In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.
What we know of the world comes to us primarily through vision. Our eyes, however, are sensitive only to that segment of the spectrum located between red and violet; the remaining 95 percent of all existing light (cosmic, infrared, ultraviolet, gammas, and X-rays) we cannot see. This means that we only perceive 5 percent of the “real” world.
We all live in two realities: one of seeming fixity, with institutions, dogmas, rules of punctuation, and routines, the calendared and clockwise world of all-but-futile round and round; and one of whirling and flying electrons, dreams, and possibilities, behind the clock.
After all, what is reality anyway? It’s nothing but a collective hunch.
The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it.
I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.
I was into pain reduction and mind expansion, but what I’ve ended up with is pain expansion and mind reduction.
“Turn on” meant . . . become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them; drugs were one way to accomplish this end. “Tune in” meant interact harmoniously with the world around you, . . . express your new internal perspectives. “Drop out” suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. . . . Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean, “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.”
The government could take away all the drugs in the world, and people would spin around on their lawn until they fell down and saw God.
Nonordinary experiences are vital to us because they are expressions of our unconscious minds, and the integration of conscious and unconscious experience is the key to life, health, spiritual development, and fullest use of our nervous systems. By instilling fear and guilt about altered states of consciousness into our children, we force this drive underground, guaranteeing that it will be expressed in antisocial ways.
If you don’t believe drugs have done good things, then burn all your records, tapes, and CDs, because every one of those artists who have made brilliant music and enhanced your lives? Rrrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so high they let Ringo sing a few songs.
If God dropped acid, would he see people?
Confronted with another human being who is in pain, the chasing after altered states of consciousness for their own sake is simply unconscionable. And here the direction appears: the search for a higher consciousness must have as its aim the development of conscience.
The best mind-altering drug is truth.
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
We are only the beginning. I am only a beginner. I was successful in digging up buried monuments from the substrata of the mind. But where I have discovered a few temples, others may discover a continent.
