrne