Life, Living, Alive

A harmonious inner awakening is characterized by a sense of joy and mental illumination
that brings with it an insight into the meaning and purpose of life.

A profound transcendental experience should leave a changed man and a changed life.
Life is altered because the very root of human identity has been deepened.

A subject may “feel” the interior of his body, experiencing his internal structure and
processes as he understands them or as altered in some way.

A succession of object-stimuli might be used to lead the subject beyond the aesthetic
appreciation of the thing to meaningful examination of his own life.

Above the normal life of problems, there exists a second, higher, timeless world, a reality
more native to you.

Acid opens your door, opens the window, opens your senses, opens your beam to the vast
possibilities of life, to the glorious indescribable beauty of life.

Almost always, the subject is introduced to such increased awareness that this experience
remains one of the outstanding events of his life.

As everything in the field of consciousness assumes unusual importance, feelings become
magnified to a degree of intensity and purity almost never experienced in daily life.

As long as you’re alive, you can live however the hell you want to; to give in to what
people expect of you is to die before your time.

Because it is a hoax from the beginning, the personal ego can make only a phony
response to life.

Darkness and death are by no means the mere absence of light and life, but rather their
origin.

Each man is Buddha. The aim of life is to discover your Buddha-hood. You must retrace
the ancient path yourself. Discover your own Christ-hood.

Enlightenment is based on an ecstatic moment of realization which is supposed to imbue
all life thereafter with a certain grace.

Eternal life “stands in the knowledge” of the Godhead, not in faith in anything less than
the Godhead.

Every person is born divine and the purpose of life is to rediscover your forgotten
divinity.

Everything seems alive. Everything is alive, beaming diamond-bright light waves into
your retina.

Everything seems to be in undulating movement and inanimate objects are frequently
described as coming to life.

Everything that lives is holy. (That includes inorganic matter which is indeed alive.
Everything is alive and holy.)

Experience life as it actually is, as beyond the ways in which it is merely measured and
described and calculated.

Feelings of separation and alienation are replaced by a sense of belonging or being a part
of the life process.

For creativity and sanity, man needs to have, or at least to feel, a meaningful relation to
and union with life, with reality itself.

For those who have lived a lifetime of conformity and spiritual neglect, freedom is
impossible, that is, short of mystical revelation.

God is not dead; he is alive and close. (He’s closer than most people realize. In fact, you
can’t get away from him.)

Harmony involves a consciousness of the interwovenness of organic life and inorganic
life.

He may have a deep and moving religious experience in which he understands the pattern
of all life, with awe, gratitude and total understanding.

Historically, mystical experience has filled man with wondrous awe and has been able to
change his style of life and values.

How can we preserve the freshness, illuminate each second of subsequent life? How can
we maintain the ecstatic oneness with others? (This refers to when the trip is over.)

How do we keep alive this world of immense value which people have had during
childhood?

How do you get to live according to the real laws of science rather than the local
ordinances of Prison Earth?

How many of our great visionaries have come from men who have gone off in the desert
or a cave or lived in solitude? (Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, etc.)

How odd that a chemical can do what a lifetime of spiritual exercises rarely brings to
anyone.

I will have enjoyed more living in the latter part of my life than most people ever know.
(That was actor Cary Grant.)

Identification with the creative energy of the cosmos often inspires a new attitude toward
life and becomes the foundation for a new understanding of existence.

If religion rejects the magical side of life, it cuts itself off from the living forces of the
world.

If the mechanisms of DNA repair, immunological defense and DNA ageing codes can be
understood, life can be extended and death postponed indefinitely.

If there is no distinct ego, the stream of experience can simply flow on, unobstructed, by
itself, a spontaneous, unforced and unblocked flowing of life.

In its freedom, its gratuitousness, its playful absence of ulterior motive, beauty is of the
essence of spiritual life.

In religion and folklore, one finds, in all traditions descriptions of paradise, of the golden
age, of the future life.

In the Eternal Now, we shall find that strait and narrow gate, that needle’s eye, through
which we are taken into the infinite life of God.

In the 1960’s, more people than ever before had a glimpse of a higher, happier, more
living reality. For a moment, they really SAW.

It is a perennial theme in literature, as in mystical religion, this distrust of the intellect,
the agency of ego, as the sole or dominant vehicle of life.

It is possible for us to become ourselves in the fullest ego-transcending form, even in this
life.

It is possible to experience the history of the Universe before the origin of life on earth.
(eyes closed)

It is possible to live spontaneously without trying to be spontaneous. Indeed, there is no
alternative. (Whatever you do is spontaneous, even being uptight.)

It permits you to see more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond
the horizons of this life.

It provides new levels of understanding of one’s own identity, the dimensions of being,
human life and existence in general.

It remains the single most important event of my life. Nothing at all can be compared to
it.

It swings open the gates to vast new possibilities, providing us with information about the
nature of our lives that is quite revolutionary.

It’s a universe of inconceivable beauty in which all things are full of life and charged
with an obscure but immensely important meaning.

It’s how your soul is doing in its path to eternity, not how your body is doing in its path
through this life that’s important.

Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that
lives itself through each of us—that’s the art of living.

Knowledge of the true nature of existence is perceived as being ultimately more real and
relevant than all scientific theories or perceptions and concepts of our everyday life.

Liberation might be defined as the process of waking up out of the nonsense, nightmares
and illusory pleasures of what is ordinarily called real life, into the awareness of eternity.

Life appears simple and exciting and the individual has the feeling of unusual sensory
richness and intense joy.

Life at Millbrook had a mythic dimension that was nourished by a sense of having
embarked upon a journey into unknown waters.

Life flows back into us when we turn from the stale oldness of theological notions to the
newness of spiritual experience.

Light contained in objects, shining out of things and people is a kind of luminous living
geometry.

Like in “Alice in Wonderland” you enter a Never Never Land where everything sparkles
and tingles, everything seems alive and new.

Love is transformed from a cliche to a living and vital reality. Lifelong convicts have
become compassionate and near-delinquents have been gentled.

Many individuals become intensely interested in nature and find a capacity for ecstatic
experiencing of natural beauty, frequently for the first time in their lives.

Memories from the first days or weeks of life can be relived with photographic accuracy
of detail.

Most people go through life barricaded against every idea, every fresh and
unconceptualized perception.

My attitude toward the experience of a future life has become much more richly
rewarding.

Mystery lies at the heart of the whole life of the universe, but it is a mystery beyond the
reach of logic.

Mythological figures literally come alive and assume independent existences. The same
is true about the landscapes and structures that make up the mythic world. (eyes closed)

No work is well and finely done unless it is a form of play. Life should be lived in the
spirit of play rather than work.

Nothing is higher than these mysteries. They have not only shown us the way to live
joyfully, but they have taught us to die with hope.

One is completely suspended and truly living in one’s experiences much more so than
ever before. (That’s with LSD.)

One is joyfully aware of the 2 billion year old electric sexual dance. One is at last
divested of robot clothes and limbs and undulates in the endless chain of living forms.

One must be tuned into the flow of the life energy and enjoy one’s existence; then the
value of life is self-evident.

One vast, immense, everlasting, cosmic wind blows through all and everything and keeps
it in motion—alive, changing, growing.

One who has the courage to undergo the shattering of the illusion will die, but will die in
the mystical sense, “…so that he may live again.” (The ego is the illusion which dies.)

Ordinary language refers to life, but music is living. Live in the mode of music instead of
the mode of language.

Our Judeo-Christian heritage has denied the connection between sensuous life-affirming
wildness and the experience of the sacred.

Psychedelic experiences seem to have a powerful effect and can change a person’s
attitude toward life.

Reality may be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river or interacting like a
dance, or evolving like life itself (as compared to reality being a noun or thing).

Recall of repressed memories is greatly enhanced, reliving of repressed biographical
events.

Religions teach of the eternity of man, of the greater life beyond, of the soul, of that
which is greater than this physical life.

Religious experiences are not the same as a religious life and not the same as a religious
belief.

Since it can be the most profound and moving experience of your life, no one should ever
enter it, in my opinion, without the most careful preparation.

Some referred to their first psychedelic experience as a “peak experience”, as a turning
point in their lives.

Sometimes inanimate objects are described as coming to life; at other times the entire
world can appear geometicized and ornamentalized. (It can be both at the same time.)

Sometimes they acquire new insights and intricate knowledge about the life process from
sources within them that are not ordinarily available.

Spirituality is seeing the world with a deeper vision that is not self-centered, a vision that
sees through dualistic views to the underlying interconnectedness of all of life.

Subjects often experience themselves as fetuses and can relive various aspects of their
biological birth with very specific and verifiable details.

Subjects see new dimensions in the world and in the universe and tend to regard ordinary
things and activities in everyday life as manifestations of the divine.

Subjects underwent highly intense and unusual experiences which may change perception
of life experiences.

The ability to relax physically and emotionally and enjoy ordinary things in life is greatly
enhanced.

The avatar, the divine one is he who discovers and lives out this rhythm during his
earthly trip.

The beautiful forms of life upon the earth combine and swirl and couple and embrace in
the most incredibly intricate, divinely magnificent spectacle conceivable.

The cellular level of consciousness puts man in touch with the DNA chain, which goes
back to the origins of life.

The concept of human life as a life-and-death struggle for survival gives way to a new
image of a cosmic dance or divine play.

The dancing playful flow of life is, in the most reverent sense, sexual forms merging,
spinning together, reproducing.

The “ego” is the instrument for living in THIS world. If the “ego” is broken up or
destroyed, then the person may be exposed to this other world.

The either/or insistence of the Western mind is abandoned in favor of a both/and
approach to life.

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

The experience can open one’s eyes and make one blessed and transform one’s whole
life.

The experience has shaped, at a deep level, my responses to dramatic changes that have
taken place in my life.

The experience of psychological and spiritual rebirth is typically associated with a sense
of love, compassion and reverence for life.

The experience of rebirth is typically associated with a sense of love, compassion and
reverence for life.

The extension of consciousness seems to go beyond the phenomenal world and the time-
space continuum as we perceive it in our everyday life.

The gift of union with God means that our mental and physical space-time life is given
the dimension of eternity.

The goal of life is “oneness” and it can be obtained only by loving. As Plato said about
2500 years ago, “The desire and pursuit of the whole is called Love.”

The great religious and spiritual traditions all teach that the source of wisdom lives within
us.

The images may enter into consciousness as supremely meaningful, illuminating the most
important areas of the subject’s life. (eyes closed)

The individual discovers new ways of enjoying his or her own physiological processes
and develops more respect for life in all its infinite manifestations.

The individual feels that his memory has transcended its usual limits and that he is in
touch with information related to the life of his biological ancestors.

The individual gains experiential access to the unitive states. This tends to change the
way of being in the world and the basic approach to life.

The LSD experience spurs a driving hunger to communicate in new forms, in better
ways, to express a more harmonious message, to live a better life.

The mind is the key to life, for under illusion, it creates confusion and when clarified it
reveals the Buddha nature.

The molecular processes of life are a billion years older than the learned conceptual
mind.

The moment of revelation when you’re turned on to the whole process, which men of old
called the mystic, is the purpose of life.

The mystic vision is one of unity and modern physics lends support to this perception
when it asserts that the world and its living forms are variations of the same elements.

The mystical experience is the consciousness of the “living primordial cosmic fact of
Love,” “the Gratuitous Grace.”

The person is allowed to glance back down the flow of time and perceive how the life
energy continually manifests itself in forms, transient, always changing, reforming.

The perspective of the continuation of life in another form has a very liberating effect on
the individual and can considerably alleviate despair and the fear of death.

The peyote road has shown me many wonders. I shall continue to follow that adventurous
path, that sublime way of life.

The process involves a profound personal transformation during which most aspects of
the individual’s life are dramatically redefined.

The psychedelic experience basically has been one of turning on to the life process, to the
dance of life.

The reality of religion and the reality of life are one and the same. (Religion is not
opposed to life or in conflict with it.)

The spiritual experiences they had in their LSD sessions were important evidence that
spirituality is a genuine and deeply relevant force in human life.

The subtle film that separates our everyday lives from the amazing world of our
unconscious mind becomes transparent and finally breaks down.

The symbolic adventures are unusually vivid and explicit in their application to the
individual’s life. (eyes closed)

The therapist has to be open to the spiritual dimension and recognize it as an important
part of life.

The ultimate measure of the standard of living is the quality of the experience and not the
quantity of material achievements.

The universe in which a human being lives can be transfigured into a new creation by
using “that other kind of seeing which everyone has but few make use of.”

The use of drugs to alter consciousness is nothing new. It has been a feature of human life
in all places on the earth and in all ages of history.

The use of LSD is a ready way of stirring deeply buried sources of the religious life and
perceptions, which create feelings of awe, joy, wonder, peace and love.

The user of LSD and marijuana is not running away from life, but looks for a fuller
experience.

The very living of any one organism is a perpetual birth, death and elimination of its own
cells.

The ways of liberation propose that what many, perhaps, discover in death may also be
discovered in the midst of life.

The whole rigid structure which is man’s usual interpretation of life suddenly drops to
pieces.

The wise person devotes his life to the religious search, for therein is found the only
ecstasy, the only meaning.

The world appears to be a beautiful and safe place and the zest for life is distinctly
increased.

The world is not static and dead. It’s now a shimmering dance of living energy. All
solidarity is gone.

These artists seemed like explorers or big game hunters venturing into very strange
territory and bringing back alive what they had seen.

They consider me insane, but I know that I am a hero and living under the eyes of the
gods.

They might begin to see the whole life process as a miraculous cosmic drama that is
carefully orchestrated by a divine cosmic force.

This increased awareness has been eagerly sought by many people who have devoted
their lives to spiritual development.

This is the central experience Jesus sought for all people. This is the heart of Jesus’ life
and teaching, although it is now largely absent from the institutional Christian churches.

Through these landscapes and among these living architectures wander strange figures,
people, super-human beings, animals, fabulous monsters. (eyes closed)

To be alive spiritually, man must have union with God and must be conscious of it. Apart
from this union, his religious life will be an empty drudgery.

To be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be
incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full.

To develop graceful, fulfilling ways of living a more serene, beautiful and creative life,
psychedelics will help to point the way.

Ultimately, nothing is irrelevant to anything else. There is a togetherness of all things in
an endless hierarchy of living and interacting patterns.

Under LSD, the most devastating of buried memories have been recovered and within a
single session relived and resolved.

Victory over life and death is won by seeing the oscillating dance of energy and yielding
to it.

We attempt to impose our ego-will on the ever-changing life process, a stoppage, a
blocking of life-energy flow.

We can go further than the religious sphere and see the need for ecstasy in all of life. This
is the solid core of truth in the message of the hippies.

We confuse the whole doctrine of eternal life when we speak of it as “future life”.
Eternity is not unending time; it is an indestructible present.

We insist that inner conflict between ego and body, reason and instinct, is the essential
condition of civilized life.

We live on the edge of the miraculous every minute of our lives. The miracle is in us and
it blossoms forth the moment we lay ourselves open to it.

We maintain the illusion of living in a solid world, though in fact, a mountain range of
granite is a network of electrical energy.

What historians describe as history is simply those aspects of the past which, according to
their own philosophy of life, they regard as particularly important and significant.

What is true and positive is too real and too living to be described and to try to describe it
is like putting red paint on a red rose. (That was Alan Watts.)

What you learn from LSD can make you a better person—more alive, awake, intelligent,
loving, creative.

What’s lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the
rest of life.

When we enter the realm of transpersonal experiences, we burst through barriers that we
take completely for granted in our everyday lives.

While one is under the drug, one has penetrating insights into the people around one and
also into one’s own life.

With the decrease in the power of words in the psychedelic experience, the immediate
sensory life gains in range of significance as well as strength.

Within the course of a lifetime, we see certain signs that seem familiar and remind us of
those times when we knew.

You can’t understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you
cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket.

You do not have to achieve harmony with life because you already have it. (Realizing
that is another story.)

You feel as if you are looking down at what was once your former life and you laugh
inwardly at the little things that once seemed so important.

You’ve never heard music in your life, really, you’ll see that you’ve never really heard
music in your life until you’ve heard it on the trip.

Your life begins when your TV game ends. Then you are free to walk out of the studio, a
God in the Garden of Eden.

Your soul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it never was before, living eternity in a
night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand.

A typical myth of the heroic journey begins when the ordinary life of the protagonist is
suddenly interrupted by the intrusion of elements that are magical in nature and belong to
another order of reality. (A typical path?)

All living organisms are throbbing together. One is joyfully aware of the 2 billion year
old electric sexual dance. One is at last divested of robot clothes and limbs and undulates
in the endless chain of living forms.

All questions about the mysteries of life seem to be answered and there is no need to go
any further. Communicating this to those who have not has this experience is neither
possible nor necessary. It becomes self-validating and deeply personal experience.

Ancestral experiences are multiform and complex. Sometimes, they involve actual
reliving of short episodes from the life of one’s ancestors or whole sequences that are
specific and rich in concrete detail. (eyes closed)

Any point from which one sees the one-ness is a center. That one point of vision is the
eye of God, seeing, glorifying, understanding the whole. One such moment of revelation
is the only purpose of life.

As long as human beings have had these kinds of bodies, living on a planet of this sort,
certain myths keep appearing and reappearing and many of them refer to the magic and
wonder of the sacred drug, the potion, the elixir of life.

Before taking LSD, I never stayed in a state of sexual ecstasy for hours on end, but I have
done this under LSD. It heightens all of your senses and it means that you’re living the
sexual experience totally. Each caress or kiss is timeless.

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.

Deep satisfaction can now be derived from a number of things that have been available
all along but were previously ignored or barely noticed. Full participation in the process
of life becomes more important than pursuit of any specific goal.

DNA code—It’s a living history of every form of energy transaction on this planet back
to that thunderbolt in the Precambrian mud that spawned the life process 2 billion years
ago (DNA code, the genetic blueprint within each cell of the body).

Dominating this ecstatic state is the feeling of intense love. You are a joyful part of all
life. The memory of former delusions of self-hood and differentiation invokes exultant
laughter.

Ego-consciousness must either live the world to the exclusion of God or God to the
exclusion of the world; there cannot be room for both on the objective plane. (The ego’s
doesn’t understand that God is not separate from the world.)

Everyone who wanted to make it went to college. But now I saw it as a game I couldn’t
afford to play any longer. I wanted to start living something real. Tired of preparing for a
nebulous future, I wanted to live and learn about NOW.

For most people, it’s a life-changing shock to learn that their everyday reality circuit is
one among dozens of circuits which, when turned on, are equally real, pulsing with
strange forms and mysterious biological signals.

For most people, this discovery is a glorious surprise. Mystics come back raving about
higher levels of perception where one sees realities a hundred times more beautiful and
meaningful than the familiar scripts of normal life.

Geneticists, we believe, make the chauvinistic mistake of assuming that DNA is a
process, rather than a living intelligence as old as life itself that can teach us the meaning
of existence. DNA designs and constructs the nervous system.

Goodness knows what sort of world a creature with more effective senses and a better
mind than ours would live in! (Man already has the best senses and mind, but is blocked
off from them and thus doesn’t use them. LSD opens it all up.)

He may find that all life and its secrets, all mankind and himself, are concentrated in the
ear of corn he is holding in his hand, and he may contemplate it and stare at it for long
moments, even hours.

I can gain insight into the nature of consciousness or experience, the meaning and
essence of being and the experience of harmony, the mystery of life, communion and
sharing, the delight of ecstasy. (Anyone can gain that insight. LSD is the best way.)

I predict that dying is a merging with the entire life process. In other words, we become
every form of life that has ever lived and will live. We become the DNA code that wrote
the entire script. Consciousness returns to the genetic code. (That was Timothy Leary.)

I think it’s time to be brave and honest. I know that if everybody who’d ever taken a
major psychedelic stood up and said “Yeah, I did that and this is how it shaped my life,”
the world would be a better place the next day.

I’m eternally grateful for this experience. LSD changed my life. I’ve lived more, felt
more, enjoyed life more in the last dew years than I had dreamed possible. LSD gave me
that treasure. (That was actor Cary Grant.)

If our conscious life is totally attached to our sensory perceptions of external reality, it is
very likely that we will come to equate reality with external reality, just as we tend to
equate mind with intellect, and consciousness with ordinary waking consciousness.

If the answer existed within the conscious ego, the quest would never have begun. The
answer is found in those areas that were previously unconscious, those areas where the
body links and joins other bodies and the total energy continuum of life and ecology.

In light of the overwhelming evidence we have regarding visionary experiences in
virtually every area of life, it is remarkable to think that traditional Western science
continues to ignore this crucial force in human history.

In our society, the artist is a kind of harmless clown who can get away with a private life
that would be scandalous for a priest or a professor. (The artist is no clown. If anything,
it’s the priest and the professor who are clowns.)

In such states, the subject has a revelation of the significance and interrelationships of
many dimensions of life; he becomes aware of many levels of meaning simultaneously
and “understands” the totality of existence.

In the light of the overwhelming evidence we have regarding visionary experiences in
virtually every area of life, it is remarkable to think that traditional Western science
continues to ignore this crucial force in human history.

In this state of mind, it becomes clear that the ultimate measure of one’s living standard is
the quality of one’s life experience and not the quantity of achievements of material
possessions.

It has mediated a profound spiritual opening in atheists, skeptics and materialistically
oriented scientists, facilitated far-reaching emotional liberation and caused radical
changes in value systems and the basic life style. (“It” is LSD.)

It may be that the fear of dying is in part a projected memory of birth and that what Freud
called the death instinct is also related to a desire to return to the womb. If the birth agony
is experienced as a death agony, this life is in a sense already life after death.

It was as though for all of your normal waking life you have been caught in a still
photograph, in an awkward, stereotyped posture. Suddenly, the show comes alive,
balloons out to several dimensions and becomes irradiated with color and energy.

It’s as though for all of your normal waking life you have been caught in a still
photograph, in an awkward, stereotyped posture. Suddenly, the show comes alive,
balloons out to several dimensions and becomes irradiated with color and energy.

It’s easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven. The rich man’s life is cluttered up with yachts, estates and other
things of little value. He has no time to feel.

Knowledge is a collection of facts and information. Knowledge is something which
comes from without. Wisdom is the ability to use those facts and the information for the
meaningful purposes of life. Wisdom comes from within.

Lama Govinda said that the process of breathing is the connected link between conscious
and subconscious and that breath is the key to the mystery of life, to that of the body as
well as that of the spirit.

LSD can catalyze and precipitate a sudden dramatic transformation. On occasion, one
LSD experience has drastically changed an individual’s world-view, life philosophy and
entire way of being.

LSD produces an upsurge of unconscious material into consciousness and repressed
memories are relived with remarkable clarity—with therapeutically beneficial
consequences.

LSD was a means of exciting consciousness and provoking visions, a kind of hurried
magic enabling youthful seekers to recapture the resonance of life that society had
denied.

Magic is a psychological branch of science, dealing with the sympathetic effects of
stones, drugs, herbs and living substances upon the imaginative and reflective faculties
and leading to ever new glimpses of the world of wonders around us.

Many mainstream scientists are very unsettled by the fact that among the most
outstanding experiences of psychedelics is the discovery of the presence of Divinity and
the sacredness of life.

Most people who experience these inner domains recognize them as part of the
boundless, expansive essence of each human being, which is usually obscured by the
problems and concerns of daily life.

My experiences with these substances have been the most strange, most awesome and
among the most beautiful things in a varied and fortunate life. (I’m surprised he indicates
that he has experienced beauty of this magnitude before trying psychedelics.)

Mysticism may be the ultimate source of ethics, morality and the life of righteousness,
mystical and ecstatic religious experience the sources of astonishing vitality and
efficiency in the pursuit of good works.

Myths play a basic role in human experience, even for people who claim to live life
wholly “rationally”. Indeed, the myth for such people is that it is both good and possible
to be an unemotional intellect that controls everything.

One transcends the dichotomy set up in one’s mind between “inner” and “outer” worlds
of experience and sees reality only from the standpoint of the mystical vision and many
experience life beyond all dualities.

Our body contains, however small the bit, a part of that physically real primeval mud
from which we grew, through orders, classes, phyla—to what we are. Thus, the physical
reality of the evolutionary sequence of life may become available to our consciousness.

Plants seem to represent pure being in the here and now, the ideal of many mystical and
religious schools. Not exploiting and hurting other organisms, most plants serve
themselves as a source of food and bring beauty and joy into the life of others.

Rocks are aware. Inorganic matter is involved in energy changes, structural excitements,
evolvings, pressured sculptings. Inorganic matter—rocks, cliffs, valleys, mountains are
alive and wise.

Shop-worn theological and devotional cliches are not only not the same as experience of
life in its immanent and transcendent fullness; they are actually obstacles in the way of
such experience.

Spiritual feelings are associated with the dilemma of time and space, origin of matter, life
and consciousness, dimensions and complexity of the universe and human existence, and
the ultimate purpose underlying the process of creation.

Subjects see new dimensions in the universe, have strong feelings of being an integral
part of creation and tend to regard ordinary things in everyday life—such as meals, walks
in nature, playing with children or sexual intercourse—as sacred.

The aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it
suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere and of the
ocean surf.

The challenge of the complete human life will be for each person to recapitulate and
experientially explore every aspect and vicissitude of this ancient and majestic
wilderness.

The concept of human existence as a life-and-death struggle for survival in a world
governed by the law of the jungle gives way to a new image of life as a manifestation of a
cosmic dance or a divine play.

The directors of the TV studio game do not want you to live a religious life. They will
apply every pressure, including prison, to keep you in their game. (The TV studio means
the establishment and the religious life here means religion with LSD.)

The discovery of the hidden aspects of reality and of the challenges associated with them
adds fascinating new dimensions to existence. It makes one’s life much richer and more
interesting.

The DNA code is a 3 billion year old time capsule of consciousness. The DNA code is
the miniaturized, invisible essence wisdom of life. Most of the characteristics formerly
attributed to the “soul” describe the functions of DNA.

The enlightened individual goes beyond grammar. He has what may be called a
“grammar-transcending experience” which permits him to live in the consciousness of
the divine continuum of the world and see the one continually manifest in the many.

The enlightened person is, so to speak, after the rise of language; he lives in language and
then goes beyond it. But what sort of world is there before language is introduced? What
sort of world is the world of immediate non-verbalized experience?

The experience can be very liberating and widening. It shows that the world one
habitually lives in is merely a creation of this conventional, closely conditioned being
which one is and that there are quite other kinds of worlds outside.

The experiencer, when he opens his eyes, sees the outer world transfigured, sees it as
glowing with an intensity of light and significance and life, which is something he simply
does not see at all in his ordinary state.

The motivations for psychedelic experimentation can be extremely serious and reflect the
most fundamental needs of human beings—cravings for emotional well-being, spiritual
fulfillment and a sense of meaning in life.

The new life for Christianity begins just as soon as someone can get up in church and say,
“Wash out your mouth every time you say Jesus”. (It means that all the talk about Jesus
has nothing to do with what Jesus himself was talking about.)

The organism, the whole pattern of nerve and muscle, is more complex and intelligent
than logical systems of arithmetic, geometry and grammar—which are in fact nothing but
inferior ritual. Life itself dances.

The sage often appears to be an idiot or “wildman” because he doesn’t take the choosing
seriously. It’s not life or death. It’s life and death and ultimately there is nothing to be
dreaded. There is nothing outside the universe, against which it can crash.

The scientist of consciousness must have courage, take the drug himself, the courage that
comes from faith in your body, cells, the life process, conscious faith in the harmony and
wisdom of nature.

The self reveals itself to consciousness more completely than has been possible hitherto,
with consciousness “living” the ensuing symbolic drama in terms of patterns that have
become simultaneously personal and universal. (eyes closed)

The sense of the vast gulf between the ego and the world disappears and one’s subjective,
inner life seems no longer to be separate from everything else, from one’s total
experience of the stream of nature.

The spiritual dimension is a key factor in the human psyche and in the universal scheme
of things. Becoming aware of this dimension of our lives and cultivating it is an essential
and desirable part of our existence.

The subject may observe or feel himself to be a part of evolutionary process, seemingly
aware of the whole or a part of the pattern of emerging life on this earth and its
progression towards the present point in time.

The things that are most important to many young Americans are not being discussed in
academic life. The sterile formalism of much American higher education can hardly hold
a candle to the psychedelic experience.

The truly inward source of one’s life was never born, but has always remained inside,
somewhat as the life remains in the tree, though the fruits come and go. Outwardly, I’m
the apple among many. Inwardly, I am the tree.

The voyager may see his companion at different ages of life, at different periods of
history, and as different persons. At one time or another, during the psychedelic session,
the voyager looks at his companion. Often it is an overwhelming discovery.

The ways of liberation make it very clear that life is not going anywhere because it is
already there. In other words, it is playing and those who do not play with it have simply
missed the point.

The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe clashes
with his society’s concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will
be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived.

The wise man has penetrated through the verbal curtain, seen and known and felt the life
process. The great writer is the wise man who feels compelled to translate the message
into words.

This period of my life coincided with what seemed to be a time of new hope for
humankind. The flower children in San Francisco were happily rebelling against the old
order, and a better future seemed within reach. A sense of euphoria was in the air.

Traditional science looks upon consciousness as an exclusively human phenomenon and
tends to treat even the highest non-human life forms as little more than unconscious
machines.

Unconsciously, if not always consciously, everyone knows that this Other World is there,
inside the skull—and any news about it, any discussion of its significance, its relevance
to other aspects of life, is a matter of universal concern.

We can literally relive early events from our lives. We can be two months old or even
younger, once again experiencing all the sensory, emotional and physical qualities as we
first knew them.

We want a passionate life lived in a state of ecstasy, a life of intensity and deep emotions.
An existential life in which every moment counts. A real life. But we’re not allowed to
have that. Because if we did…we would be free.

What a boon to society—converting violent criminals to law-abiding citizens! If we could
teach the most unregenerate how to wash their brains, then it would be a cinch to coach
non-criminals to change their lives for the better. (That was Timothy Leary.)

What is needed today is a fundamental re-experience of the oneness of all living things, a
comprehensive reality consciousness. (All living things means all things because all
things are alive, even inanimate objects.)

When men set out for Plymouth in a leaky boat to pursue a new spiritual way of life, of
course they were taking risks. But the risks of the voyage were less than the risks of
remaining in a spiritual plague area.

When used with integrity, and fortitude, psychedelic substances can reveal the
unfathomed love supporting all of creation, a love that can dissolve the death grip of
Thanatos to free Eros and joyously illumine life in all of its aspects.

Words such as joy, ecstasy, grace, beauty, just don’t exist in the psychiatric vocabulary.
The poor psychiatrist has been given the sad task of looking for pathology and is usually
bewildered when he comes face-to-face with the more meaningful experiences of life.

You can relive former incidents in your life—not just imagining these incidents, but
believing that you are actually there—smelling, hearing, feeling, every little thing seems
more real than when you actually did experience it.

You cannot take LSD once a week and stay rigidly rooted in a low-level ego game. You
have to grow with the flow or you will stop taking LSD. You must hook up your inner
power to a life of expanding intelligence.

You can’t fulfill the hero’s journey if you insist on your comfort and safety. You may
have to risk your life if you seek incomparable enlightenment. (It can be a rocky ride, but
you are not really risking your life, though it can seem like that, especially for the ego.)

You haven’t eaten, you haven’t tasted, you haven’t fucked, you haven’t seen colors, your
fingers haven’t touched rock and soil until you’ve had acid and then you know you’re
alive and you know what life is.

A high dose of LSD in the right circumstances brings you into contact not only with your
deep self but with other dimensions—extraterrestrial intelligence, a collective mind,
intelligent unity of life, living God, things that they don’t understand and can’t control
and don’t want free and available.

A single high-dose LSD session can frequently be of extraordinary value for those
persons who do not have any serious clinical problems. The quality of their lives can be
considerably enhanced and the experience can move them in the direction of self-
realization and self-actualization.

Apparently those in control of the instrumentation of coercive power in the U. S. had no
difficulty in recognizing a psychedelic religion as a psychedelic religion when that
religion was safely encapsulated in a racial minority group living outside the mainstream
of American life. (This refers to the Native American Church legally able to use peyote.)

Beyond the narrow boundaries of his or her perishable physical shrine and the limitations
of the individual life span, it would appear that everybody who experiences these levels
develop convincing insights into the utmost relevance of the spiritual dimension in the
universal scheme of things.

Blake says the landscapes and the architectures in which they live are highly organized,
they are articulated beyond anything which the mortal and perishing sight could possibly
imagine, that they were in some sense super-real, they were more real than ordinary
reality (eyes closed).

Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell. Aldous Huxley. Harper Collins; 1954/1956. A
demonstration of what a refined, prepared mind can do with the opportunity afforded by a
psychedelic in observing nature, art, colors, and forms in their full glory, with a profound
appreciation of the transpersonal and numinous aspects of life.

Flowers, leaves, grass, trees are seen with tremendous vividness—“with the intensity that
Van Goth must have seen them” is an often-used description. They seem to pulse and
breathe; in fact, even everyday, fixed objects around the room may take on “flowing,”
“waving” shapes, as if invested with some life force of their own.

I never suspected that the ancient spiritual systems had actually charted, with amazing
accuracy, different levels and types of consciousness that occur in nonordinary states of
consciousness. I was astonished by their emotional power, authenticity, and potential for
transforming people’s views of their lives.

If any single theme dominated young people in the 1960’s, it was the search for a new
way of seeing, a new relation to the world. LSD was a means of exciting consciousness
and provoking visions, a kind of hurried magic enabling youthful seekers to recapture the
resonance of life that society had denied.

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.

In our minds we possess a far greater wealth than we have ever conceived. Such a
discovery may do much for us in every way, making material ends seem less valuable to
us as ultimate aims, and encouraging us to live well for the sake of a spirit which
possesses fathomless capacities for happiness no less than knowledge.

In spite of the frequency of these phenomena and their obvious relevance for many areas
of human life, surprisingly few serious attempts have been made in the past to
incorporate them into the theory and practice of contemporary psychiatry and
psychology.

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 or Blake lived in. You begin to have a
direct experience of this kind of world while you’re under the drug.

It is here that we look beyond the belief that consciousness exists only as a result of our
individual lives. As we come to terms with the concept of the transpersonal realm, we
begin thinking of consciousness as something that exists outside and independent of us,
something that in its essence is not bound to matter.

It is one of the oldest and most universal practices for the initiate to go through the
experience of death before he can be spiritually reborn. Symbolically he must die to his
past, and to his old ego, before he can take his place in the new spiritual life into which
he has been initiated.

It may happen that the subject becomes intensely involved with a thing, then the thing
becomes a symbol and may be identified with some key person in the subject’s life.
Then, the intense involvement with the thing becomes an intense involvement with the
person.

It’s a battle of lifestyles. It’s the lovers versus the salesmen of junk. It’s the poets versus
the manufacturers of crap. It’s the dancers versus the bringers of war. It’s the
songmakers, the earth tenders, the new gardeners of Eden versus the military/industrial
complex. And beware, my friends, they are relentless.

Man is going to get back in harmony with his body, with fellow man and with other
forms of life on this planet. Man is going to realize that consciousness is the key to
human life and instead of power struggles over territory and possession of weapons, the
focus of man’s energies is going to be on consciousness.

Many transpersonal experiences have a strong influence on the individual’s values,
attitudes and interests. Thus, experiences of the collective and racial unconscious can
generate a sensitivity to the needs and problems of another culture and create a deep
appreciation for its religion, art and life philosophy.

One can experience himself in a specific situation in his childhood, in the birth canal
and/or ancient Egypt. While aware of his everyday identity, he can identify experientially
with another person, another life form or a mythological being. He can also experience
himself in a different location in the world or in a mythical reality. (eyes closed)

One enters the other world by breaking a shell: or through a door: through a partition: the
curtains part or rise: a veil is lifted. The “ego” is the instrument for living in this world. If
the “ego” is broken up or destroyed, then the person may be exposed to other worlds,
“real” in different ways from the more familiar territory.

Profound religious experience is always moving and probably the most captivating and
shattering experience known to man. When I say “shattering” I mean that the experience
shatters certain fundamental assumptions about life which stand in the way of a broader
and more humane view.

Repeated experiences of the transpersonal domain can have a profound impact on the
individual involved. They tend to dissolve the narrow and limited perspective
characterizing the average Westerner and make one see the problems of everyday life
from a cosmic perspective.

Science states that all things are in motion; that there are no solids; that everything is in a
gaseous state. The molecules of matter are always in motion. This was what I was
actually seeing. The constant motion of the molecules made everything seem alive The
wall, the table, everything had the same sort of aliveness that the human being has.

Spiritual feelings are associated with such issues as the enigma of time and space; the
origin of matter, life and consciousness; the dimensions of the universe and of existence;
the meaning of human life and the ultimate purpose underlying the process of the creation
of the phenomenal world.

The death-rebirth cycle has been recognized as a natural and lawful pattern throughout
our history by many cultures. Just as spring reliably follows winter year after year, so the
development of a new life automatically follows a full experience of the destruction of
the old.

The fates of nations and the lives of billions of people have been profoundly affected by
the divine illuminations of spiritual prophets. We have only to remember the revelations
of Buddha under the Bo tree, Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus in the desert, Paul on the road
to Damascus, and Mohammed during his visionary night journey for evidence of this.

The goal of psychoanalysis, Freud said, is to replace the extreme suffering of the neurotic
patient with the normal misery of everyday life. An alienated, unhappy, and driven
existence dominated by excessive power needs, competitive urges, and insatiable
ambition can still fall within the broad definition of mental health.

The great religious leaders all found the same thing when they looked within. They all
talked about the inner light, the soul, the divine flame, the spark or seed of life or the
white light of the void. Those are clumsy metaphors for what are actually physiological
processes within the nervous system.

The greatest obstacle to awareness is neurosis. Neurosis can be defined in one of its
aspects as a fixation upon a single aspect of life, a looking at the world through one
particular set of distorting lenses and hence as the inability to see a wider angle of life
and to perceive realistically what is going on around us.

The individual identifies with only one aspect of his or her being, the physical body and
the ego. This false identification leads to an inauthentic, unhealthy, and unfulfilling way
of life, and contributes to the development of emotional and psychosomatic disorders of
psychological origin.

The landscapes and the architectures in which they live are highly organized, they are
articulated beyond anything which the mortal and perishing sight could possibly imagine,
that they were in some sense super-real, they were more real than ordinary reality (eyes
closed).

The perception of the environment (world) has a certain primary quality; every sensory
stimulus, be it visual, acoustic, olfactory, gustatory or tactile, appears to be completely
fresh and new and at the same time, unusually exciting and stimulating. Subjects talk
about really seeing the world for the first time in their lives.

The possibilities of reliving birth or episodes from embryonal life, obtaining accurate
information from the collective unconscious, experiencing archetypal realities and karmic
memories, or perceiving remote events in out-of-body states, were simply too fantastic to
be believable for an average professional.

The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the cosmos, that
is of the life and order of the universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there
occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new
plane of existence, would make him almost a member of a new species.

The reason psychedelic experiences are important and valuable is that people live their
lives by their own “chess-boards,” playing the lawyer-game, the merchant-game or some
rule-ridden ego-game, rarely if ever expanding their consciousness to the point of true
awareness and understanding of man and nature, including themselves.

The richness of gem-like qualities, which is found in the Visionary World, does explain
many very strange facts about certain types of art and many facts about the curious,
uniform quality of religious traditions, folklore traditions, traditions of the nature of the
Golden Age and After Life, which are found all over the world.

The subject is caught up in an endless flow of colored forms, microbiological shapes,
cellular acrobatics, capillary whirling. The cortex is tuned in on molecular processes
which are completely new and strange: a Niagara of abstract designs; the life-stream
flowing, flowing. (eyes closed)

The term spirituality should be reserved for situations that involve personal experiences
of certain dimensions of reality that give one’s life and existence in general a numinous
quality. C. G. Jung used the word numinous to describe an experience that feels sacred,
holy, or out of the ordinary.

The therapeutic results transcended anything I had ever witnessed. Difficult symptoms
that had resisted months and even years of conventional treatment often disappeared after
experiences such as psychological death and rebirth, feelings of cosmic unity and
sequences that clients described as past-life memories.

There are myths of the creation of the world through the cutting up of some primordial
being, of its division into heaven and earth, into the multiplicity of things or into the 2
sexes— from which follows the generation of offspring. Thus many mythologies
envisage the goal of life as the “rememberment” of the original “dismemberment”.

There is no accepted corner in our lives for the art of pure nonsense. There is no protected
situation in which we can really let ourselves go. Our difficulty is that we have perverted
the Sabbath into a day for laying on rationality and listening to sermons instead of letting
off steam.

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.

This richness of gem-like qualities, which is found in the visionary World, does explain
many very strange facts about certain types of art and many facts about the curious,
uniform quality of religious traditions, folklore traditions, traditions of the nature of the
Golden Age and After Life, which are found all over the world.

Transpersonal experiences can involve conscious experience of other humans and
members of other species, plant life, elements of inorganic nature, microscopic and
astronomic realms not accessible to the unaided senses, history and prehistory, remote
locations or other dimensions of existence.

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.

We are largely cut off from this Deep. The stress on ego controls, rationality, focusing
outwardly rather than inwardly, have prevented us from hearing the full range of
dissonances and harmonies of human existence. Our present lives are empty, lacking in
depth, substance and direction.

What we’re doing for the mind is what the microbiologists did for the external sciences
300 years ago when they discovered the microscope and they made this incredible
discovery that life, health, growth, every form of organic life, is based on the cell, which
is invisible. (That was Timothy Leary.)

When one properly understands the religious life, it is only the courageous man who is
willing to face it. (Western “religions” don’t understand religion and religious experience
and persecute anyone who does. It also takes courage to let the ego die during an LSD
trip.)

Within the new world-view, the very creative principle of the universe is experientially
available to the individual and, in a certain sense, is commensurate and identical with him
or her. This is a drastic change of perspective and it has far-reaching consequences for
every aspect of life.

Within the nucleus of every living cell lies a tiny, complex chain of protein molecules
called the DNA code. DNA is the brain of the cell, the timeless blueprinting code which
designs every aspect of life. DNA executes its plans by means of RNA molecules. RNA
is the communication system, the language, the senses and hands of the DNA.

Your body carries a protein record of everything that’s happened to you since the
moment you were conceived as a one-cell organism. It’s a living history of every form of
energy transformation on this planet back to that thunderbolt in the Precambrian mud that
spawned the life process over 2 billion years ago. (It’s the DNA code.)

You’ve never seen a cell. What do you think of that? Yet it’s the key to everything that
happens to a living creature. I’m simply saying the same thing from the mental,
psychological standpoint, that there are wisdoms, lawful units inside the nervous system,
invisible to the symbolic mind, which determine almost everything.

A person in the psychedelic state can perceive much more in other human beings than he
can when he is in his everyday mind. The voyager may see his companion at different
ages of life, at different periods of history, and as different persons. At one time or
another, during the psychedelic session, the voyager looks at his companion. Often it is
an overwhelming discovery.

Altered states of consciousness enrich man’s experiences in many areas of life. The
intense aesthetic experience gained while absorbed in some majestic scene, a work of art,
or music may broaden man’s subjective experiences and serve as a source of creative
inspiration. There are also numerous instances of sudden illumination, creative insights,
and problem solving occurring while man has lapsed into altered states of consciousness.

Death is the point at which man escapes the time barrier of the conscious mind. Life does
not begin and does not end. We speak of it in this way because the conscious mind can
only express itself in terms of time and space. But we know full well that this end, this
event called death, is not all. And if there is something after death then there had to be
something before birth.

Elements of plant consciousness can be accompanied by philosophical and spiritual
ideation and insights. Several subjects, for example, have pondered over the purity and
unselfishness of plant existence and have seen plant life as a model for ideal human
conduct; unlike animals and man, most plants do not kill and do not live at the
expense of other organisms.

If the intellect by nature cannot understand life, it follows that the intellect by nature
cannot understand death. It’s view of death results from the fact that it looks only at the
parts, not the Whole. If it would look at the Whole, it would see immediately that life is
immortal. The esoteric doctrine would be that it is precisely our insistence on personal
immortality which makes us blind to our actual immortality.

Immersed in the impact of this work, it seems to me incomprehensible that our society
has sunk so deeply into unconsciousness as to be unaware of such possibilities. The
general public, unfamiliar with the power of our minds, remains for the most part locked
in mass hypnotism, secured within the self-constructed walls that lock out the prodigious
possibilities of life, the joy and exuberance waiting to be claimed.

In many traditions, the notion of “dying before dying” is essential to spiritual
advancement. Coming to terms with the fact of death as part of the continuity of life is
seen as tremendously liberating, releasing one from the fear of death and opening one to
the experience of immortality. As the 17th century Christian monk, Abraham a Santa
Clara wrote: “A man who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.”

In the transpersonal realm, we experience an extension of our consciousness far beyond
the usual boundaries of both our bodies and our egos, as well as beyond the physical
limits of our everyday lives. The more I have explored this realm in my own research, the
more I am convinced that these experiences in transpersonal consciousness can include
the entire spectrum of existence itself.

Individuals feel that they have left the past behind and that they are capable of starting an
entirely new chapter of their lives. Exhilarating feelings of freedom from anxiety,
depression and guilt are associated with deep physical relaxation and a sense of perfect
functioning of all physiological processes. Life appears simple and exciting and the
individual has the feeling of unusual sensory richness and intense joy.

It has been shown that LSD experiences of death and rebirth and mystical states of
consciousness can change patients’ concepts of death and life and alleviate their fears of
dying. Psychedelic therapy has proved to be more than an important tool in the control of
mental and physical pain, it has contributed greatly to our understanding of the
experience of death.

Jung observed repeatedly that the universal mythological motifs or mythologems
occurred among individuals for whom all knowledge of the kind was absolutely out of
the question. This suggested to him that there were myth-forming structural elements in
the unconscious psyche that gave rise both to the fantasy lives and dreams of individuals
and to the mythology of peoples.

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.

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.

Once people have experienced the spiritual dimensions growing in their lives, they often
learn that their lives without it were futile and impoverished. Previously, they may have
managed adequately but unhappily, unaware of the seemingly endless realms that have
since enormously enriched their existence. They discover that spirituality is a necessary
element that enhances their lives and sense of well-being.

One can experience himself in a specific situation in his childhood, in the birth canal
and/or in ancient Egypt. While aware of his everyday identity, he can identify
experientially with another person, another life form or a mythological being. He can also
experience himself in a different location in the world or in a mythical reality. (eyes
closed)

Our personal boundaries may appear to melt and we can become identified with other
people, groups of people, or all of humanity. We can actually feel that we have become
things that we ordinarily perceive as objects outside of ourselves, such as other people,
animals, or trees. Very accurate and realistic experiences of identification with various
forms of life and even inorganic processes can occur in transpersonal states.

Our society classifies an intoxicated individual as criminal or noncriminal on the basis of
which drug he used to get high. It’s like living in an occupied country. I feel like I’m in
one of those old movies about Occupied Europe from the 1940’s. That is precisely how
the majority of pot smokers feel. They are the largest minority group in the country and
yet they are living in a weird scenario straight out of the French Underground.

Previously almost-depressed individuals typically emerge from a successfully integrated
LSD session with elevated mood, joyful appreciation of existence, enhanced self-esteem
and self-acceptance and greater capacity for meaningful human relationships. Their inner
life is enriched, they are more open and they show an increased appreciation of beauty in
nature and art.

Profound transcendental experiences, such as consciousness of the Universal Mind or of
the Void, in addition to having a very beneficial effect on the subject’s physical and
emotional well-being, are usually central in creating in him a keen interest in religion,
mystical and philosophical issues, and a strong need to incorporate the spiritual
dimension into his way of life.

Psychic realities experienced during altered states of consciousness 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.

Some individuals are genetically templated to live part of their time in the future. They’re
alienated from current realities. Sometimes they feel agonizingly out of step with the
“nomads” around them. Frequently, they are locked away for having visions. It helps
when mutants can recognize themselves. Then, they can view it all with humorous
insight.

The effect of ecstasy is to create motivation, the longing to continue the ecstasy and
fulfill it. Critics of the drug cults complain that they retreat from life’s realities, become
passive and inert. Actually, it is not so much this aspect of the psychedelic scene but its
precise opposite to which they object. It is not the reading of Thoreau; it is the taking
him seriously to which society objects.

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 images are most often of persons, animals, architecture and landscapes. Strange
creatures from legend, folklore, myth and fairy tale appear in wonderful surroundings.
Ancient temples and castles are imaged and figures and incidents from the historical past.
Persons, places and objects observed in the course of the subject’s life may make their
appearance. (eyes closed)

The individual tuned into this experiential area usually discovers within himself or herself
genuinely positive values, such as a sense of justice, appreciation of beauty, feelings of
love and self-respect as well as respect for others. These values, as well as the
motivations to pursue them and live in accordance with them, appear on this level to be
intrinsic to human nature.

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 makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of
happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and
of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfaction of life are
to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their
thoughts, their emotions and their sensations.

The most human thing about man is his eternal, childlike hope that somehow, someday,
the deepest yearnings of his heart will come true. Who is so proud and unfeeling that he
will not admit that he would be deliriously happy if, by some strange magic, these deep
and ingrained longings could be fulfilled? If there was eternal everlasting life beyond
death after all?

The mystical experience was not a band-aid for my unfulfilled dreams. What I longed to
catch a glimpse of was a dimension that includes, yet far exceeds, the human world. I
hungered for the experience of the MORE without which life, to me, was not worth
living. I believed the words of the mystics and poets, but I wanted to experience them
myself.

The mystics continuously get in trouble with religious authorities, but often also with
political authorities. By his teaching and by the very way he lives, Jesus appeals to
common sense and blows the pretense of public opinion to pieces. Common people said,
“Wow, this man speaks with authority, not like our authorities”. You can imagine how
the authorities felt about it and how they reacted: “This man has to die!”

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.

The world of myths, legends, and fairy tales literally comes to life. The subject can
witness numerous scenes from the mythology and folklore of any culture in the world and
visit any mythical landscapes. He or she can also experientially identify with legendary
and mythical heroes and heroines or fantastic mythological creatures. Such sequences can
emerge in meaningful connection with personal problems of the subject. (eyes closed)

To understand the transpersonal realm, we must begin thinking of consciousness in an
entirely new way. It is here that we look beyond the belief that consciousness exists only
as a result of our individual lives. As we come to terms with the concept of the
transpersonal realm, we begin thinking of consciousness as something that exists outside
and independent of us, something that in its essence is not bound to matter.

Under the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, the concept of the ego is associated with
one’s ability to test reality and to function adequately in everyday life. Individuals who
share this limited point of view see the perspective of the ego death with horror.
However, what actually dies in this process is a basically paranoid attitude toward the
world.

We forgot that for thousands of years the psychedelic vision has been the rite of passage
of the teen-ager—the Dakota Indian boy who sits on the mountaintop fasting and
sleepless, waiting for the revelation. The threshold of adult game life is the ancient and
natural time for the rebirth experience, the flip-out trip from which you come back as a
man.

We may feel that we are really seeing the world for the first time in our lives. Everything
around us, even the most ordinary and familiar scenes, seems unusually exciting and
stimulating. People report entirely new ways of appreciating and enjoying their loved
ones, the sound of music, the beauties of nature and the endless pleasures that the world
provides for our senses.

Western scientific disciplines have described the universe as an infinitely complex
mechanical system of interacting, discrete particles and separate objects. In this context,
matter appears to be solid, inert, passive and unconscious; life, consciousness and
creative intelligence are seen as insignificant accidents and derivatives of material
development. (Einstein understood. Will the other Western scientists ever wake up?)

When we consider the activity of a modern city, it is difficult to realize that in the cells of
our bodies, infinitely more complicated processes are at work—ceaseless manufacture,
acquisition of food, storage, communication and administration… All this takes place in
superb harmony, with the cooperation of all the participants of a living system, regulated
down to the smallest detail.

With the Hebrew-Christian universe, God, the Absolute itself, is good as against bad and
thus to be immoral or in the wrong is to feel oneself an outcast not merely from human
society but also from existence itself, from the root and ground of life. To be in the wrong
therefore arouses a metaphysical anxiety and sense of guilt, a state of eternal damnation.
(This, of course, is absurd brainwashing, a vicious con game.)

Within our own consciousness, there is a memory, waiting to be recalled, of every
movement, feeling and desire in our lives. This implies that everything survives in a way
more complete than just intellectually. The psychedelic experience heightens this recall,
and if handled properly, could pass through beneficial channels leading to psychotherapy
and rehabilitation.

You can bring the subconscious into the realm of discriminative consciousness and
thereby, to draw upon the unrestrictive treasury of subconscious memory, wherein are
stored the records of not only our past lives but the records of the past of our race, the
past of humanity, and of all pre-human forms of life, if not the very consciousness that
makes life possible in this universe.

Young people started pouring into the Haight, propelled by a gut-level emptiness,
searching, anything that might relieve the burden of nonliving that gnawed at their
insides. They believed that at the other end of the rainbow was Haight-Ashbury, the
Capital of Forever, where beautiful people cared for each other, where all would be
provided and everyone could do their own thing without being hassled.

Each person will become his own Buddha, his own Einstein, his own Galileo. Instead of
relying on canned, static, dead knowledge passed on from other symbol producers, he
will be using his span of 80 or so years on this planet to live out every possibility of the
human, prehuman and even subhuman adventure. As more respect and time are diverted
to these explorations, he will be less hung-up on trivial, external pastimes. (That was
Timothy Leary.)

Mainstream science holds a very limited view of the nature of the human being.
Clarification of this situation is now being presented in the relatively new field of
Transpersonal Psychology, which recognizes those aspects of human experience in which
the sense of identity of self extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider
aspects of humankind—life, psyche, and cosmos—validating the spiritual foundation of
life.

Particularly valuable and promising were the early efforts to use LSD psychotherapy with
terminal cancer patients. These studies showed that LSD was able to relieve severe pain,
often even in those patients who had not responded to medication with narcotics. In a
large percentage of these patients, it was also possible to alleviate or even eliminate the
fear of death, increase the quality of their lives during the remaining days, and positively
transform the experience of dying.

The old paradigms of in psychiatry have now outlived their usefulness and are impeding
progress. Instead of repressing observations because they do not conform to established
ways of thinking, we should try to formulate new paradigms. A paradigm should not be
confused with an accurate description of reality. It is a useful organization of existing
data, a temporary conceptual tool that should be replaced when it no longer serves its
purpose.

The summer of 1967 was known as the “Summer of Love” and saw a great emergence of
unstructured communal living, new found sexual freedoms, and growing interest in
eastern philosophy and religion. Displays of spontaneity, trust, non-possessiveness and
non-evaluativeness among the new arrivals were attempts to deal with what was
commonly thought to be hypocriticalness, rigid adherence to rules and a lack of
emotional spontaneity between people.

Western scientific disciplines have described the universe as an infinitely complex
mechanical system of interacting, discrete particles and separate objects. In this context,
matter appears to be solid, inert, passive and unconscious; life, consciousness and
creative intelligence are seen as insignificant accidents and derivatives of material
development. (Einstein understood. When will the other Western scientists ever wake
up?)

A belief in miracles in indispensable to the survival of any spiritual life.
A God not seen as fully beautiful is less good and true and above all, less living.
A life lived in the consciousness of ego and separateness is necessarily a life of conflict.
A life of adventures passes. (eyes closed)
A profound transcendental experience should leave a changed man and a changed life.
Above the normal life of problems, there exists a second, higher timeless world.
After insight comes the deeper question as to the meaning of life.
All forms of matter and all living beings are seen as patterns of divine consciousness.
Blow the mind and you are left with God and life.
Books are not life. To idolize scriptures, even the Bible, is like eating paper money.
Change your lenses and look at life in a new way.
Church religion almost completely ignores the interior life.
Consciousness lives.
“Die and come to life.”
Divine realms come into a person’s life, the heavenly inner realms.
Each person is born divine and the purpose of life is to rediscover your forgotten divinity.
Education prepares you for the future instead of showing you how to be alive now.
Enlightenment, as distinct from doctrine, is alive.
Everything that happens “down there” is the robot manifestation of the life “up here.”
God is ours in the same intimate sense that our consciousness and life are ours.
He develops new and free energy from the unconscious to alter his life situation.
Holiness is the life of spontaneity and self-abandonment with humor.
How fresh the air feels as you breathe it. Fresh, pure, charged with life.
I know I could never have understood this experience had I not lived it myself.
It has changed the direction of an individual life completely.
It is possible to become ourselves in the fullest ego-transcending form, even in this life.
It restores a whole dimension of value to life.
It seems as though, for the first time you are breathing life.
Its impact on my life has been profound.
Life ceases to seem problematic when it is understood that the ego is a social fiction.
Life is a mystery to itself.
Life is a position of time. Death is a position of time. They are like winter and spring.
Life is a song. Life is beautiful. Life is the golden dream.
Life is altered because the very root of human identity has been deepened.
Life itself dances.
Life should be lived in the spirit of play rather than work.
LSD has revolutionized my life.
LSD subjects can relive elements of their biological birth in all its complexity.
LSD trips led to an astonishing intensification of her inner life.
Most people searched for the deeper meaning of life while under the drug.
My LSD episodes have opened my mind and enabled me to look upon life with new eyes.
Objects suddenly come alive.
One is fully tuned in. One lives in one’s senses.
One session can be an important turning point in one’s life.
Only repressed life is in time and unrepressed life would be timeless or in eternity.
Perhaps what they call living is really dying and dying is our liberation into true life.
Physical tensions which are built up by our anxious and ego-centered life are released.
Psychedelic drug use can change the direction of people’s lives.
Psychedelic drugs changed my feelings about being alive.
Reality is infinitely alive.
Spiritual freedom is just that capacity to be as spontaneous and unfettered as life itself.
Spiritual lives have been deepened by peyote.
The essence of life is its fluidity, its ability to change, to flow and to take a new course.
The experiencer may live through the whole spectrum of human feelings.
The experiences are relived exactly the way they happened before.
The feeling of reality and truth in such experiences can dominate a whole life.
The glimpse of a larger reality that such experience affords may change a person’s life.
The infinite, as living reality, can never be grasped in any fixed form.
The key to the mystery of life is chemical, the Elixir, the magic potion.
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
The mystical experience may help to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.
The mythology of a certain culture can come to life for you. (eyes closed)
The new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life.
The new society will be one of mythic integration where magic will live again.
The only purpose of life is the spiritual quest.
The psychedelic guide is a liberator who frees men from their life-long internal bondage.
The purpose of life is to look within and without and to decode the purpose of life.
The river of life flows toward the mouth of God.
The room is alive, undulating, rhythm.
The soul of the living organism is its genetic code.
The spiritual path was the center of his life.
The spiritual search and philosophical quest become important new dimensions of life.
The state of mind associated with dying can be experienced during life.
The trees dance and everything is alive.
The trip becomes introspective, past experiences “lived through” with emotion.
The ultimate reality is alive, conscious and intelligent.
The use of psychedelics was a search for meaning, not an escape from life.
There is hope of a better growth, a grander life.
There is simply no problem of life. It is absolute purposeless play.
Think of religion not as something about life, but as a form of life, a way of life.
To lose his life in order to find it is an awesome leap in the dark.
To see the world as it really is means to understand that life is immortal.
Trust in the unity of life and in your companions.
Trust the tide-force pulling you into unity with all living forms.
Truth is alive, truth is life.
Truth is to be lived, not merely pronounced with the mouth.
Under LSD, childhood memories emerge which are relived with intense emotion.
We are all one. We are all leaves on the tree of life.
We each have an inner life of consciousness and an outer life of behavior.
We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
We live in a frozen world, cut off from the flow of life and energy.
Whoever loses his ego finds his life, but it cannot be done on purpose.
You may discover that you are living a robot existence, devoid of meaning.
You’re never the same once you’ve had LSD. It makes life take on richer meanings.

I’m high! I’m alive and it’s great to be alive and I’m happy and it’s great to be happy and
I’m high and it’s great to be high, and it’s great to be alive and happy and high!

Now I know that life is a constant flowing and we are part of each other. I have read it,
thought it, but now I know and am overwhelmed with gratitude.

Now I step forth easily from my body’s prison-cell and live in the realm of the
primordial.

The household furniture is alive. Everything gestures. Tables are tabling, walls are
walling, a world of events instead of things.

The whole quality of consciousness is changed and I feel myself in a new world in which,
however, it is obvious that I have always been living.

Why the colors are so bright! The world seems alive! I’m seeing for the first time! It’s
alive! Well, of course, it’s alive. Your eye knew that all along.

I look at those leaves with their architectures of veins, their stripes and mottlings. I peer
into the depths of interlacing greenery of those living patterns, so characteristic of the
visionary world, of those endless births and proliferations of geometrical forms that turn
into objects, of things that are forever being transmuted into other things.

Suddenly I feel my understanding dawning into a colossal clarity, as if everything were
opening up down to the roots of my being and of time and space themselves. The sense of
the world becomes totally obvious. I am struck with amazement that I or anyone could
have thought life a problem or being a mystery.

A minute was now longer than his “whole life up to that point.”
A whole new life is ahead of me.
I am alive within the living God.
I’ve been blinded all my life to this radiance.
I’ve been turned on to life and have never been so happy.
I’ve had the greatest experience of my life.
It’s glorious to be alive here.
There is a new peace in my life, as well as an appreciation for the beauty of existence.

After so many years of wandering, I had come home. I had received the most precious
gifts there are, the gifts of life and love.

Everything I could see seemed alive and immensely beautiful and meaningful. Trees,
rocks, cacti the entire landscape was radiating with relevance.

Everything that I ever believed in, everything that I did or pursued, everything that
seemed to give my life meaning, suddenly appeared utterly false. (That is a revelation.)

For the first time in my life, I knew what the word “beauty” meant. Now I understand
that I had never even begun to penetrate what beauty was all about.

He felt his life had been “transfigured” by the “new being” which had emerged out of the
depths of his psyche.

He felt light, ecstatic, reborn and pulsing with exuberant life energy. His senses felt
cleansed and wide open.

He felt that for the first time in his life he was experiencing the universe for what it really
is—an unfathomable mystery, a divine play of energy.

He felt the experience was unbelievably beautiful; he had never experienced anything
like that in his whole life.

He had a profound experience of God which he describes as the most joyous moment of
his life.

He said the session had been the most important, profound and intense experience of his
life.

He saw eternal cycles of life and death unfolding in front of his eyes. Nothing really got
destroyed; everything was in eternal flux and transformation.

He was seeing life as an endless sequence of cycles in which becoming, being, and
perishing were just chapters in the same great book.

I awakened into a brilliant, overwhelmingly glorious light. It was very brief but I’d never
experienced anything like it in my life. It had quite an impact.

I belonged within peace and unity and wild joy, within something greater than my own
life or the Life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.

I could see God and life and everybody and myself in its reality and true proportion. It is
wonderful and full of meaning after all.

I felt a warm oneness with all that live, a marvelous unity and harmony with the very
universe itself.

I felt endowed with all the time in the world, free to look about me as if I were living
eternity without a single problem to be solved.

I felt flooded with lights and indescribable joy and connected in a new way to the world
and the flow of life.

I felt that I was being transported to some mysterious place where the secrets of life and
the universe were revealed.

I felt that somehow every person must be made to recognize the divine within himself
and that such a recognition would influence his every action throughout life.

I had been liberated tremendously by this experience and by finding that the pain in my
life wasn’t necessary.

I had never talked so openly about myself before in my life. And it was easy. I didn’t feel
like hiding anything about myself.

I knew what was important in my life and what was less important more clearly than ever
before.

I looked out the window and the earth seemed to vibrate with life. It’s alive. It’s a
wonderful world. I don’t have to run anymore.

I never felt so clean inside in all my life. All the trash seemed to be washed out of my
mind. It seemed as if I were born all over again.

I realized that the seed of life is consciousness and that, as such, life essentially never
ends.

I realized the many wonderful emotions I had experienced were so rare in the lives of
most people and gratitude that such ecstasy had been mine.

I saw all the little shades of white in the sugar. What blindness I had to color
differentiation all my life.

I saw for the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous, beyond any words of mine to
describe, is the whole of life.

I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is on the contrary, a living
Presence. I became conscious in myself of eternal life.

I saw then that there were dimensions to life and harmonies and deeps which had been for
me unseen, unheard and untapped.

I sensed the cosmic quality of the energies and experiences involved in the world of
living forms.

I started experiencing a strange excitement that was dissimilar to anything I have ever felt
in my life.

I wanted to shout and sing of the miraculous new life and sense and form, of the joyous
beauty and the whole mad ecstasy of lovliness.

I was at the beginning of my life. I had just been born. I was alive! Thank God I was
finally alive!

I was dead and yet I was never more joyously alive; thus I knew that after death, the soul
is more alive than we can ever be while living (without LSD).

I was having the best time of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a feeling of joy
that great.

I was in a daze, stunned by what had happened, trying to figure out what to do with these
revelations, what to do with life.

I was wondering at one point if I was living or was this heaven that I had heard so much
about?

It was a process that unveiled some of the deepest mysteries of life, mysteries which I
never dreamed could be revealed.

It was as if a veil fell from my eyes. The shapes and colors in the room stood out more
brightly and clearly, and everything seemed imbued with life.

It was like escaping from a refrigerator into the sunshine. I could feel myself coming
alive in that light of hers, that radiating warmth.

It would modulate from beauty and the intense presence of life to love on all levels, the
human as well as the mystical.

My garden embraced me. The trees, the flowers, the shadowed mosses were alive with
tenderness.

My little ego seemed removed and I felt that I saw clearly and purely for the first time in
my life.

My life suddenly seemed to me infinitely precious and I cried out with joy at the thought
that I was now living so much in so short a span of time.

My sense of touch became very intensified, the blanket covering me came alive and I
touched my face and felt every particle of my skin.

Outdoors the world was wondrous, new, alive. Everything breathed and throbbed with
vitality.

Peace and joy engulfed me and I knew that the kingdom of heaven was truly within and
that LSD had made this day the most important one in my life.

Psychedelic drugs give me a sense of harmony and beauty. For the first time in my life, I
can take pleasure in the beauty of a leaf; I can find meaning in the processes of nature.

She was now able to experience herself and the world in a way completely different than
ever before. She had zest for life.

The alcoholic had experienced vivid scenes from his past life and these had markedly
helped him in seeing the problems that led him to his catastrophic drinking.

The chair was warm, breathing, alive against my back. The chair and I were breathing as
one.

The drugs produced sudden insight that one has been living in a narrow space-time-self
context.

The mind was concerned not with space, measures and locations, but with living and
meaning.

The movie I thought was life turned out to be merely the cartoon. (Yes, there is much,
much more.)

The subject had what he regarded as an intensely interesting and remarkable session,
“probably the most interesting 10 hours” of his life.

The sum total of all these emotions, feelings of ecstasy, aliveness, reverence and love,
seemed to blend into the music.

The visible world was wholly real and in no way a deception, but it nevertheless had this
underlying structure which glowed and pulsed like a living force.

There came, suddenly, a living, flesh-and-blood, twinkling face with eyes looking at me
out of each of the little diamonds in the bark on the tree. The tree was like a Tree of Life.

These living gems, glowing with internal radiance, encrusted the buildings, mountains,
banks of rivers, trees (eyes closed).

They said it was the most fantastic experience they ever had in their life. It changed their
whole life.

This was a vision of the hidden life forces, a manifestation of the life within that was
commonly only talked about or read about.

This was color like you’ll never see in your life. It was the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever
seen.

This was the most interesting and thought-provoking thing I have ever experienced in my
life.

To my surprise, all my emotions from that period of my life emerged from the deep
unconscious and became real and vivid once again.

We have had a taste of what liberation really means and it informs and affects our whole
life thereafter.

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

A sensation of well-being and renewed life flowed through me. The world was as if
newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which
persisted for the entire day.

As you returned from these experiences of pure contentless energy, the world of images
and categories in which we live our normal lives did indeed seem like a “plastic doll
world.”

At last, it came to me that one could never find God by intellectual probing and that
spiritual wealth could be gained only by allowing rich emotions to live within one’s
heart.

At the gas station, the men smiled at me with twinkles in their eyes, and I felt very good,
I saw smiling men’s faces in the sky and the stars twinkling in their eyes. I felt better than
I ever had in my life.

Every human being moving across that porch, every sparrow that flew, every branch
tossing in the wind, was caught in and was part of the whole mad ecstasy of lovliness, of
joy, of importance, of intoxication of life.

Having experienced the great power within me, having gone back over my life, and
having recognized the oneness of all things, I was ready for the greatest of all
experiences, the oneness with God.

He was taken back through the evolutionary process right down to single-cell life and
then back up through the layers and strata of oceanic, amphibian, and terrestrial
evolution.

I felt totally new, as though I’d just been born. Having had so much ego burned away had
cleared and refreshed my spirit. It was a grace that profoundly changed my life by giving
me a reason to override my scientific skepticism and accept the reality of the spirit.

I found myself discussing who I was, what I was doing, what I wanted from life, what life
meant to me, and a series of questions that I hadn’t been concerned with since I was a
teenager.

I had the feeling that I knew what the purpose and the reason for life was. The feelings
that I had at the time could not be very well described in psychiatric terms but best
described in either religious or poetic ones.

I had the most profound experience of my life. From this single experience, the whole
scope, depth and direction of my life have changed miraculously. Indeed a miracle has
happened to me.

I had traveled through all that immeasurable chain of dreams in 30 seconds. “My God!” I
cried, “I am in eternity.” In the presence of that first sublime revelation of the soul’s own
time, and her capacity for an infinite life, I stood trembling with breathless awe.

I saw that we were part of an enormous sinewy archetype, a monstrous rooted and
branching phenomenon, the primordial life force. I could see the buds opening constantly
to new existences and whole colorful worlds.

I spent a long time watching the play of life around me, listening to the gossip of trees,
insects and animals, discovering that there is one biological intelligence that expresses
herself through the various living forms.

I was deeply enmeshed in an abstract world of whirling geometrical forms and exuberant
colors that were brighter and more radiant than anything I have ever seen in my life. I
was fascinated and mesmerized by this incredible kaleidoscopic show. (eyes closed)

I went someplace overwhelmingly different that night, and to a large extent, stayed there
for the rest of my life. My transformation didn’t go through phrases. I was simply
somebody different after that.

LSD had flipped consciousness out beyond life into the whirling dance of pure energy,
where nothing existed except whirring vibrations and each illusory form was simply a
different frequency.

My consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole
universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they
might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty.

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.

Perfectly harmonious, luminously alive, the rose was looking at Aldous and Aldous was
looking at the rose. There was perfect communication between the two—and complete
silence.

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.

She had merged with and had become the consciousness of the Earth. She experienced
herself as the Earth, as a living, breathing organism. (Yes, the Earth is alive and so is
everything else in the universe, including the universe itself.)

The following day, he was in the calmest, most joyful and most balanced emotional
condition he had experienced in his entire life. After the session, his psychotic symptoms
never reappeared.

The mechanistic Newtonian model of the universe was steadily giving way to an
Einsteinian continuum. Everything in the universe, from galaxies to quarks, was seen to
be alive, evolving, sending out decipherable signals.

The thought occurred to me that since every minute of our lives was ruled by our
feelings, it was tragic we had so little contact with this part of ourselves where forgotten
feelings lay hidden.

The trees, shrubs and flowers seemed to be living jewelry, inwardly luminous like
intricate structures of jade, alabaster or corel and yet breathing and flowing with the same
life that was in me.

The walls were vibrating and the air was becoming three-dimensional with psychedelic
trails and energy patterns moving through it. Everything was coming alive with
psychedelic energy.

This recognition of the immortality of the divine in ourselves was not an intellectual
process but rather a deep wisdom which had expressed itself through feelings so intense,
I expect to remember them throughout life.

This was the chamber of the unconscious where lay recorded all our past experiences and
feelings, race history, universal wisdom, such power and strength and the depths and
mysteries of life itself.

We had entered the cosmic state. It was divine. It was expansive and harmonious and
beatific and one. I was alive! For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be
truly alive.

With all my being transfixed in the moment that answered the quest of my life, I
shuddered in my soul and with new velocities of divining sight, I saw our universe
sphering on its destiny.

All day, in wave after wave and from all directions of the mind’s compass, there has
repeatedly come upon me the sense of my original identity as one with the very fountain
of the universe. I have seen, too, that the fountain is its own source and motive and that
its spirit is an unbounded playfulness which is the many-dimensioned dance of life.

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.

Every object in the room was a radiant structure of atomic-God-particles. Radiating.
Matter did not exist. There was just this million-matrix lattice web of energies.
Shimmering. Alive. Interconnected in space-time. Everything hooked up in a cosmic
dance.

Everything was beautiful. Everything was right. Each smallest thing was uniquely
important, yet fitted perfectly into the whole. My little ego seemed removed and I felt I
saw clearly and purely for the first time in my life. I wept with relief and joy. I felt
unworthy of such blessedness.

He started experiencing dramatic scenes that seemed to be happening in another century
and in a foreign country. They involved powerful emotions and physical feelings and
seemed to have some deep and intimate connection to his life; yet none of them made any
sense in terms of his personal biography. (eyes closed)

I became conscious in myself of eternal life…I saw that all men are immortal: that the
cosmic order is such that all things work together for the good of each and all; that the
foundation principle of the world…is what we call love and that the happiness of each and
all is in the long run absolutely certain.

I cannot recall whether the revelation came suddenly or gradually; I only remember
finding myself in the very midst of those wonderful moments, beholding life for the first
time in all its young intoxication of loveliness, in its unspeakable joy, beauty and
importance.

I cannot say exactly what the mysterious change was. I saw no new thing, but I saw all
the usual things in a miraculous new light, in what I believe is their true light. I saw for
the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous, beyond any words of mine to describe, is
the whole of life.

I could feel deeply about other people. We felt connected. The side which had been
suppressing emotions did not seem to be the real one. I was in a higher and higher state of
exhilaration and awareness. Things people said had hidden meaning. They said things
that applied to life. Everything that was real seemed to make sense.

I felt entirely in harmony with myself and the whole world… for a few seconds of such
bliss one would gladly give up ten years of one’s life, if not one’s whole life. (One who
has not taken LSD will find that hard to believe. One who has taken LSD and cannot
relate to that did not have the real LSD experience.)

I had a great awareness of life, truth, and God. I went to church and suddenly all parts of
the service made sense. My senses were sharpened. I became fascinated by the little
insignificant things around me. There was an additional awareness of the world that
would do artists, architects, and painters good.

I had come to the conclusion, with all the feelings that I had at the time, that I was
more—more than I had always imagined myself, not just existing now, but I had existed
since the very beginning, from the lowest form of life to the present time, and that that
was the sum of my real experiences.

I looked in Paul’s eyes, and every edge, every line, every detail became electric and alive
with threads of color running through it, until the entire environment was neon
psychedelically pulsing crawlingly alive and lit. He looked into my eyes and smiled
inscrutably, as he lit up the environment.

I suddenly felt that everything was so much more real than it had been before. The grass
was greener, the sun was shining brighter, and people were more alive, I could see them
clearer. I could see the bad things and the good things and all that. I was much more
aware.

In a letter to Humphrey Osmond, Aldous Huxley described a mescaline experience,
during which he came to the conclusion that “I didn’t think I should mind dying, for
dying must be like this, a passage from the known, constituted by lifelong habits of
subject-object-existence, to the unknown cosmic fact.”

In sheer delight, I began to dance on this enchanted carpet (really a lawn) and through the
thin soles of my moccasins I could feel the ground becoming alive under my feet,
connecting me with the earth and the trees and the sky in such a way that I seemed to
become one body with my whole surroundings.

It was a beautiful feeling, a verification of what I hoped would be the ultimate truth and a
hopeful view of creation: Don’t worry about your body or about dying. That’s an illusion.
Consciousness cannot die. To me, this was mind-shattering, the ultimate revelation in my
life.

It was as if all the warm, sunny wonderful days of my childhood had been rolled into one
and this was the day. I felt like a child looking out of the window at the beautiful,
beautiful world. Never in all my life have I seen anything that looked as beautiful as this
particular day.

Most of the subjects felt that the psychedelic experience could sometimes supply a
guiding vision which provided direction and meaning for one’s life thereafter. They
mentioned intense emotions such as love, compassion, or empathy, and the recognition
that the mind can be and should be highly trained.

My consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole
universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they
might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or
two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory.

People came out of these sessions reeling with awe, overwhelmed by experiences of
oneness with God and all other beings, shaken to the depths of their nature by the
grandeur and power of the divine life-energy processes going on within their own
consciousness.

Physical distance was not experienced as such. A glance or visual impression felt like a
reaching out and amoeba-like engulfment. One lived in one’s glance, one extended
oneself in one’s visual projection, one lived and traveled with one’s eyes and view. (Eye
contact is very communicative.)

She saw the session as a very important event in her life. She felt as if she had begun a
completely new chapter: “I have been EXISTING all these years; I started to LIVE this
past Friday. I honestly feel that I am a new person, with a completely new new mind.
Even my body feels different; I am pain free.”

Somebody brought back sherbet. It was Haagen Dasz and I took one mouthful. It was
absolutely delicious. I thought it was the best thing I had ever tasted in my life. I could
taste every nuance of the flavor and also felt, really felt, the texture as I never had before
in my life.

There was unity and life and the exquisite love that filled my being was unbounded. My
awareness was acute and complete. I saw God and all the saints and I knew the truth. I
felt myself flowing into the cosmos, levitated beyond all restraint, liberated to swim in
the blissful radiance of the heavenly visions.

This clear-light experience, as Leary termed it, was a true communion of the soul. I felt
as if my consciousness and entire being had broken up with the brittleness of linear ego
thought, while the person that filled the vacuum bore the same body of experience with a
totally new vitality and an understanding of life’s true value.

“This is an experience of life itself, of existence”, I fairly shouted with unintelligible joy
at my state. It was one of exultation, wonder and awe, amazement over Being. I laughed
until tears came to my eyes. “This is fantastic! Beyond words!” That it was—and is—and
ever shall be.

To concoct anything by way of description that would even hint at the magnitude, the
sense of ultimate reality…this seems such an impossible task. The knowledge which has
infused and affected every aspect of my life came instantaneously and with such
complete force of certainty that it was impossible, then or since, to doubt its validity.

A curtain was lifted and I saw the magnitude of life and was totally absorbed by it. The
moment lasted just a minute or two, but it embraced a lifetime. I suddenly understood the
cliché of oneness, that everything in the world is connected and part of a Whole, and that
that interlinkage is a truer characterization of the relationship of things than that of me
and my body being separate from all other men and their bodies.

I had the feeling of going deep within myself to the self stripped bare of all pretense and
falseness. It was the point where a man could stand firm with absolute integrity—
something more important than mere physical life. The white light experience was of
supreme importance—absolutely self-validating and something worth staking your life
on and putting your trust in.

I kept getting visions of the “golden dawning” of consciousness in man which would
enable us to get things whole, to see life’s miracles, to know that indeed all is in
everything from blade of grass to man and woman. It was a vision of some ideal
existence in which there was only the sense of wonder and all fear gone, of a certain state
of being that was there not to be judged, but simply to be.

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. (eyes closed)

I thought about the things I had studied in religion, and about how much more of it
seemed to make sense now. I had somehow touched what Jesus, Buddha, and others had
been talking about. Formerly confusing phrases out of various scriptures came to me and
each seemed perfectly beautifully clear. I became aware of a harmony and wholeness to
life that had previously eluded me. Disconnectedness was very clearly illusory….

Previously, I had forgotten the childish joy of simply being alive. Tripping makes you
feel the way an infant must feel, in the absence of discomfort, simply being: energetic,
open, interested. Tripping lent to my life the grace of fairy tales, where everything is
right and appropriate and satisfying. Psychedelic drugs engender storybook experiences:
one is tremendously cozy, delighted, enchanted, lucky.

The acid took me directly to my lucid, “higher self.” It was as though I’d arrived at my
true nature: sincere, clean of purpose, and more useful and wonderful than I’d ever felt in
my life. I can’t fathom what it was that made me feel so “perfect” and “enlightened” or
what specific obstacle the chemical had overcome to enable me to feel so wholesomely
fabulous. I felt a sweeping reassurance that everything was all right after all.

The ordinary world was erased, it was expanded, enlivened and made infinitely more
interesting. For example, I became totally engrossed in contemplating the fascinating
edges of weaving around edges and radiating out from them. The telephone was a
veritable marvel of diamond studded, gem-encrusted, crystalline sculpture, yet itself also
moving, breathing, changing, as if it were alive.

The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and
colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had seen with my
own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing clearly, whereas ordinary vision gives us an
imperfect view. I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the
imperfect images of everyday life.

The world slowly formed…life evolved…the world aged…man evolved…man
aged…thought pulled itself together…slowly…slowly…no way to hurry it along…slowly it
got around to me, sprawled on my back, staring open-eyed into the sun, on a beach at Big
Sur, and them…wham…and I slid right out of existence again, back to the beginning…for
eternities, until I fell into time again and saw the illusion of ocean-sky-sand.

To my utter astonishment, I relived my own conception and various stages of my
embryological development. While I was experiencing all the complexities of the
embryogenesis, with details that surpassed the best medical handbooks, I was flashing
back to an even more remote past, visualizing some phylogenetic vestiges from the life of
my animal ancestors.

When I realized that I was being born again, that life goes on and on and on, the feeling
was overwhelming. I was filled with confidence that it was okay to die, because the
consciousness that inhabits the flesh has a higher destiny. It never began and it won’t end.
It just keeps going. Then I was struck with wave after wave of value wisdom, as though
the forms behind human spirituality were hitting me for the first time.

All patients, said Grof, apparently moved through similar levels during their sessions.
They passed first through aspects of their own life experiences—birth, childhood,
adulthood—and then into experiential realms described in mystical traditions,
experiences of ego-death and rebirth followed by “satori”—the dissolution of ego-
boundaries and the loss of duality, an unfolding awareness of cosmic unity, a sense of
Oneness.

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.

That first experience with psilocybin had an immeasurable effect on my life. It was
radically and totally different, yet during the course of the experience I felt closer to my
true self than I had ever been and more aware of my innermost feelings and thoughts. I
had also been fully and intensely aware of people and things around me and did not lose
the reality perceptions that govern our ordinary world. Rather, ordinary perception was
enriched and enlivened beyond comparison.

A new life began for me.
Aldous was looking at my hair and seeing in it the very mystery and wonder of life.
ecstatic vision—For the first time in my life I literally saw “the world in a grain of sand.”
Everything I perceived seemed much more beautiful, brighter, alive, warmer.
Everything was alive, pulsing, everything connected.
Everything was given a glowing life.
Everything was quivering with life, even inanimate objects.
God and brotherhood become living, palpable realities.
Her face was transfigured by a kind of supernatural beauty, her body glowed with life.
His experience had brought first deliverance and then meaning into his life.
I became aware that life for me had acquired an added zest.
I experienced an ever greater sense of an eternal dimension to life.
I felt both serene and exhilarated as never before in my life.
I felt I could capture the secret of life.
I felt like a surfer riding with great joy the wave of life.
I felt profound empathy with life, strong ecological awareness,
I felt that in a second I had lived through a century.
I felt the life in the earth.
I had a palpable intuitive sense of life after death.
I had known the living spirit of nature.
I never experienced anything quite so overwhelming in my whole life.
I saw that I didn’t need any answer to the mystery of life because there is no question.
I wanted to bring myself closer to the higher sources of life.
I was conscious of my brain as alive, cells incredibly active.
I was having the ride of my life.
I was more alive than I’ve ever been in my life.
I was so exalted by life that I felt I was not touching the ground.
It was the most satisfying experience of my life.
It was the richest event of my life.
It was truly the most beautiful and fulfilling day of my life.
LSD gave a sense of bliss and oneness with life.
LSD seemed to herald an alternative, a new way of life. A new sense of oneself appears.
She relived with intense emotion past events.
The days of my life had been mostly death! Was I now alive?
The colors in the room were vibrating, alive, glowed.
The past was the property of another life. (It’s a new life now.)
The rose came back into my life.
The tree assumed a deep archetypal meaning and became the Tree of Life.
The trees seemed as alive as the animals.
The universe was experienced as living and not a dead machine.
The vision changed my life.
Their minds were enlightened in an immediate experience of eternal life.
This tour was the most extraordinary journey of my life.
Under LSD. I relived the strongest, most intense emotional experiences conceivable.

a convincing sense of personally remembering and reliving something that one had
experienced previously

an entirely new outlook on life, whereby everything becomes transformed and made of
the Glory of God

a far away land where the mysteries of life could be explained (That far away “land” is
always right here and now.)

an immediate awareness of things as they live and move, as distinct from the mere grasp
of ideas and feelings about things which are the dead symbols of a living reality

an increasing awareness of the spiritual dimension in one’s life and in the universal
scheme of things

a sense of certainty that this knowledge is ultimately more relevant and “real” than the
perceptions and beliefs we share in everyday life

a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have
this, but the consciousness that he has it already

an upsurge of unconscious material into consciousness, repressed memories relived with
remarkable clarity

amino acids, the basic building blocks of life, protein molecules combining into new
forms

awareness of the process of photosynthesis in the leaves, the mysterious process that is
the basis of all life on our planet

beyond the narrow boundaries of the physical organism and limitations of their own life
spans

developed an affirmative attitude toward the totality of existence and a general
acceptance of whatever happens in life as being ultimately all right

discovered in her first experience that life is about expressing what she calls the Real
Self, a concept which she had not previously explored

discovers a world of sublimely beautiful landscapes, of living architectures and of heroic
figures (eyes closed)

drugs—part of the search for the meaning of life, as tools to reach new levels of
awareness, for revelation

episodes of oceanic ecstasy with a mystical connection to life and to the cosmic creative
force

far-reaching insights into one’s own self and into one’s relationship with others, an
insight into “the nature of the universe and the purpose of life”

feeling of reliving memories from the lives of his or her ancestors, drawing on the racial
and collective unconscious

gave him certain inner enduring feelings that seemed to play some significant part in his
pattern of living

glimpses something so profound that certain “facts of life” prior to the experience are no
longer exclusively true

heedless to the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future, can’t be
happy until he lives with nature in the present above time

holiness a wise innocence, a relaxed intensity, a humorous humility, a supernatural
naturalness, a perpetual uncalculated life in the present

in closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this
moment. Here, life is alive.

in the very midst of those wonderful moments, beholding life for the first time in all it
young intoxication of loveliness, in its unspeakable joy, beauty and importance

increased perceptual sensitivity and portentousness, intensification of interpersonal
experience, feelings of unique insight into life

insights into aspects of people’s lives on psychedelic drugs that you could never have
known and they turned out to be true

instilling a sense of meaning in his personal existence and a feeling that since there is
meaning in life, there is meaning in death

knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universe and impersonal life that lives
itself through each of us

life an indiscriminate, unsupervised, uncontrolled 2 billion year old energy dance with
ecstatic communion as its goal

LSD a “psychic broom” to sweep out the cobwebs and bring alive those senses so little
used that they are all but atrophied

make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and
significant

makes possible an ever deepening knowledge of the mystery of human—that mystery
which merges ultimately and becomes one with the Mystery of Life itself

man and cosmos as a single living organism, as a harmonious process of interrelated
events

memories from the lives of the individual’s ancestors or experiences of various
phylogenetic crises (eyes closed)

moments of vivid awareness, of intense realization of and absorption in the immediacy of
life

non-ordinary states of consciousness which allow us to see the guiding forces of our lives
much more clearly

patterns of leaves and flowers, with recurrences and varieties reminiscent of the living
geometries of the Other World

people who had evolved past the ego, who were living beyond “the persona, the role or
mask which we normally are compelled to exhibit socially”

philosophizing on subjects pertaining to life in a manner which, at times, appears to be
out of keeping with his intellectual level

produces an intellectual ecstasy and understanding that defies description—past
philosophical reading will take on living meaning

provided the subject with a living reality and a directional frame of reference previously
unknown

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

release from life lived in a vicious circle, trying to solve a false problem, a self-frustrating
activity

reliving of emotionally important events in the individuals’ lives, from early childhood,
later life or even the remote past

restoring man to a dynamic communion with his own sundered psyche, with his old sense
of community and with the whole of life and the universe

said to himself, at that second, that for the infinite happiness he had felt that second really
might well be worth the whole of life

something not of this world, something alive in spirit and in truth a sense of harmony and
wholeness

surfaces swelling and expanding from bright modes of energy that vibrated with a
continuously changing, patterned life

that branch of metaphysics termed ontology or the metaphysics of Being: the study of
life’s essential nature

that one should be concerned about the quality of the experience of life rather than the
quantity of external possessions and achievements

that prolonged concentration was a prominent characteristic in the lives of creative
thinkers

that self-discovery could be pleasant, that philosophy was fun, that science could be a
pagan love of life, that revelation was joyful, the positive spirit of the 1960’s

that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game and that there is no
separate “you” to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed

that view of life or mode of living and knowing, which lies at the heart of the psychedelic
experience

the chasm that opens between our present ego-restricted lives and the wider seeing which
is possible

the cultivation of the inner life in response to the hunger for expression of the nonrational
aspects of the psyche, new forms of music, art, poetry, dance, mysticism

the ego-loss experience being a temporary ending of game life, a passing from one state
of consciousness into another

the eternal and purposeless background of human life (Purposeless doesn’t mean
meaningless.)

the fear that death will take us into everlasting nothingness, like being buried alive
forever, darkness without end—as if that could be some sort of experience

the highest beautitude to which life can attain and yet, simultaneously, the root and
ground of one’s being

the hitherto unconscious unity of life—a unity grounded in the fact that God is man’s
interior and not exterior center

the isolation of man-as-ego from his organic life on the one hand and from his fellow
man on the other

the moment of awakening, when the voyager discovers the wonder and awe of the divine
life process

the possibilities that psychedelic experiences can offer in terms of self-exploration,
finding the roots of one’s emotional symptoms and solving life’s problems

the realization of essential Being, of consciousness and identification with the Universal
Life

the relation of the stranger and more remote areas of the mind with all kinds of cultural,
religious and philosophical aspects of life

the relatively crude and rigid structure of verbal rules and the infinitely more fluid and
complex structure of the brain, the organism and the field in which they live

the sense of an intense gratitude for the privilege of being alive in a universe as
extraordinary as this, as altogether wonderful

the subconscious minds of people which LSD is able to penetrate and to bring to life as
experienced reality

the truth that the creative and meaningful life is impossible without some realization of
union with God

the unreal ego, perpetually distracted from the only source of real satisfaction, the living
moment

the value of the transcendental aspect of such experiences and the utmost importance of
the spiritual dimensions in human life

to be aware of life, of experience as it is at this moment, without any judgments or ideas
about it

to make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and
significant

to perceive his life in these symbolic terms, in terms of a myth or some rite of passage
(eyes closed)

to regain the former lost paradise of close contact with nature and the world of living
things, including himself

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

undergone a series of evolutionary metamorphoses carrying them from protoplasm up to
man and experiencing all the stages on life’s way

visions of archetypal forms, deities and demons, and complex mythological sequences
that seem to have a life of their own (eyes closed)

vivid and complex sequences from other cultures and other historical periods that have all
the qualities of memories, a reliving of episodes from previous lifetimes (eyes closed)

vivid reenactments of traumatic or unusually pleasant memories from infancy, childhood
or later periods of life

will restore awareness of this ignored aspect of life, for consciousness is thereby led back
to its organic roots

a dramatic shift in our value system, from the emphasis on mechanical prolongation of
life to concern about the quality of dying and death (This refers to people who are really
dying and take LSD. It is also related to the assisted-suicide issue.)

activities of those circuits of the brain that lead to philosophic inquiry, scientific
curiosity, somatic awareness, hedonistic lifestyle, humorous detachment, high-altitude
tolerant perceptions, chaotic erotics, ecological sensitivity, utopian communality

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

one myth after another, lived out and traced back to the basic flash in the silent,
impersonal, whirring of primal vibrations, beyond sense, beyond cell, beyond seed,
beyond life (eyes closed)

said that the process of breathing is the connected link between conscious and
subconscious and that breath is the key to the mystery of life, to that of the body as well
as that of the spirit

that the truly inward source of my life was never born, that it has always remained inside
in somewhat the same way as the life remains in the tree, though the fruits may come and
go. Outwardly, I am one apple among many. Inwardly, I am the tree.

the liberated soul who takes on in the spirit of play the task, which others view as a
matter of life or death (The liberated one knows that it’s life and death or life-death-life-
death, not life or death.)

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 sense of perceiving truths not known before…insights into depths of truth unplumbed
by the discursive intellect…the mysteries of life become lucid…illuminations, revelations,
full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain

the subject so totally re-experiencing events from his past as to lose all contact with the
present and relive, as child or even infant, the significant occurrences most relevant and
crucial to his present (nondrug-state) situation

the very life of the universe, which is complete at every moment and does not need to
justify itself by aiming at something beyond (The universe is infinite and there is nothing
beyond.)

to explore the underlying mystery of the spirit which lives and moves in forms, the
underlying rhythm of the mysterious spirit that manifests itself in every aspect of our
universe

assertions of having known the origin and goal of history, of having found the answer to
the ancient query, “What am I?”, of having intuited the harmonious structure of the
universe, of having experienced the primacy of love and the brotherhood of man, or of
having realized the reality of life that transcends temporal death.

greater spontaneity of emotional expression, reduction in depression and anxiety, less
distance in interpersonal relations, more openness to experience, increased aesthetic
appreciation, deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life, and an enhanced sense of unity
with nature and humanity

through into another dimension…billions-of-protein-file-cards, flicking through,
confronting me with endless library of events, forms, visual perceptions, memories, not
abstract, but pulsing…now…experiential…a billion years of coded experience, classified,
preserved in brilliant living clarity that makes ordinary reality seem like an out-of-focus,
tattered, jerky, fluttering of peep-show cards, tawdy and worn (eyes closed)

an amazingly intense feeling of aliveness
a change in the flow of life-purpose, this “change of life flow”
a feeling of knowing the ultimate meaning of life itself
a heightened sense of the drama of life
a joyful expression and celebration of life
a key to the great mysteries of life and death
a mystery that lies at the heart of all our lives
a mystical experience of unity with all of life
a new and broader life
a new experience which will enlarge our horizon and give new meaning to life
a new manifestation of life
a potentially life-changing opportunity
a potentially life-changing process
a radical spiritual transformation in the life of the individual
a revelation of dimensions that one is not aware of in everyday life
a sense of how a more fulfilling life might be possible
a spontaneous, unforced and unblocked flowing of life
an unbounded playfulness which is the many-dimensioned dance of life
a universal vision, a universal vision of life
a way of life based in nature that is lived organically as a flowing growing process
a wholly different and profound dimension of life
a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas
accelerated personality change, rapid learning, sudden life changes
appreciation of a simple way of life
awe-struck in this moment of my life taking place outside of time
become more intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world
beyond life, existence, you, me, everything
birth into newer and more enchanting life
bringing a new reverence for life, a renaissance of belief in the essential goodness in man
called this experience the most interesting and thought-provoking of his life
can be of immense value to us and of great importance in changing our lives
can give life a new focus and meaning
changed hearts and reformed lives
cleanses us of the bad habits we have accumulated by our false attitude to life
connecting himself with the living core of the planet
consciousness, that essence which pervades all our actions in life
death a continuation of what had been the hidden aspect of the experience of life
death the transformation and renewal of life, the shuffling of the pack for a new deal
dimensions beyond anything encountered in everyday life
direct contact with life
direct contact with life-process forms and images
direct contact with life, to know life apart from “interruptions”
direct experience of the basic energy of life
discovered their immortality and eternal life
discovering unsuspected dimensions of life
DNA memory back to the dawn of life
dramatic life-change (as a result of LSD)
eternal life
eternal life in heaven
experiences of “cosmic consciousness” in which the sense of life becomes perfectly clear
experiences of the divine that are the living fount of all religion
experiencing insights that resulted in positive changes in their lives
exploring a meaningful area of our lives
faith in the energy, the energy that is us and supports all life
getting new meaning in life, LSD the greatest thing that ever happened to me
had an experience that completely turned his life around
has found the answer to the whole mystery of life
have declared it to be the most significant experience of their lives
her lost heavenly fire which comes to life again
intense and life changing religious experiences
internal life processes
life-changing growth experiences
life’s infinitely rich responsibilities and our joyful responsibility to explore them
made him a new man and radically changed his way of life
make direct contact with the life process
merging with energy flux, seeing all life forms as physical waves, existence as energy
moves the individual’s life philosophy in the direction of the mystical worldview
music and love and beauty and serenity and fun and the seed of life
nonrational stirrings of the inner life the root of religion
objects which begin to live, to have another, a deeper meaning
one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers
one with the pulsing of all life
profound healing and life-transforming experiences
reaching for the generator of all life and knowledge
realms imbued with meaning, filled with life, laughter, love
reawakened us to the innate joy and playfulness that is also part of life
rebirth into eternal life
reliving of various emotionally relevant episodes from infancy, childhood or later life
renewed life and color
reveals the secret of life and therein lies its spiritual value and its universal appeal
searching for the Reality of life
see them shining, alive, glorified (people or objects)
so intensely alive
so intensely alive as never before
supreme insight into the mysteries of life
that freshness of life
that they may release the life of God which is in them
that view of life or mode of living, which lies at the heart of the psychedelic experience
this taste of primeval nature and the life force at its most stark and raw
the awareness of living interpenetrating light
the beauty of color, the way it glows and throbs and lives
the best lunch I have ever eaten in my entire life
the blissful egoless states a child experiences during the early period of its life
the consciousness of all living matter
the critical role of visionary experiences in the spiritual life of humanity
the culminating experience of a lifetime, man’s redemption from death
the dance of life
the deepest religious (spiritual) experience of my life
the direct experience of their own inner life (or your inner life)
the direct visual confrontation with the unity of all men, the unity of life
the discovery of new phases of mental life
the divinity of all manifestations of life
the drug experience a means to a fuller existence, to a life more innately human
the earth-shaking discovery which revolutionizes human thought and life
the emphasis upon the play of light and color, as though light were alive
the enchanted life I led under the influence of the drug
the essence of life, the ineffable
the eternity of life
the expansion of the immediate sensory life
the expansion of time in which I lived
the experience of our own existence as living organisms rather than as personalities
the flow of life
the fundamental rhythm which is the very texture of life
the grand prophet of a wider life
the higher meanings of life
the highest level of life energy
the Holy Spirit, the life force
the hunger for a religious commitment to give meaning to life
the implicit concord and harmony which underlies the explicit discord and conflict of life
the importance of the spiritual and philosophical quest in human life
the infinite reality in whose consciousness and being we live and move
the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids
the intense feelings of exuberance, joyous aliveness and other gripping emotions
the joys of being in harmony with the beat of life
the key to the great mysteries of life and death
the life-changing therapeutic effects of the psilocybin experience
the living mystery and inexplicable marvel of mere existence
the living peace of the Clear Light
the living reality, knowable only by personal experience
the living reality of God as the Eternal Now
the living soul of nature with which I communed
the living truth
the living universe
the loss of personality the only true life (loss of ego)
the magical immediacy and connection with life
the more intense reality of the inner life
the most astounding experience of my life
the most exciting educational experience of your life
the most heavenly music I have ever heard in my entire life, incredibly beautiful
the most important experience of his life
the most important, profound and intense experience of his life
“the most meaningful day of their lives”
the most profound and moving experience of my life
the most profound educational experience in my life
the most remarkable experience of my life
the mysterious welding of amino-acid strands that creates the human vine of organic life
the new spiritual life into which he has been initiated
the one thing that makes spiritual life possible and meaningful—union with God
the power of these drugs to change beliefs and transform ways of life
the primordial cradle of all life
the purity and exquisite life and light within death
the recognition of life in death
the relevance of mythology for psychology, religion and human life
the remarkable range and richness of the inner life of normal individuals
the revealed mystery of life
the rhythm of life
the rich inner life
the search within one’s consciousness for the Self, which is life
the sensation of life as pure process, process without source or destination
the static condition of life before we are aware
the therapeutic potential of the reliving of emotionally relevant episodes from childhood
the translation of symbol into living experience
the universal life-force
the universal life which lives itself through each of us
the universe a living presence
the unknown, the real present in which we live
the very depths of the roots of the religious life in the unconscious
the whole mad ecstasy of loveliness, of joy, of importance, of intoxication of life
the wonder of life and the glory and mystery of being
to “break through” to some new way of life and feeling
to celebrate life, to know that we are eternal
to contact incredible diversity, beauty, living, pulsating meaning of the sense organs
to enrich their religious life experientially
to experience a condensed replay of their entire lives
to harmonize his life with the Reality he senses
to have true life
to move beyond the ego which holds onto what is predictable in life
to participate in a recapturing of the evolutionary sequences of life (eyes closed)
to pull back the veil and see for a second a fragment of the energy process, the life power
to pull back the veil and see the energy dance, the life power
to revive a sense of the sacred in modern life
to see his life in terms of some universal myth or legend
to see life in the totality of its cyclical patterns and interdependences
to understand that death is false and life is immortal
touching the source of life’s energy
transmits a new understanding of life
vivid complex reliving of emotionally relevant memories
waking up from the illusion of ego, from the dream of worldly life
walls glowing, seething with color, peaches glowing, are alive, the beautiful peaches
was glory enough for a lifetime
will regard this experience as one of the most profoundly meaningful events of his life