Quotes About Psychedelics

#1. Do I need to ease up on the psychedelics, or did LP just recall one of her past lives unprompted at the most crucial juncture ever?

Lauren Kate

#2. Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.

Terence McKenna

#3. I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.

Terence McKenna

#4. The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.

Terence McKenna

#5. The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.

Terence McKenna

#6. And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.

Terence McKenna

#7. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelics drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D.

Timothy Leary

#8. And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.

Terence McKenna

#9. 'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.

Terence McKenna

#10. Terence McKenna pointed out that the profundity of [halluncinogenic inebriation] and its potential for a positive feedback into the process of reorganizing the personality should have long ago made psychedelics an indispensable tool for psychotherapy.

Rick Doblin

#11. If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. -Andy Letcher

Cameron Adams

#12. There is a coming home. A home base. Psychedelics help you reconnect with home.

Ann Shulgin

#13. When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so-called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.

Stanislav Grof

#14. Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.

Terence McKenna

#15. Love is the most transformative medicine For Love slowly transforms you Into what psychedelics only get you to glimpse.

Ram Dass

#16. We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.

Terence McKenna

#17. What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.

Terence McKenna

#18. As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions.

Stanislav Grof

#19. So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That's why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.

Terence McKenna

#20. Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what's happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.

Terence McKenna

#21. Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness.

Stanislav Grof

#22. This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear below, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug.

Sam Harris

#23. Psychedelics helped me to escape.. albeit momentarily.. from the prison of my mind. It over-rode the habit patterns of thought and I was able to taste innocence again. Looking at sensations freshly without the conceptual overly was very profound.

Ram Dass

#24. Psychedelics can carry you farther and faster than most people care to go. Once you get to psychedelics, it's no longer a matter of seeking the answer, you have found the answer. Now the issue changes dramatically, you must face the answer.

Terence McKenna

#25. It became much more complicated politically to work with psychedelics because of the unsupervised experimentation with psychedelics, particularly among young people.

Stanislav Grof

#26. Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.

Terence McKenna

#27. I'm not an advocate of drugs. I'm an advocate of psychedelics.

Terence McKenna

#28. I explored alternate states of consciousness at one period of my life through psychedelics, as was the fashion with all my friends.

Frederick Lenz

#29. The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture.

Ralph Metzner

#30. It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas ... And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.

Terence McKenna

#31. Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair.

Terence McKenna

#32. The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.

Terence McKenna

#33. I don't really advocate for psychedelics. I don't really think anybody needs to do them, or has to do them. For me, they were the only way I could have cracked open my own spirit in a way.

Daniel Pinchbeck

#34. The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.

Terence McKenna

#35. The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.

Terence McKenna

#36. If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it's an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.

Terence McKenna

#37. There are a lot of people for whom psychedelics have been really beneficial. But I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Some are just not ready but society would benefit from letting people who are ready for psychedelics have legal acces to them.

Kary Mullis

#38. The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.

Terence McKenna

#39. There are people who can start having very powerful experiences without taking psychedelics. It can happen against their will. This is a universal phenomenon.

Stanislav Grof

#40. Many of us would never have tried psychedelics if it weren't for Leary's popularizing them.

Rick Strassman

#41. If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.

Terence McKenna

#42. And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.

Terence McKenna

#43. And when you start using a lot of psychedelics, and particularly a lot of the natural psychedelics, my experience has been that I come in contact with some very old entities. And these entities have been around for a while, at least since humans first started experimenting with these plants.

D. M. Turner

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

Terence McKenna

#45. You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.

Terence McKenna

#46. I've found psychedelics to be keys to worlds that have always existed, that have to be talked about.

Ken Kesey

#47. Whether or not LSD research and therapy will return to society, the discoveries that psychedelics made possible have revolutionary implications for our understanding of the psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality.

Stanislav Grof

#48. Drugs shouldn't be used for recreation although they can be, but ultimately the point of psychedelics is to put you in touch with the powers of the universe.

Ray Manzarek

#49. The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.

Terence McKenna

#50. We are all dying and we all have some anxiety about it. And so people are more scared of dying than they are of drugs. If we can show that people who are facing death can be assisted with psychedelics that's a powerful message.

Rick Doblin

#51. 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.

Graham Hancock

#52. Our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on. The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.

Terence McKenna

#53. With the use of psychedelics, it was all based around the Tibetan Book of the Dead, using them to experience enlightenment.

Frederick Lenz

#54. The power of psychedelics ... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.

Sam Harris

#55. The ceremonial and religious uses of psychedelics are much older than their recreational uses and abuses. For most of their history, they have been mysterious, dangerous substances and must be treated respectfully.

Humphry Osmond

#56. The marijuana paradox - although associated with increased
appetite and calorie consumption, regular use of cannabis,
protects against diabetes and obesity. How it manages to do so, however, is still anybody's guess!

The Fitness Doc

#57. People tend to link "sex and drugs" because both are condemned by society. Nevertheless, throughout the ages human beings have continually searched for more ecstasy, more sexual satisfaction, for solutions to their sexual problems, and for aphrodisiacs.

Rick Doblin

#58. I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it.

Harry Nilsson

#59. It should come as no surprise to readers of the MAPS Bulletin that psychedelic plants are used as a sacrament by many native cultures all over the world. It may not be so obvious that these same plants are often incorporated into the coming-of-age ceremonies of these various societies.

Rick Doblin

#60. We were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.

Aldous Huxley

#61. These days, when I knock on the doors of the Tryptamine Palace, I am no longer greeted with unconditional love, but instead, I am reminded of the responsibility that comes with ultimate knowledge: an undeniable responsibility to myself, to my tribe, to my species, to my planet.

James Oroc

#62. It's a remarkable experience to ask yourself identity-crisis questions from a comic book movie with a mostly straight face, but I don't recommend it.

Jonathan Talat Phillips

#63. It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.

Aldous Huxley

#64. 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

#65. My brief survey of stimulant aphrodisiacs would be incomplete were I to fail to include that most famous love drug of all time, chocolate or cacao, from the seeds of Theobroma cacao.

Rick Doblin

#66. Dan explains the trip's itinerary, which includes trekking through the jungle, boating down the Amazon River, and to my surprise, three Ayahuasca ceremonies.

Michael Sanders

#67. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud.

Hunter S. Thompson

#68. 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

#69. I sit up and stare with eyes closed, perceiving the infinity of this dimension, so grateful to experience this, comfortable with the idea of this journey either ending shortly or continuing forever.

Michael Sanders

#70. Hmm. I think love is about loving all things, to treat each and every thing and every one as a sovereign being that's free to make its own choices.

Michael Sanders

#71. LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.

Timothy Leary

#72. I feel part of the environment, not separate from it, as though I'm at home rather than visiting - as though I'm tapped into some eternal omnipresence beyond the transient physical forms.

Michael Sanders