Mind, Brain, Head
A confrontation with divinity, your own higher intelligence, is going to change you.
You’ll face blazing activation of your brain.
A person in the psychedelic state can perceive much more in other human beings than he
can when he is in his everyday mind.
A thousand sensual feelings are emitted and at once sending out waves of climaxes which
thrill the mind to even greater heights.
All of our experiences are stored in the mind and under certain favorable circumstances,
may be completely recalled.
All visions are created by your mind. Your consciousness is creator, performer and
spectator of the “retinal circus.” (eyes closed)
Altered states of consciousness seem to be doors to ways of using the mind that are better
than those most of us follow most of the time.
Anyone who has learned to pay attention to and trust his intuitions, knows that his mind
contains a source of information about reality quite apart from his senses.
As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater open-
mindedness even to conceive of their existence.
As the gates of the unconscious mind open, a wide variety of repressed emotions and
recollections can be released into conscious awareness.
At the antipodes of the mind, we are more or less completely free of language, outside the
system of conceptual thought.
At the extreme, the individual consciousness seems to encompass the totality of existence
and identify with the Universal mind.
Brain-activating drugs expose people to powerful, mind-blowing experiences that shatter
conventional ideas about reality.
Brilliant minds, some of the world’s leading scientists and artists, engaged in discovering
these drugs and applying them to a whole range of things.
Certain people are increasingly changing interests, from possessions to states of mind or
from endurance to intensity of experience.
Consciousness is much more than mere cellular activity in the brain, but rather a chain of
reactions along a continuum of mindfulness distributed throughout the universe.
Consciousness is seen as an integral part of the universal fabric, certainly not limited to
the activities contained inside our skulls.
consciousness of the Universal Mind—This is one of the most profound and total
experiences observed in LSD sessions.
Countless events from the past are registered in your brain and can be flashed into
consciousness.
Creativity is often associated with psychosis, alienation and delinquency, the flaky artist,
the mad scientist, even Einstein as lovable, absent-minded clown.
“Drug” means positive things, possible growth, opening up the mind, beauty, sensual
awareness, religious revelation.
Drugs like LSD reveal something of the otherwise dimly visible expanse of the mind and
suggest that its vast potential is scarcely to be comprehended.
During the psychedelic experience, the heavy shackles of the mind are loosened,
consciousness free to move in any direction.
Each of us potentially has access to vast realms of knowledge through his own mind,
including secrets of the universe known so far only to a very few.
Education has never been an instrument to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind
them. We think we want creative children, but what do we want them to create?
Everything we experience is stored in our brains with photographic details. (So is
everything that has ever been experienced by anyone or anything.)
Flowers are almost as transporting as precious stones, reminding us of what’s always
been there, preternaturally bright, colorful and significant, at the back of our minds.
For the most creative research, men of science must be trusted and encouraged to let their
minds wander unsystematically without any pressure for results.
Freed from conventional process, the mind can produce more vivid, more original images
and thoughts.
Go beyond your secular tribal mind to contact the many levels of divine energy which lie
within your consciousness.
Go inside. Go into your own brain. Start using the untapped region of your head. Here is
the real frontier, the real challenge, the real opportunity.
Here we could travel into our own minds to remote and hitherto inaccessible realms
within.
Human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of
its senses as by external objects whose presence the mind reveals.
Huxley described the experience at its best as a “gratuitous grace,” providing access to
what he called “Mind-at-Large,” beyond the “reducing valve” of the ordinary egoic mind.
I belong to one of the oldest trade unions in human civilization—the alchemists of the
mind, the scholars of consciousness. (That was Timothy Leary.)
If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I
would let you know.
If purified, the individual mind can identify itself with the Universal Mind, the inner
consciousness.
If you want to get the plain truth, be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict
between right and wrong is the sickness of the mind.
In psychology, the psychedelics have provided the key to the unimagined vastness of the
unconscious mind.
In the psychedelic state, our mind seems to exist outside the scope of ordinary rational
consciousness.
In the right psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a
genuine religious experience.
In the 20th century, mythology speaks almost a dead language, for the modern mind
knows of no other truth higher than historical fact. Myth is therefore rejected.
In this state of knowledge of God, the mind is enlightened from out of the depths of
divine wisdom which defy our scrutiny.
Intelligence increase drugs like LSD enormously accelerate, extensify, intensify the
human brain function.
It has a way of being able to turn one’s mind inside out and dissolving what seemed to be
the most oppressive human problems into questions like “Why is a mouse when it spins?”
It is a total clarity and presence of mind, actively passive, wherein events come and go
like reflections in a mirror: nothing is reflected except what IS.
It’s a state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily without the
sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.
Knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego,
into his consciousness. It is the knowledge of the intrinsic significance of each existent.
Leary links the psychedelic experience to Oriental mysticism as well as to the most up-to-
date concepts of modern biology and brain physiology.
Let the mind alone so that if functions in the integrated and spontaneous way that is
natural to it.
Like breathing, music and other forms of sound technology have been used for millennia
as powerful mind-altering tools.
LSD can be not just a “mind-or consciousness-expanding” drug, but a “conscience-
expanding” one as well.
LSD is a kind of cure for intellectualism, a remedy for minds hung up in categories. We
feel like a medical team in a plague area. (That was Timothy Leary.)
LSD might be the brain’s experience of itself when all the electrical circuits are turned on
at once.
LSD phenomena are extremely interesting material for a deeper understanding of the
mind, the nature of man and human society.
LSD propels them into hitherto unmapped regions of the mind while the mystical lore of
the East serves as a guide through this virgin territory.
LSD provides unrivaled insights into the dynamics of emotional disorders and the
functioning of the human mind in general.
LSD remains one of the most valuable tools in understanding the functioning of the
human mind.
LSD, used improperly as in the infamous CIA experiments, can sabotage the brain so
totally that “mind murder” seems the best word for such unethical experimentation.
Man as ego does not see nature at all. For man as ego is man identifying himself or his
mind, his total awareness, with the narrowed and exclusive style of attention.
Most of the great world religions were based on inner exploration employing brain-
changing vegetables.
Most truly great minds prefer nature to human society. The latter limits. The former
liberates.
My brain is God; your brain is too. Let’s learn to practice the technologies of God with
the grace, compassion and skill which the Judeo-Christian Gods so obviously lack.
No one should take LSD unless he’s well prepared, knows what he’s getting into and is
ready to go out of his mind. Be with someone you trust emotionally and spiritually.
Nothing exists except undulating energy and flowing consciousness upon which the
grasping mind imposes categories which have nothing to do with the energy-flow.
Now the chemical messiah has come which has the ability to awaken this sleeping
realization of mind potential in even the most skeptical.
On a fundamental level, the human mind is connected with the Infinite; psychedelics
simply made manifest this basic truth.
On occasion, LSD subjects have stated that they experienced themselves as neurons in
their own brains.
One cannot act creatively except on the basis of stillness, of having a mind that is from
time to time capable of stopping thinking.
One could look at a pebble for days, and in a sufficiently enlightened state of mind, there
would always be more to be learned.
One will never find consciousness by looking down a microscope at brain cells or
anything else.
Only when the mind and soul is empty, like clear glass, does it let through the light of
God.
Our academic community is predominantly consciousness-naive. Studies of human
nature and the human mind which omit non-ordinary states are clearly incomplete.
Our meddling intellect, that part of the mind which uses language to take the mystery out
of reality, misshapes the beauteous forms of things.
Our potential is never closely approached and the mind ordinarily functions at a fraction
of its full effectiveness.
Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of
intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationship within a pattern.
Psychedelic drugs afford the best access yet to the contents and processes of the human
mind.
Psychedelic drugs manifest universal native capacities of the mind and permanent
possibilities of human experience.
Psychology, that discipline which treats of mind’s nature, man’s view of himself, is
always the last to adapt to a new world view.
Some areas of brain function cannot be assessed without using these “keys” to open the
locks.
Terrence McKenna, among others, has speculated that the evolution from prehuman to
human was the result of synergy of mind-altering plants and the human mind.
That universe within our skulls is infinitely more than the flimsy game world which our
words and minds create.
The activated human brain experiences the world the way it’s described by the equations
of Einstein and quantum mechanics.
The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we
can program.
The brain’s enormous potential is contracted. (We must expand our consciousness in
order to reach our potential.)
The consciousness-changing drugs give a glimpse into the mind. One could almost say
that LSD gives a glimpse into the very soul of man, taps a universal knowing.
The content of LSD sessions entails simultaneous perception of many dimensions and
levels of the mind.
The devil is the part of your own mind that wants you to cop out and sell short your
timeless divinity.
The discovery of mind-expanding, mind-blowing, mind-bending and mind-transcending
properties of drugs seems to go back to the New Stone Age, if not earlier.
The disease that is crushing and oppressing this planet is man’s possessive and
manipulatory symbolic mind.
The Eastern mind has no difficulty in conceiving of a consciousness without an ego.
Consciousness is deemed capable of transcending its ego condition.
The ecstatic trip can be diverted, the person’s mind ready to explain away paradise and
pull him back to the old egocentric game.
The ego is the cause of all the wars inside the human mind and by implication, also of all
the wars in the world-at-large.
The ego is the social image or role with which the mind is shamed into identifying itself,
since we are taught to act the part which society wants us to play.
The ego senses the threat implied to its domain by the fact of an unconscious mind that
can perceive an internal reality.
The either/or insistence of the Western mind is abandoned in favor of a both/and
approach to life.
The game is about to be changed, ladies and gentlemen. Man is about to make use of that
fabulous electrical network he carries around in his skull.
The individual consciousness seems to encompass the totality of existence and identify
with the Universal Mind.
The intelligent use of psychedelic drugs required a new profession, unfamiliar to the
Western world, the brain guide. The multiple-reality coach.
The LSD gamble is that risk men have faced for thousands of years if they wished to
pursue what lay beyond their minds.
The logical conceptual mind turns on itself, recognizing the foolish inadequacy of the
flimsy systems it imposes on the world.
The mind comes to rest and notices the rhythm, becoming aware that the timeless intent
of the process is fulfilled at each instant.
The mind grows clearer, more luminous, more peaceful. Insight becomes more
penetrating.
The mind is a tiny fragment of the brain-body complex. It is the game-playing fragment.
(The mind in this case means the ego.)
The mind is the key to life, for under illusion, it creates confusion and when clarified it
reveals the Buddha nature.
The mind must stop trying to act upon its stream of experiences, from the standpoint of
the idea of itself which we call the ego.
The “mind seeking to know the mind” or the “self seeking to control the self” has been
defeated out of existence and exposed for the abstraction which it always was.
The mind that needs to be controlled is the one that does the controlling. (The mind, in
this case, is the ego.)
The molecular processes of life are a billion years older than the learned conceptual
mind.
The more expanded your consciousness, the farther out you can move beyond your mind,
the deeper, the richer, the longer and more meaningful your sexual communion.
The mystical experience is neither a particular state of mind nor mere blankness of mind.
(It’s not a “particular” state of mind which can be described.)
The person who takes the drug undertakes a journey into his or her psyche. For this
reason, LSD is of deep relevance for understanding the human mind and psychotherapy.
The physical boundaries we perceive between ourselves and the rest of the universe may
best be understood as more illusory than real, as products of our minds.
The psychedelic experience provides nothing less than a means of truly going “beyond
Freud” and to venture into these previously inaccessible regions of mind.
The psychedelic state is not a “toxic psychosis” but a “journey into the unconscious or
superconscious mind.”
The psychedelics ain’t junk. The psychedelics are holy sacraments! Everybody should
take acid at least once to straighten-out their heads.
The Puritans killed the senses. English culture killed emotion. And now it was necessary
to dynamite the concrete lid, to “blow the mind” as the LSD followers call it.
The real, unborn mind is ten thousand times more clear than a mirror and more
inexpressibly marvelous.
The reason why precious stones are precious is precisely this, that they remind us of this
strange other world at the back of our heads.
The revolution in the study of the mind is at hand. That revolution can effect an evolution
of mind also.
The rift between God and nature would vanish is we knew how to experience nature,
because what keeps them apart is not a difference of substance but a split in the mind.
The rigidity of the normal mind was so different from the complete openness of the
psychedelic situation.
The scientist of consciousness must have courage. He must embark on a course of
planfully and deliberately going out of his mind. This is no field for the faint of heart.
The singing is good, but under the influence of the mushroom, you think it is infinitely
tender and sweet. It is as though you were hearing it with your mind’s ear.
The subtle film that separates our everyday lives from the amazing world of our
unconscious mind becomes transparent and finally breaks down.
The Tao doesn’t “know” how it produces the universe just as we don’t “know” how we
construct our brains.
The tendency of LSD seems to be to switch the operations of the mind from the verbal
association stream of thought to intuitive perception of images and forms.
The ultimate pleasure organ is the brain, an enormous 30 billion-cell hedonic gland
waiting to be activated.
The ultimate reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner
light of even the most cruelly tormented mind.
The use of mind-altering drugs as religious sacraments was not restricted to a particular
time and place, but characterized nearly every society on the planet
The whole idea of purifying the mind is irrelevant and confusing because “our own
nature is fundamentally clear and pure.”
There exists an abundance of evidence to indicate that mind-changing drugs have
importantly affected the course of human history.
There is generally a dramatic redefinition of his or her concepts regarding the dimensions
of the human mind, the basic characteristics of consciousness and the nature of man.
There is nothing but Mind. It’s not an existence, nor is it a non-existence. It is indeed
beyond both existence and non-existence.
There’s a plastic film between you and the divine process around you. It’s your
egocentricity, your deadening mind.
These drugs, if properly used, could be the source of energy that is to transform the
human mind.
These plants are found all over the world all the way back in history and probably used
and known about before the creation of any system of mind-changing exercises.
This mind-body isn’t “given” a structure. It is that structure and before the structure
arose, there was no mind-body.
This Other World could be experienced as the moment when one emerges from the
prison of “limited mind” and becomes identified with the “limitless mind”.
This Other World is vibrant, with strange energy transformations and exists in another
dimension of mind or self.
Those who have approached the experience with a receptive mind have often found
meaning and liberation.
Throw off the grip of your learned mind, your conditioning and experience the message
contained in the computer you carry behind your forehead.
Time and space are inventions of the conscious mind. They are not present in the
underconscious mind.
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 have truly original thought, the mind must throw off its critical guard, its filtering
censor.
To think of God as mere Power and not also, at the same time, as Power, Love and
Wisdom, comes quite naturally to the ordinary, unregenerate human mind.
To use our heads, to push out beyond words, space-time categories, models and concepts,
it becomes necessary to go out of our generally rational minds.
Turn off your mind. Step for a moment or two out of your own ego. Stop your robot
activity for a while. Stop the game you are in. Look within.
Virtually in every religious tradition, both civilized and primitive, use has been made of
mind-changing drugs used for the purposes of inducing visionary experiences.
Visionary experiences enter our consciousness from somewhere “out there” in the
infinity of Mind-at-Large.
Wasson says the mushrooms might have been a “mighty springboard” which first put the
idea of God into men’s heads.
We are using a very small percentage of the neural equipment, the brain capacity which
we have available.
We have much to learn from appropriate investigation of this powerful mind-altering
chemical.
We must discover new mental energy sources for overcoming our society’s psychological
inertia and anachronistic state of mind.
Western psychology has ignored the possibilities of mind-expansion and has become
almost externally oriented.
What art was available to the great knowers of Suchness? They probably paid little
attention to art if their mind can see the All in every “this”.
What is lacking in the Western mind is the sense of connectivity and relatedness to the
rest of life.
When the mind is completely purified, knowledge of the true identity of one’s own Self
arises.
You can link that cosmic brain and pleasure-seeking body with another or others
similarly inclined.
You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what’s always been going on,
whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time
You must go out of your mind to reach that creative quietude which is open to enriched
experience.
Your head is 2 billion years old and it’s got every control switch GE or IBM ever thought
of and a million more and it’s hooked up in direct communication with WDNA.
A Christianity which is not basically mystical must become either a political ideology or
a mindless fundamentalism. Biblical idolatry is one of the most depressing and sterile
fixations of the religious mind.
A conceptual system that could account for at least the major observations of LSD
therapy requires not just a new understanding of the effects of LSD, but a new and
expanded model of the human mind and the nature of human beings.
A new cultural mythic ideal is emerging: the myth of the fully developed mind. It is an
eminently democratic ideal. Only some can become adventurers on land or in space, but
in mind exploration, everyone is at the frontier.
A strange qualitative leap seems to occur in which deep exploration of the individual
unconscious turns into a process of experiential adventures in the universe-at-large,
involving what can be best described as the superconscious mind.
A visionary will recognize the possibility of discovering from mind, in some of its
extraordinary awakened states, a truth, or a collection of truths, which do not become
manifest in his every-day condition.
Albert Einstein discovered the basic principles of his special theory of relativity in an
unusual state of mind; according to his description, most of the insights came to him in
the form of kinaesthetic sensations.
All of us carry around in the back of our head this mysterious other world which I have
called the world of visions. The little twinkling lights of Christmas decorations remind us
of this other world; they seem in some way magical.
An individual having a peak experience feels a sense of overcoming the usual divisions
and fragmentations of the body and mind and reaching a state of complete inner unity and
wholeness; this usually feels very healing and beneficial.
Another kind of reality exists that we can call internal or nonordinary reality. It is
precisely that aspect of reality we are unconscious of when in the ordinary waking state,
and the unconscious mind is precisely that part of the mind that pays attention to it.
Any and every shape—human, divine, diabolical, heroic, evil, animal, thing—which the
human brain conjures up or the past life recalls, can present itself to consciousness:
shapes and forms and sounds whirling by endlessly.
As one’s head looks like nothing to the eyes, yet is the source of intelligence, the
indefinable Tao is the intelligence which shapes the world with a skill beyond our
understanding.
Awakening almost necessarily involves a sense of relief because it brings to an end the
habitual psychological cramp of trying to grasp the mind with the mind, which in turn
generates the ego with all its conflicts and defenses.
Become a cheerleader for evolution. That’s what I did and my grandfather before me.
These brain-drugs, mass-produced will bring about vast changes in society. (That was
Aldous Huxley speaking to Timothy Leary while both were tripping.)
Clients who experience psychological death-rebirth and/or feelings of cosmic unity tend
to develop a negative attitude toward the states of mind induced by alcohol and narcotics.
This has proved extremely useful in the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction.
Closed-eye fantasies in this world seem sometimes to be revelations of the secret
workings of the brain, of the associative and patterning process, the ordering systems
which carry out all our sensing and thinking.
From time immemorial, plants containing powerful mind-altering substances have been
used for the diagnosing and healing of diseases, enhancement of paranormal abilities, and
for magical or ritual purposes.
Gem-like objects, bright, self-luminous, glowing with preternatural color and
significance, exist in the mind’s Antipodes, are seen by visionaries and are felt by all who
see them to be of enormous significance. (eyes closed)
Goodness knows what sort of a 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.)
How can anyone be so naïve as to imagine that an ideology, a thought system generated
by the monkey mind, would be adequate to explain the universe? (That was Terence
McKenna.)
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted
musical instruments as the ears and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can
experience itself as anything less than a God?
I felt strongly that the study of nonordinary states of mind in general and those induced
by psychedelics in particular, was by far the most interesting area of psychiatry and
decided to make it my field of specialization. (That was Stanislav Grof.)
“I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.” “Bring out your mind here before me
and I will pacify it.” “But, when I seek my own mind, I can’t find it.” “There, I have
pacified your mind.” At that moment, he had his awakening.
I learned that the brain is an underutilized computer, that normal consciousness is one
drop in an ocean of intelligence, that consciousness and intelligence can be systematically
expanded, that the brain can be reprogrammed.]
If drugs can change the way in which the brain sees, hears, smells and assembles
meaningful form out of the chaos of sensation, they can also radically transform the
nature of sexual feeling.
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 psychedelics offer valid ways of exploring man’s “inner world”, the hidden ways of the
mind and brain, we should surely admit that new knowledge of this inmost frontier may
be worth quite serious risks.
If we can think of the brain as a computer, then by temporarily altering the chemistry of
the brain, stimulates new connections, linking up memories and information in unusual
ways. By this kind of synthesis, fresh concepts are formed…
If you can throw off the grip of your learned mind and experience the message contained
in the computer which you carry behind your forehead, you would know the awe-ful
truth.
If you made the mistake of rhapsodizing about the marvelous world that was somehow
locked up inside their minds, they treated you with the kind of disdain people usually
reserve for those who still believe the fairytales of adolescence.
In contrast to the incredible potentialities of the brain is the fact that we are aware of only
the millionth fraction of our own cortical signaling. (The awareness of the ego is almost
zero.)
In our emphasis on rationality and logic, we have put a great value on the everyday sober
state of mind and relegated all other states of consciousness into the realm of useless
pathology.
In the spiritual and mystical literature of all ages, one can find numerous descriptions of
spectacular physiological changes in the body or seemingly impossible achievements of
people in various extraordinary states of mind.
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 or material
possessions.
Instead of straining toward a future which one hopes to be different, the mind opens and
admits a whole experience in which and by which the problem of what is the “good” of
life is answered.
Intelligence is not a separate, ordering faculty of the mind but a characteristic of the
whole organism-environment relationship, the field of forces wherein lies the reality of a
human being.
It’s really impossible to appreciate what is meant by the Tao without becoming in a rather
special sense stupid. This special kind of stupidity is not simply calmness of mind, but
“non-graspingness” of mind. (Don’t interfere with your mind. Leave it alone.)
It is important to realize that by banning psychedelic research we have not only given up
the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the
most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness.
It is not unusual for people in non-ordinary states of mind to accurately portray material
that precedes their conception or to explore the world of their parents, their ancestors, and
of the human race. (eyes closed)
Leary felt that Harvard treated him in an unsympathetic, unjust and inhumane way. It
seemed that Harvard had been afflicted with a failure of nerve. When the chips were
down, institutional preservation prevailed over open-mindedness and the search for truth.
Leary was advised—“Your advertising must stress the religious. Find the God within.
This is all frightfully interesting. Your competitors are naturally denouncing the brain as
an instrument of the devil. Priceless!”
Liberation is the nervous system devoid of mental-conceptual activity. The mind in its
conditioned state, that is to say, when limited to words and ego games, is continually in
thought- formation activity.
Liberty was at stake here, freedom of access to your own body and brain and to manage
it, a right I believed was protected by the Constitution. The human mind is a frontier of
freedom. (That was Timothy Leary.)
LSD patients who had experienced profound feelings of cosmic unity frequently
developed a negative attitude toward the states of mind produced by intoxication with
alcohol and narcotics.
LSD subjects may scream and produce inarticulate sounds, toss and turn, act up, kneel,
put their head in one’s lap, pace around the room or even roll on the floor (and it’s all
right).
Man is just beginning to catch on to the idea, just beginning to discover that there is an
infinity of meaning and complex power in the equipment he carries around behind his
eyebrows.
Most of the LSD experience takes place in a nonverbal region of the mind and deliberate
overintellectualization stands in the way of the free flow of the subject’s stream of
consciousness.
Need the cortex be limited to the tribal-verbal? Must we use only a fraction of our
neurological heritage? Must our minds remain flimsy toys compared to the wisdom
within the neural network?
Observations from LSD research clearly indicate that in various states of mind, the bliss
of paradise, and ecstatic raptures of salvation can be experienced with a degree of
vividness and a sense of reality that surpass our everyday perceptions.
One of the most fascinating by-paths of the history of religion is the one that traces the
use of chemicals in various religious traditions for the purpose of changing the state of
mind and producing enthusiasm, the sense of God within.
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 minds are all linked, yet we’ve made this consensual agreement to pretend that we
don’t know it. We all just play out this game of creating different forms and names and
individualities.
Our society and our intellectuals and our scientists externalize the psychology of
behaviorism. Neurology today is poking at the brains of other people. You have to
experience what you are symbolizing.
Paying exclusive attention to differences ignores relationships. It does not see, for
example, that mind and form or shape and space are as inseparable as front and back, nor
that the individual is so interwoven with the universe that he and it are one body.
Psychedelic equals mind-opening consciousness. Psychedelic means ecstatic which is to
stand outside our normal patterns. It means going out of your mind, your habitual world
of contingencies, space-time coordinates.
Psychedelic, mind-manifesting drugs give promise of providing access to the great and
hitherto largely impenetrable realms—the vast, intricate and awesome regions we call
mind.
Researchers who have seriously studied and/or experienced these fascinating phenomena
realize that the attempts of traditional psychiatry to dismiss them as irrelevant products of
imagination in the brain are superficial and inadequate.
Social conditioning fosters the identification of the mind with a fixed idea of itself as the
means of self-control and as a result man thinks of himself as “I,” the ego. Thereupon the
mental center of gravity shifts from the spontaneous or original mind to the ego image.
Suddenly, the familiar view of our surroundings is transformed in a strange, delightful
way: it appears to us in a new light, takes on a special meaning. Such an experience can
be as light and fleeting as a breath of air, or it can imprint itself deeply upon our minds.
Talk about the mind, imagery, or consciousness, was definitely discouraged, since their
existence could not be “proved.” About that time a noted psychologist said of
psychology, “First it lost its soul, then it lost its mind, and now it has lost consciousness.”
The ability to see patterns, far from being a psychological weakness to be treated, is a
vital capacity of the unconscious mind that must be developed and allowed to interact
with our conscious perceptions.
The brain replaced the genitals as the forbidden organ that must not be touched or turned
on by the owner. The only way in which consciousness-change experiences could be
discussed was in terms of philosophic-religious.
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s
mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It
educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
The entirety of one’s personal history from pre-birth to the present moment can be
brought into the conscious mind and fully re-experienced. (That is also true for the
entirety of all of history and existence.)
The experience of the phenomenal world and what we call usual states of consciousness
appear to be only very limited idiosyncratic and partial aspects of the over-all
consciousness of the Universal Mind.
The highest point of the experience is a moment of transcendence in which the user
passes out of the everyday world into a paradisiacal egoless state in which he believes he
has attained some ultimate revelation about the nature of mind and the universe.
The human mind-body possesses other sources of information, makes use of other types
of reasoning, is gifted with an intrinsic wisdom that is independent of cultural
conditioning.
The individual’s right of access to his or her own brain has become the most significant
political, economic and cultural issue in America today. Our states will never be united
nor prosperous until the generational drug war is ended. (That was Timothy Leary.)
The insane man who has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who had transcended his
ego. (A society hung-up on ego see the sage as insane because they have no idea where
the sage is at.)
The LSD experience is a confrontation with new forms of wisdom and energy that dwarf
and humiliate man’s mind. This experience of awe and revelation is often described as
religious.
The mind must be prepared and the conditions right for a profound mystical or religious
experience to occur. And even then, the drug user may go through a descent into torment
and even a seeming death agony before attaining joyous unity and rebirth.
The neural structures of the brain, upon which intelligence depends, are certainly not the
deliberate creations of any conscious ego. (The ego knows nothing at all about the neural
structures of the brain, let alone being able to create them.)
The real world itself is real enough; it is only our way of looking at the world which is
not real. It is our mode of perception that leads us astray and it is not the senses which
deceive us but rather the mind or intellect which receives and interprets the sensory input.
The root of mental disorder is that the ego-feeling as such is an error of perception. To
placate it is only to enable it to go on confusing the mind with a mode of awareness
which clashes with the natural order.
There are dedicated scientists trying to find some way in which supplies of LSD may be
made available for important research in brain physiology, psychology, theology or
mental therapy.
There are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The
experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and
distance in space—it’s the first fundamental religious experience.
There can be direct acquaintance with the world’s unity. This immediate mystical
experience of being at one with the fundamental Oneness that manifests itself in the
infinite diversity of things and minds, can never be adequately expressed in words.
There flows something more than and above all something different from the carefully
selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete
or at least sufficient picture of reality.
There is indeed some analogy between the holy man and the crazy man since both may
be said to be “out of their minds,” as having “lost themselves” or as being “thought-less”
or “care-less.”
There is no standing aside from the stream of events, for neurons flow along in the same
stream as events outside the skull. After all, your neurons are part of my external world
and mine of yours.
There is the intense feeling of compassion for those who, for whatever reason, make it
impossible for themselves to get anywhere near the reality revealed by the drug—the
reality which is always there for those who are in the right state of mind to perceive it.
These drugs promise discoveries about mind as important and far reaching in their
ultimate effects as have been the revolutionary findings of this century concerning the
physical universe.
These states of mind can be extremely beneficial, often leading to physical and emotional
healing, profound insights, creative activity and permanent personality changes for the
better.
Time and space are creations of the conscious mind. It is because we do not always
understand that time and space are conscious devices that we get very confused when we
try to deal with the underconscious where there is no time and space.
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours
the outer and inner world as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally, by Mind
at Large— this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.
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 have at our finger tips a material and method by which we can draw back the heavy
curtain of our underconscious mind and release into the bright light of our conscious
mind many of the dark and troubling mysteries of our inner selves.
We have great difficulty acknowledging that mind and consciousness might not be
exclusive privileges of the human species but that they permeate all of nature, existing in
the most elemental to the most complete forms.
We were amazed to witness otherwise intelligent and open-minded persons doing
everything in their power to instill fear, to cry danger, to slander the brain with negativity.
(That was Timothy Leary.)
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 I learned from Tim (Leary) had nothing to do with drugs but it had everything to do
with getting high. His die-hard fascination with the human brain was not about altering it,
but about using it to the fullest.
When the process of cultural conditioning has not been unlearned, the human mind gets
stuck in a perpetual self-criticism, a perpetual division against itself, which in the end
paralyzes creative action.
With the ego and mind unplugged, what is left? It’s something Western culture knows
little about, the open brain, the uncensored cortex, alert and open to a broad sweep of
internal and external stimuli hitherto screened out.
Without losing their normal breadth of vision, the eyes seem to become a microscope
through which the mind delves deeper and deeper into the intricately dancing texture of
the world.
A high does 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.
ancient and Oriental religions and philosophies—It has become increasingly clear that
these systems of belief reflect profound understanding of the human mind and of unusual
states of consciousness, embodying knowledge that deals with the most universal aspect
of human existence, and thus is highly relevant for all of us.
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 this end, this event called death, is not
all. And if there is something after death then there had to be something before birth.
Everything seen by those who visit the mind’s antipodes is brilliantly illuminated and
seems to shine from within. All colors are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen
in the normal state and at the same time, the mind’s capacity for recognizing fine
distinctions of tone and hue is notably heightened.
He takes a fantastic inner journey into the unconscious and superconscious mind. These
drugs thus reveal and make available for direct observation, a wide range of otherwise
hidden phenomena that represent intrinsic capacities of the human mind and play an
important role in normal mental dynamics.
He who controls the mind-changing chemicals controls consciousness. He who controls
the chemical can twist your mind, can alter your personality, can change you and your
concept of the world. (No one has the right to control your consciousness and experiences
by threatening you with jail. Your life belongs to you.)
How can we Westerners see that our own potentials are much greater than the social-hive
games in which we are so blindly trapped? Once the game structure of behavior is seen,
change in behavior can occur with dramatic spontaneity. The visionary, brain-change,
consciousness-altering experience is the key to behavior change.
I am not merely spinning senseless paradoxes when I say that we, the sane ones, are out
of our minds. The mind is what the ego is unconscious of. The mind of which we are
unaware is aware of us. It is we who are out of our minds. We need not be unaware of the
inner world.
I believe that the astonishing human brain is man’s most inalienable possession, his
intellectual birthright. No person or institution has the moral right to muffle or inhibit its
development. No social authority can successfully arrogate unto itself the right to dictate
and fix the levels of consciousness to which man may aspire.
I see consciousness and the human psyche as expressions and reflections of a cosmic
intelligence that permeates the entire universe and all of existence. We are not just highly
evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields
of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality.
I would say that the mind is not insular, but an interconnected part of a universe of both
physical and symbolic substance, whose linkages extend throughout space and time. The
Psychedelic has helped me to feel like a part of this connection. I feel like I have a much
greater understanding of non-Western and pre-industrial mind-sets.
Identification of consciousness with ego consciousness leads to confusion of mind and
intellect, to acceptance of appearance as reality, to materialistic formulations of the
interaction of mind and matter, to isolation and fear, to increasingly negative conceptions
of reality and ultimately and very logically, to disaster.
Identifying with the consciousness of the Universal Mind, the individual senses that he
has experientially encompassed the totality of existence. He feels that he has reached the
reality underlying all realities and is confronted with the supreme and ultimate principle
that represents all Being.
If left alone by society, our International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) would
have succeeded in training several thousand neurologicians who, in their own
communities, could have trained hundreds of thousands of Americans to use their own
heads. (That was Timothy Leary.)
If one were a genuine psychiatrist and heard that something made it possible to open the
mind and get into one’s own unconscious, enabling examination of one’s own shadow
material and unconscious values, goals, anger, pain, guilt and so on, my God, wouldn’t
they be interested? One might be skeptical, but how could you not be interested?
If we understand that straight and stoned are descriptive terms for ways of using the mind
rather than labels for people who do or do not use a particular means of entering other
states of consciousness, we can use these terms profitably, for they indicate an important
choice between different kinds of thinking.
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.
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 is significant that those who have been surprised by a mystical experience seldom fail
to feel that their experience is religious. Intuitively they become aware—at least
subjectively—that their state of mind somehow links them with the saints and prophets of
the ages. This is the case even with atheists.
Let us try to bring about a new and glowing synthesis, a new higher consciousness that
brings together the East and West, the head and the heart, science and spirituality and
knowledge and wisdom. (Knowledge, here, means what the ego “knows” which isn’t
wisdom.)
LSD subjects have, in certain states of mind, access to information about almost any
aspect of the universe. The holographical approach makes is possible to imagine how the
information mediated by the brain is accessible in every cerebral cell, or how the genetic
information about the entire organism is available in every single cell of the body.
Man has reached a crisis in consciousness within which he has the choice to continue in
the path of the growing technicalization of human nature or to enter upon an intensive
and comprehensive investigation of mind and its creative process in the pursuit of a
greater use of human potential and a deeper understanding of the nature of reality.
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.
Of great relevance for the creative process is the facilitation of new and unexpected
synthesis of data, resulting in unconventional problem-solving. It is a well known fact
that many important ideas and solutions to problems did not originate in the context of
logical reasoning, but in various unusual states of mind.
Often, there is an actual experience of truths, they are KNOWN to be truths, which when
presented in conceptual terms to the mind in its normal state, seem incomprehensible and
absurd. Such propositions as “God is love” are realized with the totality of one’s being
and their truth seems self-evident in spite of pain and death.
Once a person has experienced a visionary state of mind, one can no longer confuse the
lie with truth. One has seen where one comes from and who one is, and one no longer
doubts what one is. There is no emotion or external influence that can divert one from
this reality.
Our mental functions are linked to biological processes in our brains. However, this does
not necessarily mean that consciousness originates in or is produced by our brains. This
conclusion made by Western science is a metaphysical assumption rather than a scientific
fact, and it is certainly possible to come up with other interpretations of the same data.
Our true nature is an aspect of a universal consciousness, Self, Being, Mind, or God. The
awakening to this true nature is the direct awareness that you are more than this puny
body or limited mind. It is the realization that the universe is not external to you. It is
experiencing the universe as yourself.
Researchers who have seriously studied and/or experienced these fascinating phenomena
realize that the attempts of traditional psychiatry to dismiss them as irrelevant products of
imagination or as erratic fantasmagoria generated by pathological processes in the brain,
are superficial and inadequate.
The best researchers, when confronting problems and riddles that had defied all solution
by ordinary methods, did employ their minds in an unusual way, did put themselves into
a state of egoless “creativity” which permitted them to have insights so remarkable that
by means of these they were able to make their greatest and most original discoveries.
The capacity of LSD and some other psychedelic drugs to exteriorize otherwise invisible
phenomena and processes and make them the subject of scientific investigation gives
these substances a unique potential as diagnostic instruments and as research tools for the
exploration of the human mind.
The current preoccupation with these latter-day mind modifiers ranges from a hedonistic
sensuality to a search for the highest of philosophical abstractions, from a tool for
deriving scientific data to a sacrament taken to achieve loss of self and union with the
All.
The human mind is not limited to biographically determined elements in the Freudian
unconscious; it has no boundaries or limits and its dimensions are commensurate with
those of the entire universe. From this point of view, it is more correct to see human
nature as divine than as bestial.
The remarkable thing about the LSD experience is that you see the broad range of the
underconsciousness without losing consciousness, a state wherein you are aware of all
things in the conscious mind and at the same time aware of all things in the
underconscious mind.
The talk was of love, and it ripped my mind time and time again to realize that it had
been said by so many prophets from the beginning of consciousness, and no one wanted
to listen. Now someone was listening, and we swore that we’d never forget. It was all so
simple. No obstacles that wouldn’t crumble under the bright light of the truth of love.
The theoretical formulations and practical principles that LSD psychotherapy has
discovered or validated include a new, expanded cartography of the human mind, new
and effective therapeutic mechanisms, a new strategy of psychotherapy and a synthesis of
spirituality and science.
The various “other worlds” with which human beings erratically make contact are so
many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people,
most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as
genuinely real by the local language.
They have put the chains inside our brains. They control our imaginings, our desires. Our
hearts are bound. Love does not prevail. And our dreams of the future are materialistic
and, therefore, mundane. The Establishment has won. The fascists have won. The
religious Fundamentalists have won. For now.
To men and women who have had direct experience of self-transcendence into the mind’s
Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is
not likely to be very satisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully
written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner.
Transpersonal psychology and the mystical world-view are frequently and erroneously
referred to as unscientific. This reflects the fact that psychology and psychiatry, as well as
the general public, still adhere to the old model of the world, based on the Newtonian
image of the universe and the Cartesian dichotomy between mind and matter.
We overvalue the mind, that flimsy collection of learned words and verbal connections;
the mind, that system of paranoid delusions with the learned self as center. And we
eschew the nonmind, nongame intuitive insight outlook which is the key to the religious
experience, to the love experience.
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.)
While the religious establishment worries itself into reams of cross arguments on whether
or not God is dead, these thinkers merely smile and shake their heads. God isn’t dead; He
isn’t even lost. He is right there in the deepest recesses of the mind where he has always
been. Doubting Thomases need only allow LSD to show them the way.
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.
Words like hallucination and psychosis were loaded; they implied negative states of
mind. The psychiatric jargon reflected a pathological orientation, whereas a truly
objective science would not impose value judgments on chemicals that produced unusual
or altered states of consciousness.
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.
All the learned games of life can be seen as programs that select, censor and thus
dramatically limit the available cortical response. Consciousness-expanding drugs unplug
these narrow programs, the social ego, the game-machinery. And with the ego and mind
unplugged, what is left? What is left is something that Western culture knows little about:
the uncensored cortex, activated, alert and open to new realities.
As knowledge of the existence of mind-expanding plants and chemicals dawned upon the
consciousness of Western man, swift re-evaluation of our attitudes toward certain so-
called “primitive” tribes became necessary. It became apparent that some of these
cultures had preserved the key to higher knowledge which the civilized world had
relegated to the status of myth.
Changes in point of view cannot happen overnight, for they require acceptance of painful
truths: that children daydreaming in class, for example, might be using their minds much
more profitably than children paying attention; that psychotic patients may be in a better
position to understand and experience reality than the psychiatric authorities who dose
them with tranquilizers.
Each human being is equipped with a 120-billion-cell brain, but we haven’t learned how
to use it. Few of us are aware of our neural ineptness. The organized religions have
comforted us by providing infantile fairy tales about God and promises of discarnate
immortality. Pray and obey, keep your legs crossed, avoid orgasms, and you’ll get the
one-way ticket to heaven.
Exploration of the human psyche with these powerful catalyzing agents has shown
beyond any doubt that the biographical model developed by Freud’s “depth” psychology
barely scratches the surface of mental dynamics. To account for all the extraordinary
experiences and observations in psychedelic states, it was necessary to develop a vastly
expanded cartography of the human mind.
Hallucinogens are still criminal. The “food of the gods” is illegal. The keys to the doors
of perception are against the law. Using LSD therapy with convicts, drug addicts, and
alcoholics is illegal. The great therapeutic tool of LSD that was proven so effective in
case after case of psychological maladjustment has been taken away from the doctors of
the mind by the fundamentalist, fascist guardians of our public morality.
How many of us now realize that space is the same as mind or consciousness? That your
inside goes with your entire outside as your front with your back? That this galaxy and all
other galaxies are just as much you as your heart or your brain? That your coming and
going, your waking and sleeping, your birth and your death are exactly the same kind of
rhythmic phenomena as the stars and their surrounding darkness?
How odd it is that writers may sing the praises of alcohol, which is responsible for about
2/3 of the car accidents and ¾ of the crimes of violence, and be regarded as good
Christians and noble fellows, whereas anyone who ventures to suggest that there may be
other and less harmful short cuts to self-transcendence is treated as a dangerous drug
fiend and wicked pervertor of weak-minded humanity. (That was Aldous Huxley.)
I pronounced that LSD was the greatest discovery man had ever made. It has such
enormous potential because the mind is infinite. LSD opens up the resources of the mind.
Since the mind is the most important aspect of the human being, what could possibly be
more important than a drug that revealed the awesome, infinite potential that lies within?
(That was Timothy Leary.)
I would suggest that ages and attitudes of man that are long gone by still survive in the
deepest unconscious layers of our mind. The spiritual heritage of archaic man, the ritual
and mythology that once visibly guided his conscious life, has vanished to a large extent
from the surface of the tangible and conscious realm, yet survives and remains ever
present in the subterranean layers of the unconscious.
In the transpersonal domain, where psychological and spiritual growth are one,
psychedelics appear to be powerful tools for the investigation of consciousness; they
could enable us to expand our understanding of the human mind and the nature of
creative consciousness. A willingness to question our assumptions and to keep an open
mind with respect to potential benefits and potential hazards is essential.
It can dissolve or temporarily suspend the effectiveness of those psychical mechanisms
whose functions would appear to be to inhibit emergence of certain processes and
contents of the mind. Once these inhibitions are dissolved, the ground has been prepared
for the free psyche to function in such a way as to result in the beneficial transformation
and self-realization of the individual.
Leary was joined by assistant professor Richard Alpert, a hearty band of graduate
students, and a constant stream of many of the leading intellectuals and artists of that
time. Leary and his team employed new methods in psychological research by using
themselves as subjects, reporting directly the drugs’ effects on their own minds.
Sometimes they would take psilocybin with their students. This was unheard of.
LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human
nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have
not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry.
They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality
transformation.
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.
Most of our colleagues in the psychology department couldn’t take the brain-change
work seriously. They couldn’t admit that our new subject matter even existed. Altered
states of consciousness simply didn’t exist as a category in the psychology of that time. It
was the familiar tunnel vision that has always narrowed the academic mind. (That was
Timothy Leary at Harvard.)
Mystical insight is no more in the chemical itself than biological knowledge is in the
microscope. There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an
external instrument, such as a microscope and sharpening it with an internal instrument,
such as one of these drugs. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the
microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye.
Myths do not come from a concept system; they come from a life system; they come out
of a deeper center. We must not confuse mythology with ideology. Myths come from
where the heart is, and where the experience is, even as the mind may wonder why
people believe these things. The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond
facts to something that informs the fact.
Newtonian-Cartesian science views matter as the foundation of the universe. Scientists
who adhere to this system of thought portray consciousness as a product of physiological
processes taking place in the brain. From such a perspective, each of our consciousnesses
is confined to the inside of our skulls, absolutely separated from the consciousnesses of
other people. (These scientists have it all wrong, of course.)
None of the hundreds of questions raised by the psychedelics, many of them fundamental
to the way the mind processes information, have been answered. Rather, the powers that
be have performed a holding action comparable to the one the Papal Curia tried with
Galileo, when they confined him to a house in Arceti and forbade him the right to
continue his research.
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.
Our problem is that the power of thought enables us to construct symbols of things apart
from the things themselves. This includes the ability to make a symbol, an idea of
ourselves apart from ourselves. Because the idea is so much more comprehensible than
the reality, the symbol so much more stable than the fact, we learn to identify ourselves
with our idea of ourselves. Hence, the subjective feeling of a “self” which has a “mind”.
Personally I find it extremely comforting to think that I have somewhere at the back of
my skull something which is absolutely indifferent to the human race. I think this is
something very satisfying, that there is an area of mind which doesn’t care about what I
am doing, but is concerned with something quite, quite different. (That was Aldous
Huxley.)
Profound transcendental experiences, such as consciousness of the Universal Mind, 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.
Psychedelic drugs released new forces into the consciousness of millions of people.
These forces might be seen as good, evil, or morally ambiguous; they might be regarded
as coming from within, as an upsurge from the unconscious mind, or from beyond, as a
revelation from other planes of existence; or some way to reconcile these interpretations
might be sought.
Science could make no sense of certain evidence about the world or the mind that had
been considered central in older traditions, and therefore paid as little attention as
possible to that evidence. Whole areas of experience and fields of intellectual endeavor
were relegated to the domain of religious faith or consigned to the categories of fraud,
folly, and disease.
That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced
awareness. The various “other worlds” with which human beings erratically make contact
are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most
people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is
consecrated as genuinely real by the local language.
The discovery of brain-change drugs has been compared to the discovery of the
microscope. New forms swim into perception. It’s a truism that you cannot impose the
ethics and language of the past upon the subject matter revealed by a new extension of
the senses. Galileo was arrested for describing what he saw in his telescope. The
inquisition would not bother to look through the lens.
The formless, dimensionless and intangible principle that an individual can perceive as
the Universal Mind is characterized by infinite existence, infinite awareness and
knowledge and infinite bliss. Any descriptions and definitions, however, necessarily use
words that we associate with the phenomena of the three-dimensional world; they are
therefore incapable of conveying the essence of this ultimate transcendental principle.
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 human brain, we are told, is composed of about 10 billion nerve cells, any one of
which may connect with as many as 25,000 other nerve cells. The number of
interconnections which this adds up to would stagger even the astronomers and
astronomers are used to dealing with astronomical numbers. The number is far greater
than all the atoms of the universe.
The image of human nature on which this approach is based is closer to Hindu
philosophy than to Freudian psychoanalysis. Behind the barrier of negative instinctual
forces associated with early biographical traumas, there exist vast transpersonal realms
of the superconscious mind and a system of positive universal values not dissimilar to
Abraham Maslow’s metavalues.
The intensification and “deepening” of color, sound and texture lends them a peculiar
transparency. One seems to be aware of them more than ever as vibration, electronic and
luminous. As this feeling develops it appears that these vibrations are continuous with
one’s own consciousness and that the external world is in some odd way inside the mind-
brain.
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 too-sudden opening up of the universe can induce an onslaught at what Aldous
Huxley called the “horror of infinity,” a terror of the vastness of the void within or
without, of the utter minuteness and aloneness of the soul in the cosmos. A clenching
reflex is, after all, a natural response to the floor and ceiling flying out of your mind.
(One needs to be prepared for this and understand that it’s all right.)
The work of many artists—painters, musicians, writers and poets—who participated in
LSD experimentation in various countries of the world has been deeply influenced by
their psychedelic experiences. Most of them found access to deep sources of inspiration
in their unconscious mind, experienced a striking enhancement and unleashing of fantasy
and reached extraordinary vitality, originality and freedom of artistic expression.
We have to think about the university as a place which spawns new ideas or breaks
through to new visions, a place where we can learn to use our neurological equipment.
The university and, for that matter, every aspect of the educational system is paid for by
adult society to train young people to keep the same game going, to be sure that you do
not use your heads.
We use all sorts of drugs to ease our minds but none to reveal our minds. We seem to
want change, but not understanding. Most of us have never heard of psychedelic drugs,
and those who have would never think of using one themselves. Although man has used
drugs in religious rites to discover his relationship with God since the dawn of history,
the Judeo-Christian mind cannot accept such practices.
You have to go out of your mind to use your head. You have to pass beyond everything
you have learned in order to become acquainted with the new areas of consciousness.
Ignorance of this fact is the veil which shuts man within the narrow confines of his
acquired, artificial concepts of “reality” and prevents him from coming to know his own
true nature.
Harvard dismissed Timothy Leary without a hearing even though his contracts had
several more months to run. There had been no effective protest by the Harvard faculty
against this gross abuse of the principles of academic freedom. Previously I had put
professors on a kind of pedestal, but my views were now gradually changing. I realized
that the average university professor, like most human beings, is both sheep-minded and
chicken-hearted.
I had psychological data, thousands of test scores and numerical indices which
demonstrated with precision why psychotherapy did not work. Each laborious calculation
was proving that psychology was just a mind-game, an eccentric head trip on the part of
the psychologists and that psychotherapy was an arduous, expensive, ineffective,
unimaginative attempt to impose the mind of the doctor on the mind of the patient.
(That’s Timothy Leary.)
In ordinary seeing, we are hardly ever directly aware of our immediate impressions. For
these immediate impressions are more or less profoundly modified by a mind that does
most of its thinking in terms of words. Every perception is promptly conceptualized and
generalized, so that we do not see the particular thing or event in its naked immediacy;
we see only the objective illustration of some generic notion, only the concretion of an
abstract word.
Perhaps the most effective stratagram of the intellect is to convince the owner that it is
the equivalent of the mind; if one accepts this notion, abandoning the intellect becomes
equivalent to losing one’s mind. For this reason, intellectuals tend to look upon persons
who have gone beyond the intellect as unfortunates who have suffered a mental
catastrophe, even though those persons may have greater awareness than any intellectual
can have.
Psychiatrists should listen to what their patients say about drug experiences; patients
often know more about the workings of the unconscious mind from direct experience
than doctors do from their intellects. Teachers should try to learn from students who
know more about the subject than they do. In these ways, we will come to better
information than what we now get from experts who do not know what they are talking
about.
Who has the right to control your mind? To explore it? To use it? With the invention of
consciousness techniques, a new kind of freedom faces a new kind of control. People
want to explore and develop their minds, and psychedelics are an efficient way to do so.
This desire is part of human nature, but law and social ignorance block the way. I propose
that we recognize a general human right: the right to explore, control, and develop one’s
mind.
A great amount of repressed material floods the conscious mind.
A psychedelic experience flips you out of your mind.
A trip is really a journey into the unknown territories of the mind.
Acid taught us the universe inside our mind.
An extensive new area of knowledge of the mind is waiting to be opened.
Blow the mind and you are left with God and life.
Brainwashing is mind-rape.
Deep down our minds are all connected.
Drugs open up glorious and pleasurable chambers in the mind.
Each drug experience is a unique journey of exploration into the mind.
Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.
Every atom contains the “brain” of the whole universe.
Flowers call to mind a world of innocence, transparency, light and joy.
Free the brain to experience direct-raw-naked-nerve-ending sensation.
From the conscious mind comes intellect; from the unconscious, wisdom.
Get into the channels of your mind.
Go out of your mind and into your head.
He explores the labyrinthine regions of his own brain.
He had the heart as well as the brain for doing good.
He or she discovers what real peace of mind feels like.
Huge areas of the brain are blocked off from consciousness.
I can’t see the back, much less the inside of my head.
If you come to know the nature of the mind, then you also come to know the Truth.
Individual consciousness can merge with the Universal Mind.
It frees your mind.
It stimulates the brain.
It takes courage to go out beyond your mind.
It’s like seeing things for the first time. It’s like a renaissance, a rebirth of the mind.
It’s time to wake up. It’s time to really use our heads.
It’s your trained mind which prevents you from learning.
Just as my brain sees with my eyes, the universe feels with my body.
Just as your heart knows its job, your brain is ready to do its job.
Let the mind alone, trusting it to work by itself.
Let your brain be a receiving set for the experience.
Liberate the mind.
Like a computer with unlimited access to any program, the mind roams freely.
LSD opens some window in the mind.
LSD permits the mind to organize its sensory impressions in new patterns.
LSD unplugs the ego, the game machinery and the mind.
Maintain faith and trust in the potentiality of your brain.
Man’s brain is capable of limitless new dimensions of awareness and knowledge.
Memories race by the mind’s eye with the clarity of film. (eyes closed)
Mind and matter have together disappeared into process. Things have become events.
Music became a language of heads. (potheads and acidheads)
My LSD episodes have opened my mind and enabled me to look upon life with new eyes.
One doesn’t cure the headache by cutting off the head.
Only absorption in the loving and knowing Ground can rid the mind of all fears.
Our brain works with a velocity and scope which far surpasses our mental operations.
Our ego spins around inside the mind compelling us to be tied to its field of gravity.
Our future evolution lies as much in our minds as in our genes.
Our thoughts and ideas ARE nature. The mind grows thoughts as the field grows grass.
Personal memories from the deep recesses of the subject’s mind will come into focus.
Psychedelic drugs bring you into levels of reality which your mind can’t structure.
Soar into uncharted realms of the brain.
The brain is an almost unspoiled wilderness; its exploration and charting have just begun.
The center of the mind’s activity is not the conscious thinking process, not in the ego.
The drugs “free” the mind for creative activity that would otherwise be beyond reach.
The head becomes the universe, infinitely expansive or contractible.
The heavy shackles of the mind are loosened.
The intellect is only one component of the mind.
The issue at stake is the human mind and its potentialities.
The mind becomes pure.
The mind clears up.
The mind comes to rest.
The mind discovers its natural and unconfused state.
The mind-doors burst open.
The mind is like an eye that sees but cannot see itself.
The mind is open and clear.
The mind returns to perfect consciousness.
The mind’s pure Essence is Highest Perfect Wisdom.
The mind’s still unknown potential is our future.
The new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life.
The rational mind is anti-ecstasy.
The state of mind associated with dying can be experienced during life.
The state of mind is a delightful calm of complete significance.
The static, normal mind is the source of “dis-ease”.
The substance which produces the change of mind is regarded as divine.
The subtleties of the mind defy simple categories.
The true mind is “no mind”, “original mind”, “Buddha mind”.
The turned-on mind is cosmic in dimension.
The world is intelligible only as a revelation of the mind of God.
The world is simply an extension of the body or the mind.
There are dimensions of the brain yet to explore.
There are no limits to your mind.
There is no future beyond this state of mind, no state of mind beyond this one.
Transcendence of mind makes possible new realms of insight.
Trust your divinity. Trust your brain.
Turn off the fidgety, rationalizing mind.
Unitive consciousness is the goal of all religions and philosophers of mind development.
We are largely hunter-gatherers of the mind. Its civilization has just begun.
We have but to open the eyes of the mind wide enough and the truth will out.
We need new rituals, goals, rules and concepts to give the brain back to the species.
We use the mind as a spotlight, rather than a floodlight.
Western psychology has ignored the possibilities of mind-expansion.
What you see is how the inside of your head “looks” or “feels”.
When body and mind achieve spontaneity, universal mind can be understood.
When the mind is stilled, psychological time ceases to exist.
Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.
With the cognitive mind suspended, the subject is in a heightened state of suggestibility.
With the mind opened, we look into a new world, as new as on the first day of creation.
With your ego left behind you, the brain can’t go wrong.
You are the owner and operator of your brain.
You can learn how to alter your brain function to experience in novel ways.
You can’t get out of the mind by using the mind. A catalyst like LSD is needed.
You close your eyes and the brain computer flashes multiple kaleidoscopic messages.
You see things so clear. Your mind is not cluttered up with everyday nonsense.
Your brain is your own.
Your cortex is washed clean. The empty mind.
Your “ego” is to your brain what the planet earth is to our galaxy.
Your mind is always there, but it’s one of 1000 cameras flashing away.
Your mind is seething to heights undreamed of.
Your whole mind seems to be completely clear and coherent.
He “feels” in his brain the patterns that man once employed in creating the zodiacal
patterns.
His brain is like a computer that has received a large amount of new information to be
assimilated.
The feeling of self is no longer confined to the inside of the skin. Instead, my individual
being seems to grow out from the rest of the universe like a hair from a head or a limb
from a body, so that my center is also the center of the whole.
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.
He is seeing immense zodiacal figures laid out in jeweled definition with blue and gold
stones against the heavens “on a grand cosmic scale”. He speculates that the zodiacal
signs that man has “imposed on the stars” derive from corresponding physical structures
in the brain. (eyes closed)
My mind leaves the linear plane and moves into new dimensions.
All the processes that filter, screen and regulate perception seemed to have been
suspended. As Huxley put it, the mind’s “reducing valve” had been inactivated.
Although there was thinking, talking going on, my mind was being used, yet there was no
ego.
For the first time, the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time, it did not
mean someone else’s state of mind.
He was not aware of any of the occupants of the room or even of the room itself, but his
mind was far from inactive.
I am still amazed at the exquisite feeling of release, peace of mind, and complete
relaxation.
I anticipated a remarkable experience, but was in no way prepared for the mind-
staggering voyage into distant dimensions that was my first acid trip.
I became increasingly cognizant of the sacredness of the experience I was undergoing
and felt an expansion of consciousness beyond the confines of my head and my body.
I began to fall in love with her as my hand warmed to hers. Warm hand, warm mind,
warm world, after an Eskimo existence.
I closed my eyes and experienced a vision that unfolded in vivid colors and accompanied
by voices that were audible only inside my head.
I felt my mind being stretched, as if my faculty of abstracting and conceptualizing was
being left on the surface, still capable of operating, but not interested in doing so.
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 mind and the senses that provide inputs to the mind were all grossly
underutilized faculties in the study of the world around us.
I started the process of throwing things out of my mind, junking mental furniture that had
been clogging up my brain.
It became unmistakably obvious to me that my workaday mind was only the tip of the
consciousness iceberg.
It created vast openings of the mind that led to an understanding of spiritual realities and
it was very valuable.
It was time for the old mind to die, so that a new one, with expanded sensibilities, could
be born.
The mind was concerned not with space, measures and locations, but with living and
meaning.
The usual distinction between the inner world of one’s own mind and external reality
became much more arbitrary.
There were many dimensions that were far beyond anything that one could produce in
fantasy in a usual state of mind.
We gave up using words and were just using gestures and movement and laughing our
heads off. (That was a Hassidic rabbi tripping with Timothy Leary.)
Completely unrelated events became intrinsically connected in my mind. (Those “events”
were never “completely unrelated” and were always “intricately connected” regardless of
whether a person is ever consciously aware of that.)
I looked into her mind and I had my eyes closed. Margaret came inside my mind and we
were together there, inside my mind. Suddenly, she manifested herself inside my mind
with a cat face and smiled at me with a cat mouth. I knew I’d always be with her.
In several staggered flashes of insight, like flashbulbs popping around a celebrity, I
understood the Cartesian mind/body split. I also understood Beauty and Truth and
Ultimate Reality. Unfortunately, I lacked the words to explain it.
It was a magical time. Visions of utopia flooded by brain. The pictures the psychedelics
beamed into my mind opened me up to the world in new ways and showed me what is
possible when love, trust and faith replace envy, possessiveness and violence.
The part of the mind given to trivial things surely had no immortality and the ego, which
continuously pushed us about trying to satisfy its selfish wants, would be dissolved and
good riddance.
I gave way to delight, as mystics have for centuries when they peeked through the
curtains and discovered that this world, so manifestly real, was actually a tiny stage set
constructed by the mind. There was a sea of possibilities out there (in there?), other
realities, an infinite array of programs for other futures.
I’d given up even trying to talk. I just smiled at everything that was said to me, and
nodded my head up and down as the words went by. I felt beautiful and saw nothing but
beauty. I was a little child being led and protected by two wise saints. On the perfect path
to all-the-way-up now. Awake, finally, and headed for truth.
It seemed as though the refreshing breath of some kind goddess of wisdom were being
gently blown against the surface of my brain…So delicate, so crisp and exhilarating was it
that words fail me in my attempt to describe it. Few, if any, experiences can be more
delightful…For me, this experience was liberation.
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.
Scenes involving human forms and architecture began to emerge accompanied by play of
light and color, a “technicolor” of the mind’s eye. As the visions grew more interesting, I
could still convey my experience to the guide, although my engrossment in the sensations
was such that I did not wish to interrupt them for long. (eyes closed)
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 mind. Even
my body feels different; I am pain free.”
It was as though a veil had been stripped away and certain things had become suddenly
self-evident. I realized that there was just one force in the universe. There is only one
energy and that is consciousness. And there is only one consciousness, one mind, and we
are, in fact, one with this, which means we are all one. I felt this was a revelation of the
true nature of reality.
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time and my impression of its truth has
ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,
parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness
entirely different.
With my eyes closed, colorful, ever-changing fantastic images invaded my mind
continuously. It was especially remarkable how all sounds—for instance, the noise of a
passing car—were transported into visual sensations, so that with each tone and noise, a
corresponding colored image, changing in form and color like a kaleidoscope, was
produced.
Everything in this universe appeared to be conscious. After having had to accept the
possibility of fetal consciousness, I was confronted with an even more startling
discovery: consciousness might actually pervade all existence. My scientific mind was
heavily tested by this possibility until I realized that although many of these experiences
were incompatible with our common sense, they were not necessarily out of the realm of
science.
Thoughts spun around in my head and everything—objects, sound, events—took on a
special meaning for me. I felt like I was putting the pieces of a puzzle together.
Childhood feelings began to come back, as symbols and bits from past conversations
went through my head. The word religious and other words from other past conversations
came back to me and seemed to take on a new significance. I increasingly began to feel
that I was experiencing something like mystical revelations.
A door had been opened in my mind and senses that would never close completely.
Ecstatic energies pulsated up my arms and rocketed into my brain.
I saw that I, like everyone, was linked to this one mind and that it was beautiful.
I was conscious of my brain as alive, cells incredibly active.
It cleaned me like a bath in my mind. I felt clean and good.
It was as if parts of my brain “awoke”, which had been dormant.
It was like my mind was a searchlight that reached out into space for thousands of miles.
It was straight telepathic communication. I was in his mind, he was in my mind.
Joy overflowed the mind and invaded the body until it bubbled.
My mind felt pure, peaceful, refreshed.
My mind penetrated into some of its own kingdom.
My mind was floating blissfully.
My mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than categories.
My mind, with a calm power of insight, penetrated into some of its own kingdoms.
New circuits of the brain were open.
New dimensions of my mind were coming into being.
People who walked into the room were really walking around in my mind.
The boundaries of my mind opened.
The knots in her “mind and brain” became “untangled.”
The nature of the infinite was realized by the mind.
The nature of the infinitude was realized by the mind.
Their minds were enlightened in an immediate experience of eternal life.
They did open a door in my mind and heart (Psychedelics did.).
This self-evidently was the mind’s natural state.
a single undifferentiated state of mind containing all possible dimensions of human
experience
a state of mind which is experiential rather than intellectual—a kind of sensation rather
than a set of ideas
a vivid flooding of his mind with an intense sense of pastel colors of changing hues and
with a wavelike motion
an exciting adventure into new territories of the mind as yet uncharted by Western
science
an experience of intense emotional release, the ending of an artificial and absurd use of
the mind
an opening of intrinsic spiritual areas in the human mind that are independent of the
individual’s racial, cultural and educational background
at last discovers that he can’t control his mind at all and “lets his mind think whatever it
likes”
beings whose feet are planted on the ground, but whose heads and hearts can reach the
stars
cut off from his own mind, cut off equally from his own body—a half-crazed creature in
a mad world. (That is the so-called mature, sane, civilized, well-adjusted adult.)
experiential adventures in the universe-at-large, which involves what can best be
described as cosmic consciousness or the superconscious mind
frees the mind from fixed preconceptions of beauty, creating, as it were, a free space in
which altogether new forms and relationships may emerge
higher levels and states of mind that lead to the realization of one’s divine nature and God
consciousness
humanity’s eternal appetite for technologies to activate and direct one’s own brain
function
incredible power and complexity operating at speeds and spatial dimensions which our
conceptual minds cannot register
influencing the mind-body-essence of man, as a magic, spiritual drug, a new world age
which begins to act evolutionarily
isn’t sitting with a blank mind, but simply a quiet awareness, without comment, of
whatever happens to be here and now
letting in a free flow of comprehension beyond the everyday threshold of experience
while keeping the mind clear
LSD an amplifier or catalyst which would enable me to explore the deeper recesses of my
mind
LSD, its eerie power to release ancient, wise, at times even holy sources of energy, inside
the human brain
opens up some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a
large “M” to flow into your mind with a small “m”
Osmond astonished and delighted by the range, boldness, flexibility and sheer
playfulness of Huxley’s splendid mind
out of her head with sensations of pleasure that she literally had not experienced since
childhood
providing insights into the psychology of creation by supplying a new way to read the
forgotten languages of the mind, a highway to the unconscious
psychiatrists whose proprietary claims to a revealed understanding of the mind and whose
antagonism to consciousness expansion are well known
pure mind, mind in its natural state, limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful,
knowledgelessly understanding
realized for the first time that during all the years of his life he had been behaving “like a
person who had no mind”
seeing that the mind, the basic reality, remains spontaneous and ungrasped whether one
tries to grasp it or not
the better minds of our age who believe in all sincerity that institutional Christianity is a
dead backwater and the multitudes simply follow their opinion
the discovery that both the voluntary and involuntary aspects of the mind are alike
spontaneous
the discovery that the human brain possesses an infinity of potentialities and can operate
at unexpected space-time dimensions
the essential otherness of the mind’s far continents, the complete autonomy and self-
sufficiency of their inhabitants
the human mind, its moments of intellectual and visionary illumination, its mysterious
stairways winding downward and upward into the unknown
the impossibility of grasping the actual world in the mind’s net of words and concepts
and the fluid character of those very forms which thought attempts to define
the intellect divorced from old-fashioned neurosis, freed from egocentricity, the mind
illuminated
the mind and senses in the state of open attention, where nature is received in its
unknown reality
the “non-active” functioning of the mind—listening without straining to hear, smelling
without strong inhalation, touching without pressing the object
the nonduality of the mind, in which it is no longer divided against itself, a state of
profound peace
the possibility of the average person’s using the mind to intentionally influence or direct
“involuntary” processes of the body
the recognition that all these radiances are the emanations of one’s own mind in a state of
perfect tranquility and serenity, a state in which the mind reveals its true universal nature
the rediscovery within ourselves of a virgin not-mind capable of non-verbally, not-
thinking in response to immediate experience
the relation of the stranger and more remote areas of the mind with all kinds of cultural,
religious and philosophical aspects of our 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 rich mental experiences that are normally ruled out of bounds by the rational nine-to-
five mind
the smug naivete of words in contrast to the raw rich ever-changing panoramas that
flooded my brain
the subconscious minds of people which LSD is able to penetrate and to bring to life as
experienced reality
the task of developing brain-change methods for eliminating human ignorance and
suffering
the traditional scientific framework which holds that consciousness resides solely in the
organ within our skulls (They are wrong because it doesn’t)
the tyrannical verbal brain disassociating itself from the organism and the world of which
it is a part, censoring, alerting, evaluating
the unfolding possibilities of mind-free consciousness, the liberating effect of the ancient
rebirth process that comes only through the death of the mind
those delicious raptures of beauty and sublime revealing of truth which break upon the
mind under the influence of the drug
to bypass the reducing valve (filter) and tap the unlimited potentials of the brain’s 20
billion neurons
to feel that he is participating with his body as well as his mind in the events he is
imaging (eyes closed)
to go beyond what we generally consider our rational minds in order to experience new
levels of consciousness
to induce states that would lend extraordinary lucidity and light to the mind’s
unconscious and creative process
to remove certain habitual and normal inhibitions of the mind and senses, enabling us to
see things as they would appear to us if we were not so chronically repressed
various types and levels of experience that have become available in certain special states
of mind and that seem to be normal expressions of the psyche
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
an internal awareness of the bodily functions, like the flow of blood through the veins, or
the receiving and transmitting operations of the nervous system and the activities of the
brain
curanderos or shamans—explore all the corners and caves and hidden inlets of the
visionary world and then guides other visionary travelers through the jungles of their own
brains
freedom from the learned cultural mind, the freedom to expand one’s consciousness
beyond artificial cultural knowledge, to move from constant preoccupation with the
verbal game, the social games, the game of self, to the joyous unity of what exists beyond
the deliberately inculcated conservatism of the psychiatric-medical mind, brainwashed
through many years of arduous academic training to perceive any change in functioning
as pathological
the mind that has broken out of its prison of cultural conditioning and egotism and is as
fully receptive to given reality on every level, as it is possible for the human creature to
be
the revelation of a unified cosmology, no longer sundered by the ancient irreconcilables
of mind and matter, substance and attribute, thing and event, agent and act, stuff and
energy
a clear head
a clear state of mind undistracted by customary thought process
a clear, unobstructed mind
a condition of mindlessness, of non-ego
a conversion of the mind or revulsion in the depths of consciousness
a deep out-of-the-mind experience
a dissolution of the ego-based apprehensions that cloud the sky of the mind
a dramatic mind-opening experience
a fantastic journey into his or her own mind
a fuller awareness of our unconscious minds
a journey to the center of my mind
a key to some of the manifestations of the Oriental mind
a magnificent clarity of mind
a magnifier of the mind
a mind completely at rest
a new definition of the mind
a new way to read the forgotten languages of the mind, a highway to the unconscious
a “passive state of mind”
a scientific and philosophic adventure into the vastness of the universe of the mind
a sense of walking around in my own head
a territory so alien to the Western mind
a trip through the cosmos inside my head
a voyage on the unpredictable terrain of the deep brain dreamscape
a world within the brain
accelerated-brain experience
accessing those large circuits of our brain that are tuned into cellular traffic
adventures of your mind
an activated brain
an adventure in the unconscious human mind
an ecstatic revelation—going beyond, confronting God, getting out of your mind
an Everest expedition of the mind
at some waayyy-back there level of my mind
attaining tranquility of mind, realization, insight and Wisdom
awareness which is beyond body, mind and ego
brain astronauts
brain explorers
brain rapture
calmness of mind
can expand your mind
clearer days and cleaner times seen through unclouded eyes and an uncluttered brain
clearing his mind of abstractions
conscious of his mind as “a big involved computer”
contacting the deeper layers of the mind
contacts the energy which powers the mind
deep layers of the mind
different realms of mind
different states of brain function
dimensions of human experience and the human mind
discovered how to free the mind of humanity from culturally conditioned limitations
discovered infinite realities within the brain
discovery of the mind’s unity
drug-induced, brain-change experiences
drugs for reprogramming the brain
“egolessness” or “no-mindness”—no feeler in conflict with feeling
emptying my mind of the clatter of thoughts
encountering another side of the mind
enlarges, reveals and draws forth what is already latent in his mind
enriching the mind and enlarging the vision
expand and speed up the mind
expand awareness, open up your mind
experiential identification with the Universal Mind
exploration in dimensions of mind
exploration of the potentialities of the mind
extended awareness of the mystical state of mind
fascinating journeys through the mind
felt a clear-headed tranquility
felt his mind go lifting up through the layers of consciousness
flipped out of his mind and spun up to heaven
flipped out of their conditioned mind sets into the world of magic, myth and Mysticism
free to experience the unconditioned pathways of the brain
freedom of brain from mind, freedom of the cortex from censorship, control
freeing the mind
getting free of those conceptual traps of mind
going beyond, getting out of your mind, confronting God
going deep into the unconscious mind
heartbeat, breathing, muscles, etc., regulated by the timeless “original mind”
highly charged rooms in the brain
his excited brain
his new state of mind
how to expand consciousness, how to get into your own brain
identification with the Universal Mind, with Cosmic Consciousness
illuminates the shadows of man’s mind
in the Footprints of the Mighty Minds of Past
insights into the human mind
intense transformative states of mind
journey into the hidden recesses of the mind
keeps the mind fresh and sensitive
learning how to use your head and body
Leary a true visionary of the potential of the human mind and spirit
Leary awed by the radiance of his first trip out of the mind
liberated from subconscious demons, clear-minded
liberates the human mind from its constricting identification with the abstract ego
liberating the sick mind from every radical compulsion to be what it is not
LSD a method of changing consciousness and brain function
LSD, the “mind detergent”
LSD’s profound effects on the way the mind handles both emotions and perceptions
Mind, infinite Mind
“mind-loosening”
mind-manifesting or mind-revealing
music to fill the new spaces in one’s mind that drugs unlocked
my mind and the “bornless” Mind, Little Mind and Big Mind
my psychedelically accelerated mind
new drugs which expand and speed up the mind
new, unknown and uncharted territories of the human mind
one’s own mind which is at root no other than the universal mind
open-mindedness and courage
opening a door in your mind
opens the mind and enhances creativity
opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures
opens the mind to its glorious, ecstatic depths
our bodies at ease and our minds mixing together
our unconscious mind and the inner teachings that come through it
perfect peace of mind
possibilities within your mind that have gone unrecognized or were denied, by your ego
propel me out beyond my mind
psychedelics, mind-manifesting or mind-revealing substances
pure contemplation, free from the discursive chatter of the skull
pure universal mind
purity of mind
push out beyond the unexpanded boundaries of our minds, beyond words
pushing the boundaries of my mind
regain the lost brainblood of childhood
regions of the mind and states of consciousness hitherto inaccessible
restore the mind’s original purity
return again to the state of infancy (to spontaneity)
shucked off the mind and awakened to eternity
speak of Mind in terms of light
stilling the discriminative activity of the mind
streams through the mind
such an awe-inspiring adventure of the mind
taking man’s mind to spiritual realms
that freedom of mind and heart which is the essence of awareness
that God is your unconscious mind, that everybody shares the same unconscious mind
that intensification, expansion and freedom of the mind
that one last freedom, the freedom of the mind
the activated brain’s potential
the almost endless potentialities of the human mind
the art of letting the mind alone
the art of turning sexual ecstasy into mystic mind-expansion
the awesome implications of what brain research may discover
the broadest domain of mind
the clear Intuitive Mind, the enlightening Essence of Mind
the cosmic “brain”
the cosmic drama being written in my brain
the Cosmic Mind, a wider consciousness
the creativity and power of the brain freed from its learned structures
the discovery that the human brain possesses an infinity of potentialities
the divine mind
the dream world of visions, mind-expansion, self-awareness and mystical ecstasy
the drug’s mind-changing powers
the eternal world of the human mind
the evolution of man’s consciousness and the human brain
the existence of vast reaches of mind beyond our conscious, rational mental processes
the expansive universe to which drugs such as LSD can open up the mortal brain
the exploration of the frontiers of the mind
the friendly realms of the brain
the freedom to develop one’s mind fully
the further reaches of the mind
the gamble of the mind, an act of faith and courage
the immensity of hyper-brain consciousness
the increased suggestibility and openness of the mind
the key to the inner chambers of the mind
the liberation of the mind from conventional thought
the liberation of the mind from symbols
the luminous skies and seas of the mind’s antipodes (eyes closed)
the Magic Theatre—price of admission is your mind
the message of the mushrooms which is the wordless, mindless rapture of the moment
the millennium of mind
the mind in its natural, unmodified condition, clear and vibrant
the mind loss and the vision
the mind’s attempt to grasp the fluid forms of nature in its mesh of fixed classes
the mind’s internal architecture
the mind’s unborn, unvanishing and unconfused nature
the mind-changing, mind-manifesting, or mind-revealing drugs
the most wonderful field of mind which could be opened
the mystical experience, the mindless vision, the nongame visionary experience
the mystical perception of the non-rational mind
the necessity of going out of your mind, going within
the new and improved accelerated brain
the radiantly bejeweled regions of the mind
the realization of mind itself, of its pure, undifferentiated Essence
the open-brain and its ecstatic possibilities
the open brain, the uncensored cortex, alert and open to a broad sweep
the opening of mind and heart to reality
the original or true nature of the mind
the Other World of the mind, the Other World of visionary experience
the peculiar sensation of “walking on air” which arises when the mind is first liberated
the psychological creatures inhabiting the remote regions of our minds
the role of psychedelics in exploring the mind’s potential
the secret about the potentialities of the brain
the state of divine mind
the state of the divine mind
the strange territory of the mind into which they had stumbled
the stream of consciousness which is recorded in the brain
the super-computer qualities of the mind, including an ageless memory core
the trip beyond the mind to liberation
the true mind
the 2 billion year old historical archive, your brain
the universal Essence of Mind
the whole attitude of letting the mind alone and trusting it to follow its own nature
the whole spaceless, timeless world of universal Mind
the world of Suchness, of Mind, of the Clear Light
these higher registers of the mind
these new states of mind
these states of mind and emotions
these upper states of mind
this ecstatic brain-opening experience
this inner revolution of the mind
this luminous other world, this luminous world within the mind
this new science of precise, disciplined brain-change
this relaxed uncreated state of mind
this state of mind
this state of mind one of cosmic grandeur
this widened definition of mind
those far reaches of the mind
three people, a trinity of awareness, one mind in 3 bodies, 3 minds in one body
to activate the archetypal circuits of the brain
to clear the head
to clear their own brains of old programs and create new ones
to cut through the daze and dope of mindless existence and wake us up
to determine how LSD can best be used in releasing the potentials of the human mind
to enlighten the heart and mind
to expand consciousness beyond the learned mind
to expand the human mind
to explore new brain terrain
to explore our own minds and consciousness and thereby the universe
to fashion new educational methods based on the imprinting capacities of the mind
to free the mind of all fixed conceptions
to free you from your verbal mind
to intensify and extend the mind’s apprehension of its reality
to intensify one’s state of mind
to open a window inside his head
to relax the mind and clear the consciousness
to transcend the mind’s habitual fixations
to turn on not just the mind, but the sense organs
to turn on the higher circuits of the brain
to use portions of my brain normally not used
total nonattached mindfulness
transcending your cultural mind
trusting the mind to act on its own
unlock the door to unconscious levels of mind
unplug the old mind so a new one could take shape
using LSD as a tool to explore the creative attributes of the mind
Western mind—a restricted view of human knowledge
what they reveal of the complexity and wisdom of the human mind at its best
your “new” mind or reborn spirit