Behavior, Personality

A psychedelic is the solvent which dissolves the vigorous stereotypes of egocentric
behavior.

All behavior involves learned games but only that rare Westerner we call “mystic” or
who has had a visionary experience sees clearly the game structure of behavior.

Any external or social action, unless it’s based on expanded consciousness is a robot
behavior.

Change in behavior can occur with dramatic spontaneity once the game structure of
behavior is seen. The visionary experience is the key to behavior change.

Ego death is not permanent, but the break-through to a broader awareness generally
begins the process of transformation of the personality.

Extremely valuable insights may enable the subject to revise his thinking and self-image
and to alter his behavior in desirable ways.

If the behavior of an organism is intelligible only in relation to its environment,
intelligent behavior implies an intelligent environment. The galaxy is intelligent.

In taking LSD with someone, you are relinquishing all of your personality defenses and
opening yourself up in a very vulnerable way.

It is easier to change behavior if you understand the learned-game nature of behavior.
This sort of insight can be brought about by consciousness-expanding drugs.

LSD activates emotionally important material in different areas and on various levels of
the personality.

LSD can produce dramatic changes in personality leading to unprecedented peace, sanity
and happiness.

LSD enables us to penetrate deeply and bring about changes in personality formerly
thought impossible.

Modern man no longer regards nature as being in any sense divine and feels perfectly
free to behave towards her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.

Old destructive patterns of behavior may suddenly be abandoned after an overpowering
emotional experience. The learning of new attitudes and techniques may become easier.

Organism/environment is a unified pattern of behavior. (You are part of your
environment, not separate from it.)

Psychedelic drugs enable the individual to cultivate those creative and spiritual facets of
his personality that so often remain unexplored.

The current popular method of behavior change is psychotherapy, which defines
confusion and inefficiency in game playing as illness.

The most important rule is that the tripper decides what behavior change is desired.
Nobody else has the right to decide for him.

The organism, rather than acquiring behavior from the environment, hooks up an innate
behavior pattern to the environment.

The personality is touched to its core and is led into provinces of psychic life otherwise
unexplored. Light is shed on boundaries otherwise dark and unrevealed.

The psychedelic peak experience is certainly an important factor mediating deep
personality transformation.

There are experiential-spiritual as well as secular-behavioral potentialities of the nervous
system.

There is a sort of cycle in which one’s personality is taken apart and then put together
again, in what one hopes is a more intelligent fashion.

These drugs are useful in producing valuable personality changes in individuals with
serious personality disorders.

These drugs produce ecstatic states from which new learning, a shift in values, or
subsequent behavior change purportedly ensue.

These experiences changed my assumptions about how and why we become who we are,
and why we behave the way we do.

This profound experience may constitute a new and powerful means for eliciting
profound therapeutic changes and for facilitating reconstructuring of the personality.

Those who have experienced most keenly their union with God are intensely real and
unique personalities.

To the biological, physical and psychological sciences, man is a pattern of behavior in a
field.

We go through torments to protect our personality; once we see through the illusion, we
laugh.

At present, Christianity tends to demand blind faith, rote words and mechanical behavior.
This leaves people empty and unfulfilled. But the cosmic calling we humans have will
not be denied forever, despite the ignorance of religious institutions.

Certain drugs can produce in otherwise normal individuals deep mystical and religious
states. Matrices for such experiences exist in the unconscious as a normal constituent of
the human personality.

Cultural institutions encourage the delusion that the games of life are inevitable givens
involving natural laws of behavior. These fixed delusions tend to rigidify behavior
patterns.

Expecting scientific descriptions to discover the pattern to which nature conforms is
really assuming that law or verbal formulations precedes physical behavior. (Nature was
around long before man and his word games.)

Oftentimes, those who underwent psychedelic therapy reported dramatic personality
changes involving not only the relief of neurotic symptoms but a wholesale revamping of
value systems, religious and philosophical beliefs, and basic lifestyle.

Our society and our intellectuals and our scientists externalize the psychology of
behaviorism. Neurology today is poking at the brains of other people. You have to
experience what you are symbolizing.

Psychedelic drugs offer new perspectives on every aspect of human thinking, human
behavior, human searching. There is no issue in psychology, physics, biology and
theology which cannot make use of these microscopes of consciousness.

Psychedelic drugs produces reactions which are not conventional. Ecstatic behaviors are
not conventional and “normal” and it follows that they must be abnormal, psychotic,
crazy.

Psychologically, the psychedelics promised easier access to repressed unconscious
materials, shortcutting the years and prohibitive expense of psychoanalysis. In behavior
change, they held the promise of reducing the recidivism of paroled prisoners.

Religious experience is the most profound and powerful aspect of the human personality
and is the aspect most capable of bringing out the compassionate and creative qualities of
the human spirit.

Since LSD is a non-specific amplifier of mental processes, the LSD phenomena cover an
extremely broad range, extending potentially to all aspects of human experience and
behavior.

The best model for understanding the changes in behavior that occur after psychedelic
drug use is the changes in one’s views of self and world after a voyage to a strange
country.

These states of mind can be extremely beneficial, often leading to physical and emotional
healing, profound insights, creative activity and permanent personality changes for the
better.

Those individuals who have faced death and rebirth in their sessions show specific
changes in their perception of themselves and the world, in their hierarchies of values,
general behavior, and overall world-view.

He who controls the mind-changing chemicals controls consciousness. He who controls
the chemical can twist your mind, can alter your personality, can change you and your
concept of the world. (No one has the right to control your consciousness and experiences
by threatening you with jail. Your life belongs to you.)

How can we Westerners see that our own potentials are much greater than the social-hive
games in which we are so blindly trapped? Once the game structure of behavior is seen,
change in behavior can occur with dramatic spontaneity. The visionary, brain-change,
consciousness-altering experience is the key to behavior change.

If properly handled, a psychedelic crisis has great positive potential and can result in a
profound personality transformation. Conversely, an insensitive and ignorant approach
can cause psychological damage and lead to chronic psychotic states and years of
psychiatric hospitalization.

If we perceive this has some sort of deep significance and we do something about it, then
it may be very, very important in changing our lives, changing our mode of
consciousness, perceiving that there are other ways of looking at the world than the
ordinary utilitarian manner and it may also result in significant changes of behavior.

It is not uncommon for subjects reporting evolutionary experiences to manifest a detailed
knowledge of the animals with whom they have identified—of their physical
characteristics, habits and behavior patterns—that far exceeds their education in the
natural sciences.

Review of psychedelic literature shows that favorable results have been reported in a
wide variety of clinical problems, including depressions, phobias and other types of
psychoneuroses, psychosomatic diseases, character disorders, sexual perversions,
criminal behavior, alcoholism, narcotic drug addiction, and even psychoses.

Some candidates, resisting the effects of the drug out of fear that their personalities or
their “selves” are being destroyed, are inclined to put up defensive barriers to nullify the
drug’s action. The subject should be aware that what is being destroyed is not his true
“self,” but the abstract formulation of values and concepts society has imposed upon him.

The aim of the psychiatrist is to teach the (statistically) abnormal to adjust themselves to
the behavior of the (statistically) normal. The aim of the educator in spiritual insight is to
teach the (statistically) normal that they are in fact insane and should do something about
it. (That was Aldous Huxley.)

The entire range of pleasurable experiences has gone unstudied, unlabeled, undefined.
You will not find the word “fun” in the index of most psychology texts. Indeed, until the
psychedelic movement, unconditioned behavior and unconditioned experience were
considered ipso facto schizophrenic.

The language of science is increasingly a language of process, a description of relations
rather than of things. The world so described is a world of actions rather than agents,
verbs rather than nouns, going against the common-sense idea that an action is the
behavior of some thing, some entity of “stuff.”

The value, apart from their intrinsic value, so to say the ethical, sociological and spiritual
value of the visionary experience, is that if it is well used, it can result in a significant and
important change in the mode of consciousness and perhaps also in a change in behavior
or for the good.

There exists in all human beings an urge to self-transcendence, a wish to escape from the
prison of personality, a longing to become something other and greater than the all-too-
familiar Me. The religious man has attributed this universal urge to the workings of an
innate and deep-seated yearning for the divine.

These realities are an intrinsic part of the human personality that cannot be repressed and
denied without serious damage to the quality of human life. For the full expression of
human nature, they must be recognized, acknowledged and explored, and in this
exploration, the traditional depictions of the afterlife can be our guides.

We are going to have to develop, as chemistry has developed, a language that will pay
respect to the fact that our experience, our behavior, our social forms are flowing all the
time and if your language isn’t equipped to change and flow with them, then you are in
trouble, you’re hooked. You’re drugged by the educational system.

When the shell of the ego has been cracked and there begins to be a consciousness of the
subliminal and psychological otherness underlying personality, it sometimes happens that
we catch a glimpse, fleeting but apocalypic, of that Othernesss, which is the Ground of all
being.

Both Freud and Skinner explained creative processes in terms of their deviance from
“normality” rather than as positive, healthy processes to be encouraged and developed. It
is not surprising that most American psychiatrists and psychologists are baffled by the
reports of LSD activity, puzzled by the subjective reports of LSD users, and skeptical
about the value of LSD in man’s efforts to understand, describe and change his behavior.

Exploration of the potential of these substances for the study of schizophrenia, for
didactic purposes, for a deeper understanding of art and religion, for personality
diagnostics and the therapy of emotional disorders and for altering the experience of
dying has been my major professional interest throughout these years and has consumed
most of the time I have spent in psychiatric research. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

I do not feel that any church known to me is seeking the truth. Each is certain it has the
truth. They do not want to help me find the truth; the only want me to worship that which
they have already decided is the truth. They are not interested in my soul, except to
surrender it to some concept they have. They are more interested in making me behave in
a certain pattern which they have decided is best for me.

If mystical experiences are integrated into the personality, they are highly therapeutic.
Single-state scholars and theoreticians are hard-pressed to explain this therapeutic value.
Denial is easier. But if an enlarged map of reality includes altered states of consciousness,
then experiencing such states logically leads to a fuller view of reality, and therapists tell
us that a fuller view of reality is therapeutic.

LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human
nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have
not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry.
They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality
transformation.

No government has the right to interfere with what happens inside someone’s body or
nervous system. Anything we do behaviorally in public to hurt anybody else in any way,
that is a crime. What we do inside our bodies with our nervous systems or anything that
we say in the way of a lecture or writing cannot be punished, as per the First Amendment
to the Constitution. (Tell that to our crooked, moronic, right-wing, fascist politicians.)

Specialists from various disciplines have asked me for specific details of my
observations, because they felt that these data may have important implications for such
diverse areas as personality theory, psychology of religion, psychotherapy, genetics,
psychology and psychopathology of art, anthropology, the study of mythology,
education, psychosomatic medicine and obstetric practice. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

The last thing an institution of education wants to allow you to do is expand your
consciousness, to use the untapped potential in your head, to experience directly. They
don’t want you to take life seriously, they want you to take their game seriously.
Education, dear students, is anesthetic, a narcotic procedure which is very likely to blunt
your sensitivity and to immobilize your brain and your behavior for the rest of your lives.

The opportunity to vividly experience specific memories from different periods of one’s
life makes it possible to see their interrelations and discover chains of unconscious
neurotic patterns underlying specific emotional problems. This can be an important
transforming experience that results in profound changes in the personality structure,
emotional dynamics, and behavior of the individual.

With the advent of modern science, the notion of acceptable reality was narrowed to
include only those aspects of existence that are material, tangible, and measurable.
Spirituality in any form was exiled from the modern scientific worldview. Western
cultures adopted a restricted and rigid interpretation of what is “normal” in human
experience and behavior and rarely accepted those who sought to go beyond these limits.

Systematic study of non-ordinary states has shown me, beyond any doubt, that the
traditional understanding of the human personality, limited to postnatal biography and to
the Freudian individual unconscious, is painfully narrow and superficial. To account for
all the extraordinary new observations, it became necessary to create a radically
expanded model of the human psyche and a new way of thinking about mental health and
disease.

Consciousness will be freed from games which comprise personality.
Conversion or startling change in behavior patterns can occur.
In order to change behavior, it is necessary to change your inner experience.
It is not an organism in an environment, but a unified field or process, a single behavior.
Our own bodies are functions or behaviors of the whole external world.
Play behavior increases.
Sexual experiences and behavior can be deeply influenced by the LSD experience.
The ego is the principle stumbling block to favorable changes in personality.
The scientific approach views changed behavior negatively.
We each have an inner life of consciousness and an outer life of behavior.
You wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.

He said that a few LSD sessions had given him more insight into his personality than the
whole of four years in analysis.

I had been able to see through and let go of many constricting patterns of thought and
behavior that previously seemed automatic and beyond conscious control.

I saw people as gross distortions of themselves. The personality and intentions seemed to
be boldly written on his features and reflected in his mannerisms.

What are ordinarily dismissed as irrelevant details of speech, behavior, appearance and
form seemed in some indefinable way to be highly significant.

When the ego-personality was ripped away completely, what was left was “purest love”
and a sense of oneness with all living creatures.

You could drop down into your unconscious to see the pillars and the roots of the tree
which is your personality.

Seemingly, some element of my former personality had died, but some other part that
was far more vital had been reborn. Whatever it was that wanted to come to life was
important, but I didn’t yet know how or why.

During this long journey I saw recurrent images of mandala-like forms. Eventually I saw
life arise on this planet, and humans evolve, and civilization develop to a point where a
person with my Name/Address personality sat in a room and took some LSD and saw the
evolution of the universe.

I “saw”, though that is not quite the word, the evolution of the universe. I felt the various
stages of cosmic evolution, inventoried a thousand planets, participated in the molecular
dance of life. Subjectively, I lived and experienced 10 billion years, feeling it second by
second. My Name/Address personality played no part in the pure consciousness with
which I observed everything.

I felt that I had made a great discovery or as if another personality had been born.

a colorful visionary adventure resulting in a profound spiritual opening and personality
transformation

a vivid sensation of the mutual interdependence of his own behavior and the behavior of
his environment, so that the two seem to become one—the behavior of a unified field

experiencing consciousness freed from the cardboard social games that comprise
“personality”

feels the encounter with Being has led to the erasure of behavior patterns blocking his
development

holy fools who indulge in a behavior incompatible with established morality (The real
fools are those who are hung-up on “established morality”.)

how to break out of personality into new realms of consciousness and how to avoid the
involuntary limiting process of the ego

how to explain in scientific terms the mechanism that allows psychedelics to change
behavior

LSD a very powerful behavior-changing agent with immense potential for therapy if used
properly

may gain a new perspective on himself or gain an important insight into his defenses
which results in a change of behavior

new and powerful mechanisms of healing and personality transformation that are now
available in traditional psychiatry and psychotherapy

realized for the first time that during all the years of his life he had been behaving “like a
person who had no mind”

socialization, getting each new recruit to the human race to behave and experience in
substantially the same way

the opening of areas of religious and spiritual experience that seem to be an intrinsic part
of the human personality and are independent of the individual’s cultural and religious
background

the potentials of the drug experience for revealing new levels of consciousness and
bringing about changes in personality and behavior faster and more effectively than any
other method known to us

the psychological implications of the psychedelic experience, the accelerated personality
change, the rapid learning, the sudden life changes so regularly reported by psychedelic
researchers

the opening of spiritual areas of the unconscious that are intrinsic parts of the structure of
human personality and are independent of the individual’s racial, cultural or religious
background (One can refer to them as archetypal, belonging to the collective unconscious
which Jung wrote about.)

a dramatic emotional healing and a profound personality transformation
a profound and lasting personality change
an ecstatic rebirth, the resurrection of a new personality
beyond game problems of personality, role and professional status
bring about major personality transformation
can experience a wide spectrum of extreme emotions and behave in most unusual ways
changes in values and beliefs, personality and behavior
confusing personality or ego with the actual human organism
destruction of the personality-structure and the birth of a new self
dramatic changes in the personality structure
extensions of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes
giving the subject a truer insight into his personality
instant personality-change
magical personality transformations
operating from a higher unifying center of personality
re-entry, coming back down, a wiser more peaceful personality
that human personality is multidimensional, that we exist in many realities at once
the experience of our own existence as living organisms rather than as personalities
the impact of physical space on our behavior
the learning of new attitudes, new feelings and new behavior
the little self, the ego-personality
the loss of personality the only true life
the power of inner religious experience to mediate wholesome personality change
the power of these drugs to change behavior
the power to change and shape personality at a deep level
the robotic behavior of the “normal” “well-adjusted” person
to a new, more balanced personality level
to break out of personality and into new realms of consciousness
unmasking the illusion of the personality