Nature (as in the outdoors or universe)

A journey into this new mode of consciousness gives me a marvelously enhanced
appreciation of patterning in nature.

A walk in nature with its variety of sensory experiences, seems to be conducive to
positive or even ecstatic emotional states.

Beautiful natural scenery or certain objects that reflect nature’s creativity usually have a
very positive influence on the LSD experience.

Elements of animal and plant consciousness can increase an individual’s love of nature
and make him more responsive to ecological problems.

For many, a sense of discontinuity between nature and man and man’s loss of the
spontaneous, free energy of eternal delight, is the essential tragedy of modern man.

God is dethroned and un-godded by being put in opposition to nature and the world. (If
God is infinite, then God can’t be in “opposition” to nature or the world or anything else.)

Holiness does not reside in gods outside of nature. Holiness IS nature and our attitude
toward rocks, whales, and galaxies should be one of reverence.

In the contrast world of ordinary consciousness man feels himself to be something in
nature but not of it.

Individuals talk about experiencing themselves as reborn and purified; a deep sense of
being in tune with nature and the universe replaces their previous feelings of alienation.

It is quite urgent that we learn to perceive ourselves as integral features of nature and not
as frightened strangers in a hostile, indifferent or alien universe.

It’s not that it would be good to return to our original integrity with nature, but that it’s
simply impossible to get away from it. (All one needs is to realize that.)

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.

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

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

Most truly great minds prefer nature to human society. The latter limits. The former
liberates.

Nature “peoples” just as much as it “forests,” grows human organisms as a tree grows
fruit.

Our relationship to the world of nature is practically screened out of consciousness by our
present use of intelligence (or our present lack of use of intelligence).

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

Psychedelic substances have been used very wisely in primitive cultures. Our culture
doesn’t have this framework, the closeness to God and nature.

Scientific description follows the pattern of nature; it does not lay down, like rails, the
rules which nature must follow because the pattern itself is developing freely.

The beauty and mystery, the gaiety and exuberance which we see in nature and art exist
supremely and perfectly in God.

The eyes and ears, the nose and skin, all become avenues of erotic communion, not just
with the other people, but with the whole realm of nature.

The individual regains his sense of being one with that Nature of which he is a part and
which is also the very ground upon which he stands.

The oceans, the air and even the solar system are as much our vital organs as heart and
stomach. We are not in nature. We are nature.

The original sense of the seamless unity of nature is restored without the loss of
individual consciousness.

The processes of nature are like the arts of music and dancing, which unfold themselves
without aiming at future destinations.

The rift between God and nature would vanish if we knew how to experience nature,
because what keeps them apart is not a difference of substance but a split in the mind.

The socially conditioned role-playing ego is never a free agent. Man is free to the extent
that he realizes his genuine self to be the author and origin of nature.

The structure of nature is a multitude of changing patterns, not a multitude of distinct
things.

The whole world of men and nature acquires an atmosphere that we may call variously
divine, luminous, enchanted, timeless, archetypal.

The wind is experienced as a tangible manifestation of the awesome power of the
universe, as “God’s breath” or nature’s exhalations.

The world of nature is neither things seen by an ego, nor things, some of which are
sensations, bundled mechanically together, but a field of “organic” pattern.

Things, facts and events are delineated not by nature, but by human description and the
way we describe (divide) them is relative to our varying points of view.

Transcending the ego leads to great individuality, the person no longer believing that the
rules of the game are the laws of nature.

We don’t see that human nature and “outside” nature are all of a piece. (They are
connected and united.)

We have lost the ability to feel nature from the inside and to feel the seamless unity of
ourselves and the world.

What a real man or woman is remains inconceivable since their reality lies in nature, not
in the verbal world of concepts. (That’s inconceivable in terms of verbal concepts.)

cosmological mysticism—It’s an ecstatic experience of Nature and Process which leaves
the subject with a sense of having acquired important insight into, as well as identity
with, the fundamental nature and structure of the universe.

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

If you get with yourself, get with gravity, get with energy, following its line of least
resistance, you will discover that all the vibrations of nature are ecstatic, erotic or blissful.
Existence is orgasm.

In Nature, there is yet undiscovered glory, a spirit which gradually will interpenetrate you
as you commune with her. She is not a mockery, a sham, for a truthful essence indwells,
informs her.

In the West, Nature has been completely isolated from the religious context in which our
ancestors used to view it. Our non-human environment and our own physical existence
have now become domains exclusively reserved for science. (What a mistake.)

It is an ecstatic state, characterized by the loss of boundaries between the subject and the
objective world, with ensuing feelings of unity with other people, nature, the entire
universe and God.

One transcends the ordinary distinction between subject and object and experiences a
state of ecstatic union with humanity, nature, the cosmos, and God. This is associated
with strong feelings of joy, bliss, serenity and peace.

Patterns of nature which the language screens out are, in psychological terms,
unconscious and repressed. Social institutions are then in conflict with the actual pattern
of man-in-the-world.

Psychedelic subjects reported experiential identification with other people, animals and
various aspects of nature during which they gained access to new information about areas
which they previously had no intellectual knowledge.

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

The empathy with nature seems to be especially abetted by the warming rays of the sun,
the playing of the breezes over the subject’s body, his contact with the earth below him
and various other types of tactile experiencing of the environment.

The experience quite regularly has a definite spiritual and mystical emphasis and this
typically takes the form of enchantment with the mysteries of nature and the creative
forces of the universe.

The individual can be flooded with feelings of love and mystical connection to other
people, nature, the entire cosmos and God. Experiences of this kind are extremely
healing.

The psychedelic drug doesn’t mean doctor-disease, dope fiend-crime or instant insanity
but ecstasy, sensual unfolding, religious experience, revelation, illumination, contact with
nature.

The psychedelic experience tends to bring the subject into intimate contact with nature
and dramatically enhances his or her sensory perception of the world and an encounter
with nature at its best can become an aesthetic and spiritual experience of lasting value.

The realization that nature is ordered organically rather than politically, that it is a field of
relationships rather than a collection of things, requires an appropriate mode of human
awareness.

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

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

The unconscious for Jung was not a junkyard of rejected instinctual tendencies, repressed
memories and subconsciously assimilated prohibitions. He saw it as a creative and
intelligent principle binding the individual to all humanity, nature and the entire cosmos.

Transformative experiences associated with positive emotions, such as feelings of
oneness with humanity and nature, states of cosmic unity, encounters with blissful
deities, and union with God, have a special role in the healing and transformative process.

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.

When you look for stuff underlying the pattern of nature, you cannot find any stuff.
Instead, you just find more and more patterns because there never was any stuff. What we
call “stuff” is simply pattern seen out of focus. When it is fuzzy, we call it stuff.

Nature seems to the subject a whole of which he is an integral part and from this
characteristic feeling of being a part of the organic “body of nature” the subject readily
goes on to identify with nature in its physical particulars and processes. No drug subject
similarly identifies with a room or other artificial environment.

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

So many practitioners of the inexact sciences (e.g., psychology, anthropology, sociology)
let it be known most clearly that they already know what reality is. For these poor
drudges, reality is the world of nonpoetry in accordance with the great Western myth that
all nature outside the human skin is a stupid and unfeeling mechanism.

The individual in this state becomes deeply aware of his or her unity with other people,
nature and the entire universe and with the ultimate creative principle or God. This is
accompanied by an overwhelming positive affect that can range from peace, serenity and
bliss to an ecstatic rapture.

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

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

I felt like a neurological Knute Rockne. I was a scholar from the greatest university in the
greatest country, moving the adventurous search for human knowledge forward. I
counted myself fortunate to be a member of that long line of visionaries who throughout
history have sought peaceful nature-shrines to carry on the search for self-knowledge.
(That was Timothy Leary.)

Openness to new data challenging traditional beliefs and dogmas has always been an
important characteristic of the best of science and a moving force of progress. A true
scientist does not confuse theory with reality and does not try to dictate what nature
should be like. It is not up to us to decide what the human psyche can do and what it
cannot do to fit our neatly organized preconceived ideas.

Our difficulty is not that we have developed conscious attention but that we have lost the
wider style of feeling which should be its background, the feeling which would let us
know what nature is from the inside. Perhaps some intimation of this lost feeling
underlies our perennial nostalgia for the “natural life” and the myth of a golden age from
which we have fallen.

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

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

All the wonders of nature are no other than oneself.
Divine grace does not obliterate nature but perfects it.
Facts and events are terms of measurement, rather than realities of nature.
Human consciousness has not adjusted itself to a relational and integrated view of nature.
LSD gives people appreciation of nature.
Man is one with nature in a seamless unity.
Man, nature and God are one reality, are of one Suchness.
Many things which we feel to be basic realities of nature are social fictions.
Modern American man is completely out of rhythm with nature.
More and more, it seems that the ordering of nature is an art akin to music.
Nature, instead of conforming to a pattern is a pattern.
Nature is, at the very least, a volume and at most an infinitely dimensioned field.
Nature is differentiated unity, not unified differences.
Nature is eternal, but not static. It is eternally dynamic.
Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity.
Nature is much more playful than purposeful.
Nature is not pursuing any purpose.
Nature will always be the enemy to the man who has lost God.
One gets to one’s nature and to one’s basic roots in Nature.
Order, beauty and discipline, harmony and cooperation, exist already in nature.
Our thoughts ARE nature. The mind grows thoughts as the field grows grass.
Our view of nature is largely a matter of changing intellectual and literary fashions.
Primeval Nature bears a strong resemblance to that inner world.
Return to nature is an important aspect of the psychedelic experience.
The complexity of nature is a dance.
The course of nature flows of itself.
The fundamental realities of nature are not, as thought construes them, separate things.
The laws of nature are not discovered but invented.
The rules of grammar are not the rules or patterns of nature.
The state of liberation is not away from the state of nature.
There is order, pattern and meaning in nature.
These experiences can mediate accurate information about various aspects of nature.
We are all organically related to God, to Nature and to our fellow men.
You will experience the harmony and beauty of nature as deity.

The experience had deeper levels that were mythical and mystical and these dimensions
were intertwined with the physical aspects of nature.

The scenes were nature in exaggerated excellence, vividly clear, aglitter and lovely. (eyes
closed)

As my body was rocked with wave after wave, I lost contact with my feet and my legs. I
began to experience a total identification with nature, as though my body were merging
with the earth, like a tree with roots in the ground.

He fell into an inward ecstasy and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the
principles and deepest foundation of things. He gazed into the very heart of things and
nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen.

It seemed that there was beauty, in all of nature, animate and inanimate alike and that the
eyes of the entire human race must somehow be opened up to this magnificence and thus
to God.

Everything seemed extremely real and it was nature at her extreme excellence.
I felt whole and full of wonder in nature as I remember feeling as a child.
I had known the living spirit of nature.
I had never felt as close to nature before.
I was more aware of the exuberance of nature.
It was an experience of self-recognition which opened my eyes.

a phenomenon of nature, a singing, dancing, bubbling, laughing, exuberantly, loving,
energetically thinking and talking human being

a sense of receiving new flesh, new blood and new eyes, being charged with supernatural
energy and connected with the elements of nature

a state in which the fruits of nature and the potentialities of the human organism may
develop more richly

an experience of ecstatic connection with Nature, with the cosmic order, and with the
creative energy of the universe

ecclesiastical Christianity with its nature-alienated religiosity (Will they ever realize that
nature and God are one?)

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

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

Leary—Doctor of Philosophy, A. Watts—Doctor of Divinity, Huxley—Secretary of
Nature

the awe and wonder one experiences when confronted with the creative forces of nature
and the many mysteries of the universal design

the “empty” or “illusory” character of the visible world of nature—the impermanence of
its forms

the failure of the rational approach to grasp the many mysteries of nature and the awe and
wonder experienced in confrontation with the creative forces of the universe

the mind and senses in the state of open attention, where nature is received in its
unknown reality

the realization that nature is ordered organically rather than politically, that it is a field of
relationships rather than a collection of things

to become aware of feelings of love and unity with nature of which he could never have
dreamed

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

understood the cosmic meaning of all nature dances and how man and nature merge into
one

image after image, flowing in succession more rapid than I would have wished, but all
exquisitely detailed and with colors richer and more brilliant than those either nature or
the artist has yet managed to create (eyes closed)

greater spontaneity of emotional expression, reduction in depression and anxiety, less
distance in interpersonal relations, more openness to experience, increased aesthetic

appreciation, deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life, and an enhanced sense of unity
with nature and humanity

a deep appreciation and personal identity with the total grandeur and beauty of nature
a deep sense of connection with other people and nature
a restoration to my own nature through contact with Nature
a strong sense of special connection with nature
a way of life based in nature that is lived organically as a flowing growing process
direct contact with primate sensation, nature
divine nature
earth wiggles, water streams and waves and nature in general dances and swings
Eastern religions non-urban and thus more in tune with nature
how man can get back into harmonious interaction with nature
increased self-esteem and feelings of oneness with other people and nature
insights into nature and varieties of transcendent states
nature an infinitely dimensioned field
nature and its beauty
nature that had been magically transfigured
nature’s creativity
our interdependence with the entire domain of organic and inorganic nature
powerful rituals of taking plants in an atmosphere of reverence and harmony with nature
revelations of nature’s loveliness
the alienation of Western man from nature
the beauty and passion of nature, the divine warmth and radiance of the sun
the beauty of nature, the feeling it awakened in me
the contemplation of the beautiful in nature
the enticing display of the mysteries of nature
the essentially musical and dancing spirit of the universe, the musical quality of nature
the flowing impermanence of nature
the harmony and wisdom of nature
the living soul of nature with which I communed
the marvelously purposeless world of nature
the merely random process of nature
the mind’s attempt to grasp the fluid forms of nature in its mesh of fixed classes
the pattern or order of nature
the rhythms of nature
the sense of oneness with nature regained
the sexual implications of the Taoist philosophy of nature, Taoist sexual practices
the society of men with men and the larger ecological society of men with nature
the universal reality of nature
the way that the whole is contained in each of its parts a universal property of nature
this spiritual relationship of man with nature
this taste of primeval nature and the life force at its most stark and raw
to let themselves go, to the spontaneous rhythms of nature
to liberate us from the prison of isolation from nature
to return to spiritual nature
universal nature
visions of nature (eyes closed)