Direct, Straight

A belief is an opinion about the nature of reality based on a specific form of upbringing,
indoctrination, or reading of religious literature; it lacks direct experiential validation.

“Authoritative” articles appeared authored by those who had had no direct experience
with the drug.

Because of the unique nature of the psychedelic state it is impossible to reach a real
understanding of its quality and dimensions unless one directly experiences it.

Childhood is not thought-ful but wonder-ful. Angels know truth and beauty directly,
intuitively, not through the mediation of ideas and therefore early childhood is angelic.

Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union and union can be
achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego.

Direct perception of unity is the very heart of mystic experience, accompanied by
powerful feelings of joy.

Direct spiritual experiences are perfectly compatible with the mystical branches of the
great religions.

In every age, men have struggled to perceive God directly rather than as a tenuously
grasped abstraction.

In order to perceive reality directly, one must learn how to abandon the intellect and
disengage oneself from the thoughts it produces incessantly.

In this state of cosmic unity, we feel that we have direct, immediate and unlimited access
to knowledge and wisdom of universal significance.

Insightful knowledge or illumination about being or existence in general that is felt at an
intuitive, nonrational level and gained by direct experience.

Intuition is the part of you that has hunches and is able to discover direct knowledge or
understanding without rational thought.

Liberating ourselves from the tyranny of words, conditioned reflexes and social
conventions, we establish direct, unmediated contact with experience.

LSD activates deep repositories of unconscious material and brings their content to the
surface, making it available for direct experience.

LSD will change biochemical balances inside our nervous system and you can experience
directly some of the things which we externally view through the lens of the microscope.

Mystics emphasize the direct experience of cosmic consciousness that goes beyond the
scientific approach.

One of the top overriding values of these altered states is that they bestow direct
experience of phenomena usually apprehended only in abstraction.

Psychedelic drugs allow us to study—directly, experientially, empirically-the problems
which have perplexed philosophers for millennia.

The development and expansion of a direct emotional experience of reality, unobstructed
by words and concepts would be of evolutionary significance.

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive
thought, but susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being.

The end of human life is not action but contemplation or the direct and unitive awareness
of God.

The existence of the immanent and transcendent divine is not a matter of unfounded
belief but a fact based on direct experience.

The learned perceptions disappear and the structure of the world disintegrates into direct
wave phenomena.

The subject in this state feels that he has access to direct insightful knowledge and
wisdom about matters of fundamental and universal significance.

The time will come within a century when an educated man will be he who knows who
he is and where he came from, knows on the basis of direct psychedelic experience.

There can be direct, aesthetic acquaintance with the world as beauty or with the world’s
unity.

These drugs provide their users with direct intimations of attractive alternative realities
which might normally never be encountered.

This is what Jesus taught and demonstrated—cosmic consciousness, the direct experience
of divinity dwelling in us and all things.

To experience directly, we must transcend the verbal-symbol imprint, experience energy-
flow directly, receive energy messages directly.

We each hold the potential for having direct and immediate experiential access to
virtually every aspect of the universe.

When the world is inspected directly and clearly, past and future times are nowhere to be
found. (All there is is the present.)

When we step into nonordinary reality even for a moment, we experience things directly,
see inner contents rather than external forms.

Whereas the scientific comprehension of the relative universe is as yet largely theoretical,
Eastern disciplines have made it a direct experience.

You see with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself, “Now I am seeing
for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes.”

Your head is 2 billion years old and it’s got every control switch GE or IBM ever though
of and a million more and it’s hooked up in direct connection to WDNA.

According to Carl Jung, the main function of formalized religion is to protect people
against the direct experience of God. (That’s why formalized religion is a farce and a
fraud.)

Artistic and literary folks respond ecstatically and wisely to drug experience. They tell us
this is what they have been looking for: new, intense, direct confrontation with the world
about them.

clear consciousness, seeing the world just as it is—Such awareness is a lively attention to
one’s direct experience, to the world as immediately sensed, so as not to be misled by
names and labels.

Even the uneducated layman can experience directly what is slowly deduced by
scientists. (Actually, the scientists are poking at straws. They have to take the LSD
themselves to understand what they’re working on or studying.)

In developing systems for communicating experience, how can we transmit energy
patterns to “turn on” the receiver—i.e., directly stimulate the nervous system, bypassing
the receiver’s symbol system?

In order to become directly acquainted with God, rather than merely know about God,
one must go beyond symbols and concepts, which are obstacles to the immediate
experience of the divine.

It is a direct and immediate awareness that we are dealing with something that has a
divine nature and is radically different from our ordinary perception of the everyday
world.

Many transpersonal experiences involve events from the microcosm and macrocosm—
realms that cannot be directly reached by human senses—or from periods that historically
precede the origin of the solar system.

Phenomena perceivable directly by our senses appear on the same experiential continuum
with those that ordinarily require such complicated technology as microscopes and
telescopes to be accessible to human senses.

Realms that are ordinarily inaccessible to the unaided human senses, such as the physical
and biological microworld and astrophysical objects and processes, become available for
direct experience.

Sound and music seem to represent direct manifestations of the cosmic order. (This refers
to sound and music within yourself, internally, that only you hear and not sound or music
in the external world that everyone who is there can hear.)

The recent increase of interest in various forms of self-exploration, which can mediate
direct spiritual experiences, is a very encouraging trend and a development of great
potential significance.

The religion of direct experience of the divine has been regarded as the privilege of a
very few people. I personally don’t think this is necessarily true at all. I think that
practically everyone is capable of this immediate knowledge.

The spirituality revealed in the process of focused self-exploration sees God as the Divine
Within. Here the individual uses various techniques that mediate direct experiential
access to transpersonal realities and discovers his or her own divinity.

There can be direct acquaintance with the world’s unity. This immediate mystical
experience of being at one with the fundamental Oneness that manifests itself in the
infinite diversity of things and minds, can never be adequately expressed in words.

There is probably not one major rock group that has not been influenced, directly or
indirectly, by LSD and paid homage to the ecstatic experience in one or more of their
songs. (That was written in 1968.)

Those aspects of the psychedelic experience which subjects report to be ineffable and
ecstatically religious involve a direct awareness of the energy processes which scientists
measure.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours
the outer and inner world as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally, by Mind
at Large— this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.

Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a
direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our
existence.

We cannot just talk about spirituality; it needs to be an experiential realization.
Enlightenment does not come simply from following the wisdom teachings. It comes
through direct experience.

We see on the part of young people, directly or indirectly involved with the psychedelic
scene, an affirmation of positives, not an “escape from reality”. (That was written in
1968.)

While at the cradle of all great religions are the direct visionary experiences of their
founders, prophets, and saints, in many instances a religion loses its connection with this
vital core over time.

Wise men throughout history have told us again and again, in legends and myths,
aphorisms, poems and allegories that there exists within us a source of direct information
about reality that can teach us all we need to know.

A science which fails to address itself to spiritual goals becomes secular, political and
tends to oppose new data. A religion which fails to provide direct experimental answers
to these spiritual questions becomes secular, political and tends to oppose the individual
revelatory confrontation.

He takes a fantastic inner journey into the unconscious and superconscious mind. These
drugs thus reveal and make available for direct observation, a wide range of otherwise
hidden phenomena that represent intrinsic capacities of the human mind and play an
important role in normal mental dynamics.

Is the use of LSD the initial event that will guide us to a new morality and to new patterns
of human life on this planet? Will we keep our heads straight and our bodies and minds
clear? Or will we become anti-intellectuals devoted to the culture of “big fishes eating
smaller fishes” in the holy names of religion, education, civilization, progress.

It does help you to look at the world in a new way. And you come to understand very
clearly the way that certain specially gifted people have seen the world. You are actually
introduced into the kind of world that Van Goth and Blake lived in. You begin to have a
direct experience of this kind of world while you’re under the drug.

Metanoia is that profound state of consciousness which mystical experience aims at—the
state in which we transcend or dissolve all the barriers of ego and selfishness that
separate us from God. It is the state of direct knowing, immediate perception of our total
unity with God.

Organized religion had little offer. Faith in an invisible divinity was not enough. What
LSD promised was the direct, unmediated experience of self-transcendence—the
mystical enlightenment where we KNOW what the philosophers and the prophets talk
about.

Our individual consciousnesses connect us directly not only with our immediate
environment and with various periods of our own past, but also with events that are far
beyond the reach of our physical senses, extending into other historical times, into nature,
and into the cosmos.

Our true nature is an aspect of a universal consciousness, Self, Being, Mind, of God. The
awakening to this true nature is the direct awareness that you are more than this puny
body or limited mind. It is the realization that the universe is not external to you. It is
experiencing the universe as yourself.

The modern term for the direct experience of spiritual realities is transpersonal, meaning
transcending the usual way of perceiving and interpreting the world from the position of a
separate individual or body-ego. There exists an entirely new discipline, transpersonal
psychology, that specializes in experiences of this kind and their implications.

The most direct challenge to the principles of mechanistic science are phenomena from
transpersonal experiences, such as “the relativity and arbitrary nature of physical
boundaries, nonlocal connections in the universe, memory without a material substance,
nonlinearity of time, and consciousness associated with inorganic matter.”

The person feels a deep connection with the innermost spiritual core of his or her being.
The illusion of the individual self fades away and the person enjoys reunion with his or
her divine Self, which is also the Universal Self, the cosmic source of all existence. This
is a direct and immediate contact with the Beyond Within, with God.

To men and women who have had direct experience of self-transcendence into the mind’s
Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is
not likely to be very satisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully
written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner.

We are living simultaneously in the world of experience and the world of notions, in the
world of direct apprehension of Nature, God and ourselves and the world of abstract,
verbalized knowledge about these primary facts. Our business as human beings is to
make the best of both these worlds.

A superior religion goes beyond theology. It turns toward the center; it investigates and
feels out the inmost depths of man himself, since it is here that we are in most intimate
contact, or rather, in identity with existence itself. Dependence on theological ideas and
symbols is replaced by direct, non-conceptual touch with a level of being which is
simultaneously one’s own and the being of all others.

Leary was joined by assistant professor Richard Alpert, a hearty band of graduate
students, and a constant stream of many of the leading intellectuals and artists of that
time. Leary and his team employed new methods in psychological research by using
themselves as subjects, reporting directly the drugs’ effects on their own minds.
Sometimes they would take psilocybin with their students. This was unheard of.

Many psychiatrists, even though they talk constantly of the unconscious mind and are
always speculating on the unconscious thoughts of their patients, appear to know this part
of the mind only as an intellectual construct and not as a direct experience. Furthermore,
many of them appear to be quite frightened of patients who actually live in their
unconscious minds, particularly if patients have made this contact by using drugs.

The global popularity of chemical mind-changers is due to their producing ecstasy,
perception change, fresh sensation. Ecstasy means to break out of the verbal prisons,
suspend your imprints, see things anew, perceive directly. With freshened perception
goes the feeling of liberation, insight, the exultant sense of having escaped the lifeless net
of symbols.

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 reduction of ideational barriers by LSD permits certain kinds of creative activity. A
direct connection exists between the ability to experience prelogical, primitive-archaic
thinking and artistic creativity. (This writer, Sidney Cohen, was wrong to use the term
“primitive-archaic thinking.” The thinking of the ego is what’s primitive and archaic, not
what’s beyond the ego.)

If the human potential that Jesus demonstrated is understood to be within us, if the
capacity to grow to godlike stature is directly experienced by all Christendom as the key
to the Kingdom, then Christianity will fulfill its purpose by encouraging people to evolve,
to transform themselves, to rise to a higher state. (This means the LSD state of cosmic
consciousness. Do phony idiots such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson understand
that?)

In ordinary seeing, we are hardly ever directly aware of our immediate impressions. For
these immediate impressions are more or less profoundly modified by a mind that does
most of its thinking in terms of words. Every perception is promptly conceptualized and
generalized, so that we do not see the particular thing or event in its naked immediacy;
we see only the objective illustration of some generic notion, only the concretion of an
abstract word.

Leary the scientist, Alpert the intellectual and later the mystic, Metzner the scholar: what
held these three together was their shared faith in the power of the transcendent
experience to remove the blinders that keep us at odds with each other. A world where all
humans have access to the mystical experience would be a world transformed, they
believed. Everyone would then directly see what Jesus, Buddha, Moses and Mohammed
preached.

Psychiatrists should listen to what their patients say about drug experiences; patients
often know more about the workings of the unconscious mind from direct experience
than doctors do from their intellects. Teachers should try to learn from students who
know more about the subject than they do. In these ways, we will come to have better
information than what we now get from experts who do not know what they are talking
about.

Free the brain to experience direct-raw-nerve-ending sensation.
It points directly and openly to the truth.
Prior to any metaphysical knowledge, we have no direct consciousness of interior truth.
The drugs make an end run around Christ and go straight to the Holy Spirit.
There can be direct acquaintance with the intrinsic strangeness of existence.
These experiences seem more direct and immediate, more real than ordinary reality.
Ultimately, I hope, all religious dogma will be replaced by direct, personal experience.
Understanding is primarily direct awareness, an immediate experience.
We cannot know reality directly through intellectual activity.

A glance was as powerful and direct a message as the most privately and elaborate verbal
statement.

He was not remembering back reflectively, but instead he was directly perceiving the
experience and the meaning of the experience.

One felt perfect communication going on, a kind of direct interchange. It was like an
intense and overwhelming orgasmic immersion.

This moment now is it, eternity. The acid was acting as a cleansing agent, dissolving all
the wooly stuff that got in the way of my direct perception of the here and now.

During the playing of the record I felt myself being swept along by the movement of the
words, as if the meaning were coming through directly to me and the meaning itself was
a movement, a dynamic flow which carried me along as if on a journey.

He was directly aware of “all the operations of vitality which, in our ordinary state, go on
unconsciously” and he could “trace the circulation of the blood along each inch of its
progress.”

He was told to “smell the lemon in the music.” At once, the subject declared himself able
to “hear the smell.” The he said he could smell the lemon in the music. Then he was able
to smell the lemon directly.

I now felt I had had some direct experience of the ineffable realms of union with God,
and I discovered that my dissatisfaction with conventional religion was not due to the
death of God, as some theologians proclaimed, but rather to the impoverished concepts of
God, currently in vogue.

We were dealing with a powerful aphrodisiac, probably the most powerful sexual releaser
known to man. The effect was sensory—contact was intensified thousand-fold but also
deeper. The union was not just your body and her body but all of your racial and
evolutionary entities with all of hers. It was mythic mating. Neurological union. Cellular
sex. Archetypes merging. It was the direct reliving of thousands of matings.

I discovered within myself a complex inner world, rich in sensibility, symbol, feeling,
and metaphor, not only for accessible recollections of my life and those more deeply
stored in my unconscious, but also for those that transcended my own direct experience.
It was as if the events of my life the lives of my forebears and unknown people from
earlier periods of history and diverse cultures were passing through me. I was both actor
and audience in this drama.

The perennial philosophy and the esoteric teachings of all time suddenly made sense. I
understood why spiritual seekers were instructed to look within, and the unconscious was
revealed to be not just a useful concept, but an infinite reservoir of creative potential. I
felt I had been afforded a glimpse into the nature of reality and the human potential
within that reality, together with a direct experience of being myself, free of illusory
identifications and constrictions of consciousness.

He seemed to experience directly his brotherhood with all of mankind.

I felt as if I could penetrate directly to everybody’s soul.

It was straight telepathic communication. I was in his mind, he was in my mind.

Spiritual ecstasy, religious revelation and union with God were now directly accessible.

a direct awareness of the processes which physicists and biochemists and neurologists
measure

a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own
scientists know to be true in theory

an ontological experience infinitely more direct and real than any truth, however
profound, that could be mediated by an established creed or ritual

direct access to the deep structures and processes where thoughts, feelings and motivation
originate

direct spiritual experiences, such as feelings of cosmic unity, death-rebirth experiences,
encounters with archetypal entities, visions of light of supernatural beauty

directing the beam of the table lamp, which had a strong bulb, straight at my closed
eyelids and the effect was quite spectacular

humanity’s eternal appetite for technologies to activate and direct one’s own brain
function

insightful knowledge or illumination about being or existence in general that is felt at an
intuitive, nonrational level and gained by direct experience

knows directly the mysterious workings of Nature which science is only beginning to
guess at

my central sense of identity, which springs directly from the heart of reality and is not
subject to birth or death

participate directly in and respond emotionally to the mythic and ritualistic re-enactments
(eyes closed)

psychedelic experience not a matter of intellectual conviction or belief but of direct
vision

psychedelics a powerful tool to cut through conditioning, to bring a person to direct
understanding of their own true nature, and the nature of the universe

spiritual awakening, a direct visionary experience of transpersonal realities, the original
source of mainstream religions

the confusion of our perceptions of reality with reality itself, the formulation of erroneous
hypotheses that do not conform to our own direct experience

the direct experience of the concrete, natural world in its nonverbal and nonconceptual
state

the direct total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and
fundamental cosmic fact

the purest forms of intuition, unaccountable yet powerful convictions of knowing how
things really are, of sensing directly that something is true

to become directly aware of energy exchanges and biological processes for which we
have no language and no perceptual training

to come into direct contact with the truth itself without allowing theories and symbols to
stand between the knower and the known

unconventional knowledge and understanding life directly and not in abstract, linear
terms

an inward liberation from the bounds of conventional patterns of thought and conduct,
understanding life directly, instead of in the abstract, linear terms of representational
thinking

direct spiritual experiences, such as feelings of cosmic unity, a sense of divine energy
streaming through the body, death-rebirth sequences, encounters with archetypal entities,
visions of light of supernatural beauty

mainstream psychiatric literature suggesting that direct spiritual and mystical experiences
in the lives of the great prophets, saints and founders of religions were actually
manifestations of mental diseases

science—the systematic attempt to record and measure the energy process-data,
religion—the systematic attempt to provide answers to the same questions by direct
personal experience

the state in which we transcend or dissolve all the barriers of ego and selfishness that
separates us from God, the state of direct knowing, immediate perception of our total
unity with God

a direct experience of the Self
a direct experience of the whole man at every level of his being
a direct, immediate, incontrovertible experience of the Mysterium, the sacred
a direct, unlimited understanding of the divine nature
a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things
a reality that is beyond human knowledge but nevertheless can be experienced directly
a vision that was so real and convincing, so directly and deeply felt
an absolutely direct and full consciousness
avoids the entanglements of religiosity and goes straight to the heart
can sense another person’s feeling and mood directly (without talk)
direct, aesthetic sensation
direct and immediate experience we usually cloud over with game-playing
direct and nonverbal means of revelation and consciousness expansion
direct awareness of the eternally complete consciousness
direct awareness of the inner world
direct body awareness of their own tissues and cellular processes
direct communion with the Divine source of all Truth
direct contact with God
direct contact with God’s energy
direct contact with life
direct contact with life-process forms and images
direct contact with primate sensation, nature
direct contact with reality
direct experience of the basic energy of life
direct experience of the Beyond
direct experiential knowledge of the evolutionary process
direct formless sensations
direct insight—know the truth by not knowing
direct insight which beholds truths that are universal
direct merging with the cosmos and with the divine
direct mystical knowledge of a Universal Self
direct perception of inside the skin events
direct revelation
direct sensation unencumbered by mental concepts
direct spiritual knowledge, immediate knowledge
direct total awareness
direct understanding
direct, uninhibited experiencing
directly understand the mystery of given reality
discovering the joyous delights of direct sensuality
emotional knowledge of a direct and actual and acute sort
in direct communication with the sacred realms
make direct contact with the life process
making possible direct awareness at higher-than-normal levels of intensity
mystery that can only be experienced directly
open to direct sensual reception
realities that modern man, for the most part, has not the slightest direct awareness of
seeing reality directly, in its “suchness”
spirituality based on direct personal revelation
states of unstructured awareness, direct awareness
the direct experience of the spiritual Ground of things
the direct experience of their own inner life (or your own inner life)
the direct path to God
the direct sensations of flowing process
the direct visual confrontation with the unity of all men, the unity of life
the experience of direct energy
the flow of direct sensation-experience
the gap between theoretical description and direct awareness among scientists
the inspiration of direct experience
the more direct sensory contact of the child
the most direct and immediate perception
the realm of nonverbal experience, reality as we perceive it directly
the self-validating certainty of direct awareness
the speed and breadth of direct sensation
to go beyond all symbols to a direct experience of the basic fact of divine immanence