[psykhe-delos]

“A recent article by an Oxford professor of pharmacology refers to psychedelic experiences as “distorted sensations” and suggests that the real danger of psychoactive drugs is that they may profoundly and permanently alter the brain, ending with the warning: “Blowing one's mind maybe literally just that.”

To call psychedelic experiences “distorted” is the judgement of a sober, logical and materialist thinker. However, a person under the influence of a psychedelic drug may well regard ordinary perception as severely limited, and therefore a distortion of the truth. I believe that the problem is one of language: words belong to our normal consciousness and are inadequate to describe another.

Conventional scientists cannot afford to accept the existence of other realities without undermining their own premises. In spite of having achieved so much, science has failed to explain consciousness, and cannot even accept the validity of many important aspects of human existence, such as religion, ‘life force’ or love. Only by keeping “ the doors of perception” safely closed can accepted science be kept intact. Yet science is the exploration of nature, and should not be restricted just to avoid upsetting the status quo.” - Tikal: The Continuation, Alexander Shulgin & Ann Shulgin

[urgoddess666]

[psykhe-delos]

“We had arranged in advance to use a divided-dose technique: 100 micrograms and then an hour later 200 micrograms. The LSD was pure Sandoz. 

During the initial hour with 100 micrograms we continued the work on the preprogramming and after the 200 micrograms took over, I lay down on the floor between the loudspeakers to listen to the music. The music was at a very high volume. 

Suddenly I was precipitated into what I later called the “cosmic computer.” I was merely a very small program in somebody else’s huge computer. There were tremendous energies in this computer. There were fantastic energy flows and information flows going through me. None of it made any sense. I was in total horror and panic. 

I was being programmed by other senseless programs above me and above them others. I was programming other smaller programs below me.The information that came in was meaningless. I was meaningless. This whole computer was the result of a senseless dance of certain kinds of atoms in a certain place in the universe, stimulated and pushed by organized but meaningless energies. 

I traveled through the computer as a program that floated through other programs. I moved to its extreme outer limits. Everywhere I found entities like myself who were slave programs in this huge cosmic conspiracy, this cosmic dance of energy and matter which had absolutely no meaning, no love, no human value. The computer was absolutely dispassionate, objective and terrifying. The layer of ultimate programmers on the outside of it were personifications of the devil himself and yet they too were merely programs. There was no hope or chance or choice of ever leaving this hell. I was in fantastic pain and terror, imbedded in this computer for approximately three hours planetside time, but eternally in trip time.”

-John C. Lilly, Center of the Cyclone

[psykhe-delos]

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge toward a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.

William James

[psykhe-delos]

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

[psykhe-delos]

To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of Psychedelic.

Humphry Osmond

[psykhe-delos]

LIBERATION LEADS TO LIBERATION. These are the first words of truth — not truth in quotation marks but truth in the real meaning of the word; truth which is not merely theoretical, not simply a word, but truth that can be realized in practice. The meaning behind these words may be explained as follows: By liberation is meant the liberation which is the aim of all schools, all religions, at all times. This liberation can indeed be very great. All men desire it and strive after it. But it cannot be attained without the first liberation, a lesser liberation. The great liberation is liberation from influences outside us. The lesser liberation is liberation from influences within us.

G.I. Gurdjieff

[psykhe-delos]

Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: "Nowadays there is now longer anybody who can bow low enough." This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious psychological investigation.

C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

[psykhe-delos]

A man who follows the fourth way knows quite definitely what substances he needs for his aims and he knows that these substances can be produced within the body by a month of physical suffering, by a week of emotional strain, or by a day of mental exercises--and also, _that they can be introduced into the organism from without if it is known how to do it_. And so, instead of spending a whole day in exercises like the yogi, a week in prayer like the monk, or a month in self-torture like the fakir, he simply prepares and swallows a little pill which contains all of the substances he wants and, in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required results.

G.I. Gurdjieff

[psykhe-delos]

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.” ― Simone de Beauvoir

[psykhe-delos]

We are not born into the world. We are born into something that we make into the world.

Michael Talbot

[psykhe-delos]

"Living in the world without insight into the hidden laws of nature is like not knowing the language of the country in which one was born." - Hazrat Inayat Khan

[psykhe-delos]

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

[psykhe-delos]

“Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a bound free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God. Believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God.” ― Giordano Bruno

[psykhe-delos]

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

[psykhe-delos]

“I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view. ” ― Allen Ginsberg

[psykhe-delos]

The Way of Mastery is to break all the rules—but you have to know them perfectly before you can do this; otherwise you are not in a position to transcend them.

Aleister Crowley

[psykhe-delos]

“I'm not of the school of thought that mushrooms is a medicine and is for healing. Of course, it can heal, can give you smoking cessation, can help you with dying, but that's not the purpose of psilocybin. It's a tool for exploration for novel states of consciousness. You strap on your exploration suit and you're sitting on the deck of the Enterprise and ready to go boldly where no one has gone before. That's what it’s about and that is what it's for.

Because we're approaching a crucial point for human beings—we can engineer ourselves and make a machine that has the capability to be much more, of breaking into the human levels of knowledge of information. Either we have created our next level which will make us obsolete or we get to the point where we can merge with those machines and be part machine and part organic or take the entheogens and reach the DNA set code and become the next level of humans.

Let's go in and see what we can do to become more then what we are now.” - Kilindi Iyi