Reality, Real, “More Real Than Real”

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

A concept of reality that separates self and the world has decisively determined the
evolutionary course of European intellectual history.

A map stands in the same relationship to the territory it covers as our idea of reality
stands to reality.

A new intellectual understanding of reality is an important catalyst for therapeutic
progress.

A popular fallacy holds that there are no non-objective realities, that objective reality is
the “only” reality.

A reality is experienced that exposes a gleam of the transcendental reality in which the
universe and self are one.

A transcendent experience can be soul-shaking, can be painful to return at once to game
reality.

All the movement, all the energies, all forms, all happenings we must see as those in our
one and real self in many existences.

All the religious movements that have shaped human history were inspired and
repeatedly revitalized by visionary experiences of transpersonal realities.

An average person in our culture operates in a way that is far below his or her real
potential.

An individual tuned into cosmic consciousness usually has no doubt that he or she is
confronted with the ultimate reality.

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 a Psychedelicist, one tries to bring fragments of the other reality back into this one, as
building blocks.

As drugs entered the scene, songwriters and musicians became interested in interior
experience, outer space and the Meaning of Reality.

As ultimate and infinite reality, there is no external standpoint from which to doubt it or
prove it.

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

Behind the apparent multiplicity of things in the world of science and common sense
there is a single reality in which all things are united.

Brain-activating drugs expose people to powerful, mind-blowing experiences that shatter
conventional ideas about reality.

Dismiss the Judaic-Christian-Marxist-puritan-literary-existentialist suggestion that the
drop-out is escape and that the conformist cop-out is reality.

During unusual states of consciousness, one can make beneficial visionary journeys to
other realms and dimensions of reality.

Each new magnification structure required a new science, a new language to deal with
the new level of reality, formerly invisible to the naked eye (microscope, telescope).

Every enhancement of the separate personal self produces a corresponding diminution
of that self’s awareness of divine reality.

Everything is composed of tiny dots of color and these dots all blend together to form a
single scene and a single reality.

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

For the divine, the real is not the construct; it is the natural, nonverbal and indescribable
order.

Full reality is awesome to contemplate. Man longs for God, but fears to meet Him. (It is
the ego that fears.)

God is divided in play, in make-believe, but remains undivided in reality, so that when
the play comes to an end, the individualized consciousness awakens to find itself divine.

Hindu philosophy has not made the mistake of imaging that one can make an
informative, factual statement about the ultimate reality.

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

I don’t think religion is, in its essence, a matter of belief at all. Reality is reality, whatever
you choose to believe about it.

I entertain the hope that as the path proves fruitful for more and more people, increasing
numbers will explore these realms and revise their narrow paradigm of realities.

Ideas of the world and oneself which are social conventions and institutions are not to be
confused with reality.

In field, forest and every garden, a reality is perceivable that is infinitely more real, older,
deeper and more wondrous than everything made by people.

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

In the modern world, religion is often a social activity with mild ethical rules. Religion in
primitive society was an awesome reality.

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

Individuals occasionally report quite realistic recollections of their fetal existence. They
can feel like an embryo in the womb and have specific embryonal sensations.

Information that comes to the LSD user seems more real than ordinary reality. (It sure is
more real and meaningful than ordinary reality.)

It is prohibited in highly technological and complex civilizations to lift the reality curtain
and gaze upon the naked beyond.

It is through the experience of the sacred that the ideas of reality, truth and significance
first dawn.

It is through experience of the sacred that the idea of reality, truth, and significance first
dawn, to be later elaborated and systemized by metaphysical speculations.

It was these experiences that convinced me of the existence of a miraculous,
unfathomable reality that is hidden from everyday sight.

It’s not that all things are in reality One because, concretely speaking, there never were
any “things” to be considered One.

Jesus showed us the way to a higher state and called upon us to realize it, to make it real,
actual—individually and as the race.

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

Language is a device for taking the mystery out of Reality and making it amenable to
human comprehension and manipulation.

Leary insisted that the insane rat race was the real “narcotic escape” and that people
could find a new kind of harmony by “sanitizing” themselves with LSD.

Liberation is from the maya of social institutions and not of the physical world. What is
meant by the real or physical world is determined by social institutions.

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

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

LSD shows me the real Reality. It is the final enlightenment. The insights I gain are true.
(That’s right and don’t ever listen to anyone who doesn’t understand that.)

LSD stimulates an easy recall of events long buried in a patient’s subconscious and
striking insights into his own nature and the real world around him.

Man falls when he becomes entangled in his own web of words, ideas, discriminations,
thus losing sight of the one and inconceivable Reality.

Man’s apparent destiny to seek an ever greater comprehension of the nature of reality
cannot be thwarted or suppressed.

Many non-Western cultures provide occasions during which their people may become
familiar with a broad range of nonordinary realities.

Many people retain a powerful sense of incompletely explored emotional and intellectual
possibilities of something felt as intensely real and not yet explained or explained away.

Memory never captures the essence, the present intensity, the concrete reality of an
experience. (Alan Watts wrote that before he knew better, before he had ever taken LSD.)

Metaphorically, if reality is a movie, a snapshot provides dimensionally incomplete
information.

Most naively believe that culture-hallowed words about things are as real as or even
realer than their perceptions of the things themselves.

Most people feel exalted as they discover their real cosmic status and gain an entirely
new perspective on their daily problems.

Mysticism in the broadest sense is “the experience of communion with Ultimate Reality,”
a communion that has no limits.

No one part is more real than another. Everything at all moments is shimmering with all
the meaning.

Nothing before LSD ever brought home to me the idea that things of the spirit might be
real and palpable.

Objective reality, the world view produced by the spirit of scientific inquiry, is the myth
of our time.

Once one realizes that the single authorized version of reality psychiatrists promote with
their talk of “reality testing” is a fiction, there is no going back.

Once the reality of the world as grounded in the Absolute is established, the body seems
to be less an obstacle to freedom, for it is a form of that self-same Absolute.

One of the real tragedies of our time is that such an extraordinarily valuable and
necessary tool as LSD should be held in such disrespect.

Our meddling intellect, that part of the mind which uses language to take the mystery our
of reality, misshapes the beauteous forms of things.

Our ordinary egocentric consciousness is a limited and impoverished consciousness
without foundation in “reality”.

Our precious “self” is just an idea, useful and legitimate enough if seen for what it is, but
disastrous if identified with our real nature.

Our reliance on habit, on words and on concepts, tends to blind us to the immediate
reality in front of us.

People of real genius or creativity ability are increasingly unable to work in our
universities.

Psychedelic drugs bring you into levels of reality which aren’t structural because your
mind can’t structure them.

Psychedelics make it easier to see and accept aspects of reality that one can’t rationally
explain.

Purged and purified, the soul approaches union with the Divine. Light, love and joy have
become the only realities.

Reality, God, the Eternal Now, is entirely beyond speech and understanding and
attainment, but at the same time, is right here.

Reality is always larger and more complex than the most elaborate and encompassing
theory.

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

Religion to us is ecstasy. It is freedom and harmony. Kids should not let the fake,
television-prop religion they were taught turn them off. The real trip is the God trip.

Religious ideas are like words—of little use and often misleading, unless you know the
concrete realities to which they refer.

Sensory conditioning has forced us to accept a “reality” which is a cosmic-tragic farce
illusion.

Shamans are equally at home in “objective reality” and the various regions of the
supernatural world.

Shamans know a dirty little secret about culture, which is that it’s show business.
Everybody else thinks it’s reality.

So hypnotic, so persuasive is the power of convention that we begin to feel these ghosts
as realities and make them our loves, our ideals, our prized possessions.

Some of the observations from non-ordinary states would require not only revision of our
ideas about the human psyche, but of the traditional beliefs about the nature of reality.

Start using the untapped region of your head. Here is the real frontier, the real challenge,
the real opportunity.

Such insight is intuitively felt to be of a more fundamental form of reality than the
phenomena of everyday consciousness or the most vivid of dreams or hallucinations.

The ability to experience reality in unconventional ways may be an unrealized talent in
most of us and may explain the empirical correlation between psychosis and genius.

The craving for and contact with transcendental realities can be more powerful than the
sexual urge.

The dancing, kaleidoscopic arabesques which appear before closed eyes are surely an
observation of some reality.

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

The dramatic experience of new dimensions of reality can be meaningfully integrated
into the world view (a new, better and more meaningful and realistic view of the world).

The ego is a concept, a symbol, even a delusion—not a biological process or physical
reality.

The ego senses the threat implied to its domain by the fact of an unconscious mind that
can perceive an internal reality.

The experience of death-rebirth is usually so realistic that it is perceived as experientially
identical with actual biological demise.

The experience of the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, transcends all categories and eludes
description.

The formal world becomes the real world in the moment when it is no longer clutched, in
the moment when its changeful fluidity is no longer resisted.

The hippies raising questions about alternative realities was ontological promiscuity and
probably more threatening than their erotic looseness.

The imprint is made. You emerge with a new reality: what was invisible or impossible
before is now part of your self and your perceptual field.

The individual connects with important aspects of reality that are inaccessible to
perception under ordinary circumstances.

The intelligent use of psychedelic drugs required a new professional, unfamiliar to the
Western world, the brain guide. The multiple-reality coach.

The knowledge through participation in ultimate reality, in the sense of being able to
KNOW and SEE what is REAL, carries its own sense of certainty.

The liberated or awakened man is free from the confusion of conventional entities with
reality.

The longing of my soul to experience the Reality of Oneness with the Absolute was my
paramount hope and motivation in taking LSD—that some breakthrough might be given.

The mystical experience enables the individual to be so open and sensitive to organic
reality that the ego begins to be seen for the transparent abstraction that it is.

The mystical view of consciousness is based on the experience of reality in non-ordinary
modes of awareness.

The negations, negativity, apply, not to reality itself, but to our ideas of reality. (Reality is
positive, but the ego’s ideas about reality are negative and all wrong.)

The phenomenal world that we observe in our ordinary state of consciousness represents
only one aspect of reality.

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 real, unborn mind is ten thousand times more clear than a mirror and more
inexpressibly marvelous.

The real world is very different from the misshapen universe they have created for
themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices.

The reality of a middle-aged American is a fabrication of mass media. (That was written
in the 1960’s and is still true.)

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

The reality of the infinite cannot be proved or described in terms of the finite. (Words are
finite.)

The root of evil is ego, the social fiction, the “Great Lie.” We are letting the “pretended
soul” gyp and deceive the “real soul.” Your own betrayer is inside you and sells you out.

The screens that obscure who one really is are removed and one can sense a personal
positive essence.

The self may know, without knowing how it knows, the single Reality. (You circulate
your blood and digest your food, but you don’t know how you do it.)

The so-called “ordinary person” is only apparently natural or perhaps his real naturalness
feels unnatural to him.

The soul beholds realities of greater significance, such as may never be apprehended
again out of the light of eternity.

The texture of the fabric of these socially shared hallucinations is what we call reality and
our collective madness is what we call sanity.

The ultimate reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended, except by those who
make themselves loving and pure in heart.

The ultimate reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner
light of even the most cruelly tormented mind.

The universe is not a collection of bits and pieces, divided in time and space, but is in
reality the metaphysical “One.”

The Western scientific view considers matter as primary. The mystical view regards
consciousness as the primary reality and ground of all being.

Theologians need to acknowledge the reality of other worlds, other dimensions of Being,
to which man has access.

There has always been this center of pure and unmoved awareness which never at any
time departed from present reality.

There is about all really holy people a kind of guileless humor, a sense of one’s own
absurdity.

There is an unfixing of perceptual constants and the subject’s habitual reality ties are
suspended.

There is love in each human heart. We must learn how to release the love in our own
hearts. The great oneness of love becomes a reality when we flow into it.

There is no “higher religion” without mysticism because there is no apprehension of the
meaning of reality without mysticism.

There’s a real difference in the way you look at the world if you’ve had the experience of
tripping.

These drugs intensify experience, transfiguring the way we normally regard objective
reality.

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

These people need real love and understanding, the love and understanding which seems
to come through LSD.

They think things are all right the way they are. They don’t even think anything EXISTS
beyond the TV-bullshit-money reality production.

This ability of the individual to examine memories, unburdened by feeling of guilt or
anxiety, often leads him to believe that at last he is seeing himself as he really is.

This experience has considerably changed my view of reality. These are new experiences
of the world I want to explore.

This other dimension of experience is understood to be of a higher order of reality than
the dualistic dimension.

This other earth, where everything is brighter and clearer and more real than in our world
is, he says, a vision of blessed beholders. (That was Socrates, Plato’s mentor.)

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

To “know” reality, you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it
and feel it.

To the cosmological eye, all things and all people are lovable, in reality, where they are
seen as of one Suchness and yet, unique, incomparable.

Totalitarian states know that the artist is not a harmless eccentric but one who, under the
guise of irrelevance, creates and reveals a new reality.

Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept. It has become reality. (It has always
been a reality.)

Transpersonal experiences involve a strong, personal and conscious relation to reality that
goes far beyond the present scientific framework.

Union with God does not have to be attained but realized because it is a present reality
from the very beginning.

Until recently, it was rarely seriously considered that the descriptions of the adventures of
the soul after death could reflect experiential reality.

We are ignore-ant of our real identity as members, functions, expressions and
manifestations of everything that is to be seen in the sky and much more.

We are part of an infinite field of consciousness that encompasses all there is—beyond
space-time and into realities we have yet to explore.

We are so absorbed in conscious attention, so convinced that this narrowed kind of
perception is the only real way of seeing the world.

We are speaking about the very experience that shows us what is true, the experience
from which we take the standard for what we mean by “real”.

We can anticipate that normal reality without drugs will be simply one of a possible two
or three hundred realities interrelating at a given time.

We confuse our systems of symbols and descriptions with the real or natural world, the
ego with the organism, the map with the territory.

We discover abruptly that we have been programmed all these years, that everything we
accept as reality is just social fabrication.

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

We may not see reality except in terms of functions, which shuts out an enormous
amount of reality.

We must look at reality without words to see it as it is. When we see reality as it is, we
are free to use thought without being fooled by it.

We will attain to knowledge of the universe through the spirit of truth and thereby to
understanding of our being one with the deepest, most comprehensive reality, God.

We wished to confront the realities of our nervous system, not in a clinical but a creative
setting.

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.)

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

What really dies in the process of ego-death is that part of us that holds a basically
paranoid view of ourselves and of the world around us.

What we ordinarily call “reality” is merely that slice of total fact which our social
conventions of thought and feeling make it possible for us to apprehend.

When inner vision is ignored or obscured, one may be caught by illusions that constrict
awareness of reality.

When one turns his attention inward, he discovers a world of ‘inner space’ which is as
vast and as real as the external, physical world.

When we have experiences of this kind, we feel that we have encountered dimensions of
reality that belong to a superior order.

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

Whether one is enlightened or ignorant, there is in reality no escape from the Supreme
Identity.

A new deepened reality consciousness could become the basis of a new religiosity which
would not be based on belief in the dogmas of various religions, but rather on perception
through the “spirit of truth”.

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

All of us have been censored so much, the filters have been applied for so long, that if we
want to expand our consciousness and move on to different levels of reality, we are
probably going to have to use chemical means.

Almost all mystics and visionaries have experienced reality in terms of light—either of
light in its naked purity or of light infusing and radiating out of things and persons, seen
with the inner eye or in the external world.

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.

Because of their clarity and vividness, transcendent states frequently feel more real than
“ordinary” reality; people often compare the discovery of these realms to awakening from
a dream, removing opaque veils, or opening the doors of perception.

Consciousness is central and primary. This reversal of the prevailing scientific view
which sees consciousness as secondary and peripheral to material reality, changes
conventional ideas of cause-and-effect relationships.

Every assertion about the basic substance or energy of reality must be meaningless.
(That’s because assertions are based on words, which are too limited to say anything
meaningful about the basic substance or energy of reality.)

Every person who has a genuine mystical experience reports that he sees the unity, reality
and infinity in space and time of all creation. He feels joy, peace and a sense of the
sacred. He knows that his experience is true.

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

For millennia, man has been involved in the ritual ingestion of substances reputed to
produce an awareness of a sacramental reality and has come to incorporate these
substances into the myth and ritual pattern of the culture in which they occur.

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

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

From the standpoint of one reality, we may think that the other realities are hallucinations
or psychotic or far out or mysterious, but that is because we’re caught up at the level of
one space-time perception.

I have used the symbolic expression “awakening” because it clearly suggests the
becoming aware of a new area of experience, the opening of hitherto closed eyes to an
inner reality previously unknown.

I think the ego forms in this way: in order to behave in a way that is acceptable to your
parents, you—by necessity—suppress your intuitive reality. You behave as though you
believe that your reality is what your parents believe it is.

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.

Immediate experience of reality unites men. Conceptualized beliefs, including even the
belief in a God of love and righteousness, divide them and as the dismal record of
religious history bears witness, set them for centuries on end at each other’s throats.

In altered states of consciousness this new perception of the world becomes dominant and
compelling. It completely overrides the everyday illusion of Newtonian reality, where we
seem to be “skin-encapsulated egos” existing in a world of separate beings and objects.

In reality, all men are alike in their essential innocence—that the division of their natures
into the good and the evil is arbitrary or a decision of an independent spectator, none
other than our old friend, the isolated observing ego.

Individuals who transcend the boundaries of ordinary reality and embark on the spiritual
journey, typically experience a dramatic change in their concepts of the dimensions of
existence.

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 is a very misleading confusion of words with reality to assume that what cannot be
thought cannot be experienced or to put it the other way around, whatever can be
experienced can be expressed in thought.

It offers access to most extraordinary realms of experience, offers remarkable
philosophical and spiritual revelations and mediates fascinating insights into the cosmic
processes by which reality itself is created.

Many traditional scientists confuse the current Newtonian-Cartesian model of the
universe with a definitive description of reality, the accuracy and truth of which has been
proven beyond any reasonable doubt. (Those scientists have it all wrong.)

Most people, it seems, who relax and “let go” have the universal experience of
discovering a single Reality, a oneness with all things, an identity with God, with the
Supreme Being, with the Higher Self, or whatever you wish to call it.

No authoritarian government, whether ecclesiastical or secular, can tolerate the
apprehension that each one of us is God in disguise, and that our real inmost, outmost and
utmost Self cannot be killed. That’s why they had to do away with Jesus.

No one who has studied the matter closely doubts the reality of psychedelic peak
experiences, the capacity of psychedelic drugs to open up the unconscious, or the
conviction of some who take them that they are gaining insight.

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.

Occasionally, the subjects can lose awareness of the actual physical setting altogether and
their consciousness moves into experiential realms and subjective realities that appear to
be entirely independent of the material world.

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.

Only the most static, repressive society need worry about psychedelic subversion.
Consciousness-expanding chemicals, in reality, present no threat, but rather offer hope
and encouragement to a democratically oriented social structure.

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

Our so-called scientific attitude destroys faith and throttles the spiritual development.
Things of real worth can never be proved: God, love, compassion, mercy, kindness,
charity and dozens of other wonderful values.

Physicists and mystics agree that what we call “objects” are really patterns in an
inseparable cosmic process and they also agree that these patterns are intrinsically
dynamic.

Promoting their methodological ineptitude to the rank of a criterion of truth, dogmatic
scientists have often branded everything beyond the pale of their limited competence as
unreal or even impossible.

Scientific theories are but conceptual models about reality not to be mistaken for correct
descriptions of reality itself. (There are no correct descriptions because reality is
infinitely beyond limited words.)

Since psychedelic drugs expose us to different levels of perception and experience, use of
them is ultimately a philosophic enterprise, compelling us to confront the nature of
reality.

Some of these persons report that the death-rebirth process seems to have removed a
subtle film from their senses which previously prevented them from experiencing reality
fully.

Some theologians tended to view LSD and other psychedelic substances as sacred and the
sessions as sacraments because they could bring the individual in touch with
transcendental realities.

That transpersonal experiences can mediate access to accurate information about various
aspects of the universe previously unknown to the subject requires in itself a fundamental
revision of our concepts about the nature of reality.

The conventional wakeful state in which awareness is hooked to conditioned symbols,
flags, dollar signs, job titles, brand names, party affiliations and the like, is the level that
most people, including psychiatrists regard as reality; they don’t know the half of it.

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

The drugs appeared to suspend imprints of reality inducing a critical period during which
new imprints could be made. In a positive, supportive atmosphere, new realities were
being imprinted.

The “emptiness” of the universe signifies the fact that the outlines, forms and boundaries
to which we attach all terms are in constant change and in this sense, its reality cannot be
fixed or limited. It is called empty because it cannot be grasped.

The experiential insights from unusual states of consciousness suggest the existence of
intangible and unfathomable creative intelligence aware of itself that permeates all realms
of reality.

The expression “a system of teaching” has no meaning, for Truth, in the sense of Reality,
cannot be cut up into pieces and arranged into a system. The words can only be used as a
figure of speech.

The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality and the
more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions are the products of
his own thought.

The habitual egocentric mode in which man identifies himself with a subject facing a
world of alien objects does not fit the physical situation. So long as it remains, an inward
feeling is at variance with reality.

The most vital human need is to discover one’s own inner reality. This makes it possible
to draw on the enormous resources and wisdom of ages that lie in the collective
unconscious.

The prevailing attitude in traditional psychiatry and among the general public is that any
deviation from the ordinary perception and understanding of reality are pathological.
(What idiocy!)

The reach of consciousness is not limited to the material world and to spacetime. It can
extend beyond the boundaries of the Newtonian reality altogether and access nonordinary
dimensions of existence.

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 recent rapid convergence between mysticism, modern consciousness research and
quantum-relativistic physics suggests that psychedelic research could contribute in the
future to our understanding of the nature of reality.

The recognition that the universe is not a mechanical system but an infinitely complex
interplay of vibratory phenomena of different types and frequencies, prepared the ground
for an understanding of reality based on entirely new principles.

The spectrum of transpersonal experiences is not only extremely rich, but includes levels
of reality governed by laws and principles that are different from those that rule ordinary
reality.

The spiritual leadership of a stable and unified society must have access to metaphysical
knowledge, i.e., to an effective realization and immediate experience of the ultimate
reality.

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

The term psychotic means a flight from reality and the reality is based upon what we all
define it to be. If we took those limitations away, a psychotic would just be someone on
another level.

The universe is not a collection of bits and pieces, divided in time and space, but is in
reality the metaphysical “one,” wherein everything is tied up with everything else in a
pattern which is absolute for the entire universe.

The usual definition of oneself as an independent ego is a social institution rather than a
physical reality, having therefore the same kind of reality status as a minute or a verbal
definition.

The vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of education, all the openness to
inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than those enumerated in the
Sears-Roebuck catalogue which constitutes the conventionally “real” world.

The wonder of LSD is that it can bring within the capabilities of ordinary people the
experience of universal love and the reality of our divine nature which was once possible
only to the mystics.

The world of the LSD voyager is precisely one in which opposing ideas are true
simultaneously (non-Aristotelian), space is geodesic rather than linear (non-Euclidian)
and cause and effect are unreal (non-Newtonian).

There are sudden “slips” of consciousness into a wave length or dimension of this
everyday world which impress those who see them as being more real than the normal
vision.

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 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.

This century, the scientific understanding of reality has undergone dramatic changes, but
traditional psychologists and psychiatrists have not yet accepted the inevitable
consequences for their disciplines.

Those who uphold the impoverished sense of reality sanctioned by official psychiatry
describe this type of awareness as “depersonalization,” “loss of ego-boundary” or
“regression to the oceanic feeling,” all of which are derogatory terms.

To lose the reality of the isolated ego is not to lose the integrity of the individual.
(Actually, the ego has no real reality and has nothing to do with the real integrity of the
individual.)

To strive to blot out the conventional world of things and events is to admit that it exists
in reality. (You don’t have to and indeed cannot blot out the conventional world. Just see
it for what it is and don’t be taken in by it.)

Total awareness opens the way to understanding and when any given situation is
understood, the nature of all reality is made manifest and the nonsensical utterances of
the mystics are seen to be true.

We have been taught to narrow our awareness to a fantasy world of symbol solids. But
that’s not how it really is. All matter is energy—everything is whirling change, even you!
Look at your baby pictures. Look in the mirror. You are a dramatically changing process.

We need no longer be estranged from reality and from ourselves. The Eden story can now
come to its inevitable and happy conclusion; the flaming sword has been extinguished
and we are free at last to re-enter the garden.

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts, feelings and sensations are new and strange. All events, physical, personal
or social are looked at with a new eye. You suddenly realize who you really are and what
your personal reality means.

A system of thinking that deliberately discards everything that cannot be weighed and
measured does not have any opening for the recognition of creative cosmic intelligence,
spiritual realities or such entities as transpersonal experiences or the collective
unconscious.

Academic psychology is concerned with conditioning humans to accept what Freud
called the “reality principle,” implying that only the artificial, conditioned games of the
current social order are real; that natural pleasure is somehow a hallucination, even a
psychotic outburst.

An LSD trip will show the subject the manifold aspects of reality—a reality that does not
unfold upon a single level or within a single event, but involves a great variety of events
on a number of levels. As the experience becomes more profound, the spectrum of
sensations and feelings becomes almost infinite.

Drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes
unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD is by no
means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can easily be an experience in which you
have to test your soul against all the devils in hell (the ego’s fight for its life).

Each level of consciousness is inevitably produced by biochemical means, either by
natural biochemical events or by introduced chemicals that move you to these different
levels just as accurately as the magnification of a lens moves you to different levels of
external reality.

experiences of other universes—The strange and alien worlds that LSD subjects discover
and explore in this type of experience seem to have a reality of their own, although not
within the range of our cosmos; they appear to exist in other dimensions, in universes
coexistent with ours.

I suppose in a certain sense one can say the value is absolute. In a sense one can say that
visionary experience is, so to say, a manifestation simultaneously of the beautiful and the
true, of intense beauty and intense reality and as such it doesn’t have to be justified in any
other way.

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 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 I put on glasses and see details more clearly, no one can say that I am hallucinating.
But if, under the drug, I see colors and forms I did not see before, they say I am
hallucinating. But maybe I really achieved a new and better vision of external reality.
(There are no maybes about it.)

In the psychedelic ‘60’s the flower children had been lit up like living torches and
beamed out their powerful little lights across the world. For a while it looked like the
light would conquer the dark, and there would at last be peace on earth. We were filled
with wonderment, gratitude, awe, love. We had seen MORE than the everyday reality.

In this type of experience, subjects get involved in wild adventures in strange, alien
worlds that have reality of their own, although not within the range of our cosmos. These
universes seem to exist on other levels of reality or in other dimensions, parallel with and
coexistent with ours.

Individuals experiencing mystical consciousness of this type have a sense of leaving
ordinary reality, where space has three dimensions and time is linear, and entering a
timeless, mythical realm where these categories no longer apply. In this state, eternity and
infinity can be experienced within seconds of clock time.

It is a complex revelatory insight into the essence of being and existence. This insight is
typically accompanied by feelings of certainty that such knowledge is ultimately more
real and relevant than our concepts and perceptions regarding the world that we share in a
usual state of consciousness.

It is not unusual in psychedelic sessions to experience quite concrete and realistic
episodes identified as fetal and embryonic memories. Many subjects report vivid
sequences on the level of cellular consciousness which seem to reflect their existence in
the form of a sperm or ovum at the moment of conception. (eyes closed)

It shouldn’t be this difficult to accept logically that there are many realities and that the
most exciting things that happen are not at the level of our routine perception and, for that
matter, that the most complex communications, the most creative processes, exist at
levels of which we are not ordinarily aware.

It was possible to guide man to a world where no longer does man view himself as a
creature separated and estranged from all other creatures but rather as a participant in a
rich and fertile reality, a reality so interrelated and so full that it could best be described
as a dynamic continuum.

LSD subjects often arrive at the conclusion that no real boundaries exist between
themselves and the rest of the universe. Everything appears to be part of a unified field of
cosmic energy, and the boundaries of the individual are identical with the boundaries of
existence itself.

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.

Once a person has experienced a visionary state of mind, one can no longer confuse the
lie with the 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.

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

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

Only when the ordinary perception of the material world is transcended can
consciousness connect with the heavenly regions. For those who have had the privilege of
such experience, the existence of Heaven, God and celestial beings ceases to be a matter
of belief and becomes self-evident reality.

Real learning can take place only in a condition of freedom. (Real learning, therefore,
doesn’t happen in schools because kids are forced to go and teachers, using the power of
the grade, are like dictators. Pressurized, brainwashing propaganda is what schools are all
about, not real learning.)

Religion, I will be thinking of as the inner experience of the individual when he senses
Ultimate Reality, whether as God, a Beyond, transcendent cosmic process, a wholly
different and profound dimension of life, nirvana or however one chooses to name and
interpret this ultimate reality.

Romney and Reagan may fascinate middle-aged reporters in papers, editors, advertisers
and readers, all of whom convince themselves that there is something real about the game
of Romney and Reagan. But the majority of youth don’t read these papers. (Today, the
names are different but the point is the same.)

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 formless, dimensionless and intangible cosmic consciousness can best be described
as Infinite Existence, Infinite Awareness and Knowledge, and Infinite Bliss. However,
any words refer primarily to phenomena and processes of the natural reality and are,
therefore, only pitiful attempts to convey the essence of this transcendental principle.

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

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

The mechanistic image of the universe created by Newtonian-Cartesian science is no
longer an accurate and mandatory description of reality. (It never was an accurate
description of reality because there is no such thing as an accurate description of reality
by using words, and not even mathematical or chemical formulas can do it.)

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

The notion that the universe is gyrating stupidity in which man is doomed to frustration,
this reductionist, nothing-but-ist view with its muscular claims to realism and facing-
factuality is at root a resentment against quality, genius, imagination, poetry, fantasy,
inventiveness and gaiety. It is as superstitious as flat-earthism.

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

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

There appears to emerge a universal central perception, apparently independent of the
subjects’ previous philosophical or theological inclinations. It is that behind the apparent
multiplicity in the world of science and common sense, there is a single reality, infinite
and eternal, all beings united in this Being.

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

To the world, the alchemists were buffoon chemists looking for a way to turn lead into
gold, but that was only the cover story. The real lead that concerned the alchemists was
ordinary consciousness and the gold they sought was the golden brilliance of cosmic
consciousness.

Transpersonal experiences involving entities and realms that are not objectively real
according to the Western worldview can convey absolutely new information. For
example, in nonordinary states, many people have encountered deities and mythological
realms specific to cultures about which they have no personal knowledge. (eyes closed)

Unbiased systematic study of this material would lead to changes in our understanding of
the human psyche and of the nature of reality that would be as far-reaching and radical as
those that were introduced into physics by the theories of relativity and the quantum
theory.

Under the current dispensation, the vast majority of individuals lose, in the course of
education, all the openness to inspiration, all the capacity to be aware of other things than
those enumerated in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue which constitutes the conventionally
“real” world.

We are confronted by the very real possibility that the known and unknown uses of these
drugs that could prove to be legitimate and beneficial for individual persons and society
may be suppressed until some future century when investigation will be permitted to
proceed unhampered by popular hysteria and over-restrictive legislation.

We are trying to apply the concepts of an outdated world view—the mechanistic world
view of Cartesian-Newtonian science—to a reality which can no longer be understood in
terms of these concepts. (This reality never could be understood in terms of these
concepts.)

We may encounter entities, situations, and places that bear little or no resemblance to the
realities we know in our day-to-day lives. It is here that we go beyond more familiar
experiences and enter the world known to shamans and seers, the world of deities and
suprahuman beings known from myths and fairy tales. (eyes closed)

We must achieve “freedom from the known”—freedom from the unanalyzed postulates
in terms of which we do our second-hand experiencing, freedom from our conventional
thoughts and sentiments, freedom from our stereotyped notions about inner and outer
reality.

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.

Abraham Maslow urged that there was a need to “depathologize” the psyche, that is, to
look upon the “inner core” of our being not as the source of metaphysical darkness or
illness but as the source of health and as the wellspring of human creativity. It was his
belief that Western civilization had obscured the importance of this inner core by
approaching it more as a superstition than as a reality.

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.

Almost all of us are still robots controlled by conditioning. We think we are conscious,
but we aren’t. We are asleep, hypnotized, sleep-walking—the metaphors vary, but they
all mean that we can’t see outside our conditioned reality-tunnel. When we begin to
awaken, we perceive the world is nothing at all like the myths and superstitions our
society has imposed on us.

At first, all research challenging the dominant paradigm tends to be suppressed because
the current theories are mistaken for a true and exhaustive description of reality. (A
paradigm is what scientists believe about reality. New information leads to a new
paradigm. It used to be thought that the earth was flat. New information necessitated a
new paradigm or way of looking at it.)

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.

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

In my utopian fantasy, Island, I speculated in fictional terms about the ways in which a
substance akin to psilocybin could be used to potentiate the nonverbal education of
adolescents and to remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen
universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned
prejudices. (That was Aldous Huxley.)

Indians experience the collective unconscious as an immediate reality, not just as an
intellectual construct. It is significant that this experience of shared consciousness holds a
most important place in the society. In fact, as a sacramental ritual, it is the basis of tribal
unity because it proves and confirms the supposition that every person in the tribe is the
same as every other person in the most fundamental way.

Leary believed that the human race is presently evolving to a higher level of
consciousness and a greater spiritual awareness. His research with LSD seemed to bear
out the fact that our nervous systems are equipped to receive a vastly greater spectrum of
reality than we realized; and once the veils of perception are cleansed, wars, racism,
competitiveness and violence will be seen as old, outgrown, pre-human traits.

Loss of self may be experienced as an actual death and rebirth, undergone with anguish
and joy of overwhelming intensity. In some cases, the culmination is a mystical ecstasy in
which for an eternal moment all contradictions seem reconciled, all questions answered,
all wants irrelevant or satisfied, all existence encompassed by an experience that is felt to
define the ultimate reality, boundless, timeless, and ineffable.

Modern consciousness research has confirmed the basic thesis of perennial philosophy
that the consensus reality reveals only one aspect or fragment of existence. There are
important realms of reality that are transcendental and transphenomenal. The impulse in
human beings to connect with the spiritual domain is an extremely powerful and
important force. It resembles, in its nature, sexuality.

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 can
not do to fit our neatly organized preconceived ideas.

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

Our 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 an idea of ourselves. Hence, the subjective feeling of a “self” which has a “mind.”

Perceptions of encompassing light, infinite energy, ineffable visions, and
incommunicable knowledge are remarkable in their seeming distinction from perceptions
of the phenomena of the “natural world.” According to mystics, these experiences are
different because they pertain to a higher transcendent reality. What is perceived is said
to come from another world, or at least another dimension.

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 and therefore what
sanity 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.

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

The argument that the person who has taken psychedelic drugs thereby disqualifies
himself as a person able to objectively view and evaluate the experience must strike most
seasoned researchers as simply ludicrous. It is also unanswerable since all who might
reply to it on the basis of real knowledge are declared in advance unfit to deal with the
question.

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

The new data are of such far-reaching relevance that they could revolutionize our
understanding of the human psyche. Some of the observations transcend in their
significance the framework of psychology and psychiatry and represent a serious
challenge to the current Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of Western science. They could
change drastically our image of human nature, of culture and history, and of reality.

The reality and concrete nature of these experiences, as well as their convincing quality,
presented for a while a very serious conflict for the “scientist” in me. Then, all of a
sudden, the resolution of this dilemma emerged; it became clear to me that it was more
appropriate to consider the necessity of revising present scientific beliefs than to question
the relevance of my own experience. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

The traditional definition of sanity involves perceptual, emotional, and cognitive
congruence with the Newtonian-Cartesian image of the universe, not as a pragmatically
useful model, but as the only accurate description of reality. Substantial and critical
deviations which seriously challenge the Newtonian-Cartesian postulates are labeled as
psychosis.

Three hundred years ago, if I announced there was a level of reality made up of tiny
particles which seem to have a beauty, a meaning, a planfulness of their own, I’d be in
danger of being imprisoned. When I could persuade people to look through the
microscope lens at a leaf, or a snowflake or a drop of blood, then they would discover
that beyond the macroscopic world are visible realms of energy and meaning.

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

We’re not just our bodies. That’s an illusion. Our physical forms are just a temporary
condensation of consciousness in material form. This one consciousness is our true
identity, and we all know this deep within us. I know that you know that we all know that
we are one. We’re all just playing this game. In ordinary reality, we’ve deliberately gone
to sleep on this knowledge.

Western science recognizes as real only those phenomena that can be objectively
observed and measured. (That’s a very naive, narrow, limited scope. Cells of the body
were real before the discovery of the microscope. The earth was always round and always
revolved around the sun regardless of what Western scientists know or could “objectively
observe and measure”.)

Western scientists view their own particular approach to reality and psychological
phenomena as superior and “proven beyond a shadow of doubt,” while judging the
perspectives of other cultures as inferior, naive, and primitive. The traditional academic
approach takes into consideration only those observations and experiences that are
mediated by the five senses in an ordinary state of consciousness.

When we experience identification with the cosmic consciousness, we have the feeling of
enfolding the totality of existence within us, and of comprehending the Reality that
underlies all realities. We have a profound sense that we are in connection with the
supreme and ultimate principle of all Being. In this state, it is absolutely clear that this
principle is the ultimate and the only mystery.

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

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.

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

When subjects were given a psychedelic drug without knowing what to expect or how to
respond, being left alone in a dark room or threatened by unfamiliar researchers
demanding cooperation in psychological testing, it is easy to understand why so many
experiences became psychotic. If nonpsychotic experiences are desired, subjects must be
prepared, feel secure in a friendly environment, and above be willing and able to trust in a
reality greater than themselves.

All things are in reality the Tao or the Buddha nature.
All things are without independent reality since they exist only in relation to other things.
An imperial or kingly concept of the ultimate reality is neither necessary nor universal.
Another state of reality is realized.
As egos, they do not know the ultimate reality at all.
As the sound “water” is not actually water, the classified world is not the real world.
Awareness is a view of reality free from ideas and judgments.
Buddha “never said a word”. His real message remained always unspoken.
By intuitive wisdom, he sees into the nature of reality.
Concepts we use in our rational description of reality are relative, limited and illusory.
Consciousness is real and has connections to every part of the body.
Cosmological mysticism is an experience of reality illuminated from within.
Cultural conditioning is a process of gradually narrowing your tunnel-reality.
Drugs dramatically alter the manner in which reality is experienced.
Each of us labors under the illusion that our imprint board is reality.
Eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality.
Facts and events are terms of measurement, rather than realities of nature.
Freedom comes through complete acceptance of reality.
Glimpses into alternative realities can shed light on this one.
God and brotherhood become living, palpable realities.
He or she discovers what real peace of mind feels like.
Ideas and words are more or less fixed, whereas real things change.
If reality is to be understood in its fullness, there must be total awareness.
In reality, the infinite remains undivided.
Internal reality is of a different order of reality that is self-validating.
It is consciousness expansion because it expands the scope of your personal reality.
Man, nature and God are one reality, are of one Suchness.
Many problems are rooted in the ego’s conceptions of reality rather than in reality itself.
Many things which we feel to be basic realities of nature are social fictions.
Mythic reality exists!
Next to this state, ordinary reality is like a cheap parlor trick in a grimy hotel.
No thought or ideal or image can contain reality.
One is organically connected with reality as a whole.
Only in measured reality are we limited by the laws of physics.
Only when this reality is attained is the true working of Suchness understood.
Our “normal” state of consciousness is a constructed reality.
Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth.
People have awakened to the reality of the spirit.
Real knowledge is nonverbal and beyond the reach of concepts.
Real religion has nothing to do with words.
Reality in itself is neither permanent nor impermanent; it cannot be categorized.
Reality is a cosmic circulation, a network of relations in process.
Reality is a curtain for people who haven’t got the courage for acid.
Reality is infinitely alive.
Reality is infinitely more complex than any scientific theory or ideological system.
Reality is penetrated more deeply.
Space is just as real as anything solid.
The beauty of the real God, lie so much other beauty, is rarely seen.
The controllers censor anything that gives the power to change reality to the individual.
The depths of reality can be opened.
The ego cannot see the reality of nonordinary reality.
The elimination of the false ego helps us to develop a more realistic image of the world.
The feeling of reality and truth in such experiences can dominate a whole life.
The full and real self is not the willing and deliberating function but the spontaneous.
The fundamental realities of nature are not, as thought construes them, separate things.
The glimpse of a larger reality that such experience affords may change a person’s life.
The individual experiences only part of the reality “available” to him.
The infinite, as living reality, can never be grasped in any fixed form.
The inner sphere is the real self, unknown to the conscious ego.
The intense reality experienced by the person under LSD is often overwhelming.
The manifold world of facts and events veils the one underlying reality.
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
The mystic experience is the measure, the standard for what is real.
The nature of the one reality must be known by one’s own clear spiritual perception.
The paradigms of science should not be confused with reality or truth.
The perceptions seem more real than the ordinary state.
The real self exists on after the death of the body.
The real world is actually timeless.
The reality of opposites is that “between” for which we have no words.
The social drama and its conventions are confused with reality.
The social reality misses the real excitement.
The spiritual awakening amounts to a real resolution.
The trip is so powerful, so different, so shattering to one’s illusion of a single reality.
The undifferentiated energy process is real.
The ultimate change is the “you” that you imagine and the real “you” merging into one.
The ultimate reality cannot be described in terms of any finite or known category.
The ultimate reality is alive, conscious and intelligent.
The way in which various disciplines divide reality is ultimately arbitrary.
There are other realities more conducive to ecstasy, happiness, wisdom.
There exists a second, higher timeless world, a reality more native to you.
There is a hierarchy of the real.
There is a lost reality, a reality lost long ago.
There is a single reality, infinite and eternal.
There is little conjunction of truth and social “reality”.
These are not escapes from but enlargements, burgeonings of reality.
These experiences seem more direct and immediate, more real than ordinary reality.
They forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
They have tapped a universal reality that is potentially available to everyone.
This reality is the “suchness” of our natural nonverbal world.
This was no evasive flight from, but a deep probe into reality.
To awaken really means to see what is true.
To see it all as serious, taken-for-granted reality is to miss the point.
To see the world as it really is means to understand that life is immortal.
Unforgettable revelations about the nature of reality occur.
Universal symbols refer to complex transcendental realities.
Visionary states can provide valuable information about the self and reality.
We can explore mythological and other realities that we previously did not know existed.
We cannot know reality directly through intellectual activity.
We cannot measure true reality; in fact, the very essence of reality is its immeasurability.
We discover that there is a real liberation that is possible for every human being.
We must transcend parochial cultural contexts to truly understand reality.
What is empty is not reality itself but all that seems to block its light.
What is separate in terms, in words, is not separate in reality.
What we call reality is a shadow upon an imperfect screen.
When defenses are down, we begin to see customarily ignored aspects of reality.
Without thoughts, there are no “things”; there is just undefined reality.
You start to tune into other planes of reality.
You suddenly get into closer contact with reality.

He has been thrust into a new world and his now useless “real world” categories fall
away.

His experience of nonordinary reality is no less real for being unverifiable in the realm of
ordinary experience.

The structures and the masks he has built up over the years suddenly disappear and he is
cast free to ponder on the ultimate reality of things without restraint.

He sees in his experience a glimpse of reality.

This is what I’d been seeking, communion with a higher reality.

Every scene was realistic, but the colors were unusually vivid and all sparkled in brilliant
morning sunshine. (eyes closed)

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 achieved fuller and clearer recognitions of the nature of reality, of man and of his own
higher nature.

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

He trusted his experience of having entered into a state of more, not less reality, of
hypersanity, not subsanity.

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

I discovered emotionally that the essence of reality is self-awareness, selfhood, not
egohood.

I experienced reality from a location that lies somewhere beyond the force of gravity or
time.

I felt as though I was remembering something I had known before I was born, but had
forgotten by identifying with the physical and mental world as total reality.

I knew that the experience was not the result of a psychosis brought on by the drug but a
glimpse into a world beyond ordinary reality.

I realized how a normally, constricted perceptual framework permits one to see only a
fraction of reality.

I thought that I was near death; when suddenly, my soul became aware of God, in an
intense present reality. I felt him. I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt.

I was looking at a painting and projected images into it, all seen in vivid photographic
reality.

It created vast openings of the mind that led to an understanding of spiritual realities and
it was very valuable.

It seemed more real than ordinary consciousness and all of it seemed “revisited,”
something one had known once.

It was much more real than what you call reality. More real than what you’re thinking
and feeling at this moment. More real than the world before your eyes.

Layer upon layer of illusion dropped away and crumbled into nothing. The Final Reality
began to dawn.

Now that he was aware of “countless realities”, routine existence had been revealed to
him as “illusory.”

The outside appeared clear, serene and beautiful. I saw things I have never seen on the
road. The trees, grass, colors, sky—all were a real delight to behold.

The subject discovered the rubber stamp artificial structure of social reality and social
role.

The usual distinction between the inner world of one’s own mind and external reality
became much more arbitrary.

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

There surged upon me a succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery of a striking
reality and depth, alternating with a vivid kaleidoscopic play of colors (eyes closed).

There was awareness of unutterable bliss coupled with the conviction that this was the
only real and eternal state of being.

They apprehended real truths, common to all our humanity, and needing but some
instrument of intense insight to bring them forth.

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

Without exception, every object was aglitter and asparkle, like diamonds dancing. All
colors took on the quality of gems, without causing a loss of realism.

wood beautifully grained—I was projecting figures into the grain patterns. One could
look right through the socially real grain to a higher order of pattern.

By my calculation, the state lasted about 300 years, for the sensations which followed one
another were so numerous and pressing that any real appreciation of time was impossible.
The rapture passed…I saw that it had been just a quarter of an hour.

God, Who had always been so vague and remote before, was now real and near and I
knew that He would never again be invisible to me. Thus, I was given another rich and
lasting reward.

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

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.

My exponentially heightened awareness saw through the static, one-dimensional ego-
constricted false front which is the consciousness-contracted reality of the everyday
world.

The ancient days were restored before my eyes and to my ears, and I exulted in the
perception with such conviction of reality that I ascribed it to no power of my own, but
knew it as an exterior and universal fact.

The city was transformed into the wonderful world I had experienced when hearing
fables as a child. The rich colors and textures, more real than real, were pure
enchantment. Walls of buildings had an added dimension to their surfaces.

The LSD voyage goes out far beyond one’s small private history. My trip was back
through the cycle of being, which, if Jung’s collective unconscious really exists, as I
could now swear that it does, is the recurring history of you and me, all of us.

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

I felt that I was part of some intricate, unified network that was all-inclusive and eternal
and I felt that in that place I would continue to exist in some form forever. My belief in
the finality of death was undermined by an event that was so real it could not be denied
and I could no longer believe that death was the end of everything.

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

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

I was amazed and intrigued. I’d learned first-hand how limited our everyday notions of
consciousness are. I knew that the experience had touched something very deep in me. I
recognized a level of reality in the experience that could not be ignored. I wanted to know
more and was willing to take the risk.

I was not I any more but a consciousness that encompassed a vastly broader spectrum of
reality than “I” had ever dreamed. I was changed, and the new vision so attracted me that
I stopped paying attention to the segment of reality that had formerly held my complete
attention, mainly, the physical plane.

The essence of what I received that night was a recognition that reality, in its totality, is
something much larger and more complex than will ever fit through the tiny keyhole of
human perception. Technological amplification we might invent, will never begin to
encompass it.

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

Feeling not that I was drugged but that I was in an unusual degree open to reality, I tried
to discern the meaning, the inner character of the dancing patterns which constituted
myself and the gardens and the whole dome of the night with its colored stars. All at
once, it became obvious that the whole thing was love-play. This single source was not
just love as we ordinarily understand it. It was also intelligence.

I was looking at my furniture as the pure aesthetic whose concern is only with forms and
their relationships with the field of vision or the picture space. But, as I looked, this
purely aesthetic, Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the
sacramental vision of reality. I was in a world where everything shone with the Inner
Light and was infinite in its significance.

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.

My familiar reality had cracked; a vast new reality that promised liberation from death
and meaninglessness lay before me. I believed that if everybody saw what I now saw
there would be peace on earth. The demons of hate, violence, illness and war would be
banished back into Pandora’s box. The scales would fall from humanity’s eyes and we
would recognize that we are one, and that we are eternal.

During the experience, I felt I understood what mystics throughout the ages have claimed
to be the universal truth of existence. I had an academic background in philosophy and
comparative religion, but I realized that mystical teachings had now taken on an added
dimension. My perception seemed to have shifted from a flat, two-dimensional
intellectual understanding of the literature, to a three-dimensional sense of immersion in
the mystical reality.

I sensed a complete connectedness of everything. It was obvious to me that all of the
separateness I ordinarily perceived was, in fact, an artifact of cultural conditioning, and
was indeed less “real” that what I was supposedly hallucinating. At that moment, I knew
that I was, for the first time, experiencing things as they are, utterly continuous. There is
no discontinuity. There is not one thing and another thing. It is all the same thing, the
Holy Thing.

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

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

All reality was totally present, including the past and future.
All the mysteries which otherwise get whispered, here were so real and obvious.
All was vividly clear and real.
Everything seemed extremely real and it was nature at her extreme excellence.
Everything was experienced as completely real.
He answered a question as to the nature of nondual reality with a “thunderous silence.”
I experienced the euphoric effects of LSD, a celestial transformation of reality.
I felt I was home or in true Reality.
I felt there was a fundamental validity and reality to the experience.
I found myself giggling about philosophical concepts of reality.
I had uncovered forgotten emotions and experiences of unbelievable reality.
I passed through the levels of reality between the material world and pure energy.
I realized that the old occult traditions really must have a basis in reality after all.
I wanted to get back to the world where heaven was real.
It did indeed induce a flight, but instead of fleeing from reality, I flew more deeply into it.
It had been a real epiphany, a revelation of God.
It was a profoundly moving, real and deeply meaningful experience.
It was all so real and new.
My awareness had moved beyond our ordinary so-called real world.
My book-learning expectations had been replaced by the real thing.
The experience unfolded range upon range of reality I hadn’t known existed.
The psychedelic experience signified the reality and the beauty of the flower of the spirit.
The reality I knew had cracked and through the cracks shone another order of reality.
The rich colors and textures, more real than real, were pure enchantment.
There was no question that magic was real.

a dream-like state marked by extreme alterations in consciousness of self, in the
understanding of reality, in the sphere of experience and marked changes in perception

a fractured and disorganized view of the world, with a mentality so fascinated by speech
and thought that it has lost the power to feel the interval, the reality between terms

a high state of consciousness in which man finds union with the ultimate reality of the
universe

a new model of the psyche, new understanding of emotional disorders and of the
therapeutic process, new insights into human nature and the nature of reality

a process of experiencing Essence in such a way that it illuminated all of existence, a
kind of flight TOWARDS reality

a rich spectrum of transpersonal experiences that provide profound insights into realms
and dimensions of reality that are ordinarily hidden to human perception and intellect

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

a truly miraculous instrument for new perceptions and insights about those aspects of
reality which concern him personally

access to levels and domains of reality described by the great mystical traditions of the
world

an enchanted reality wherein everything is bound up with everything else in a pattern
which is absolute for the whole universe

an extremely realistic feeling of the ultimate biological crisis that frequently gets
confused with real dying

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

an intimate, personal experience of the reality to which most forms of religion and
philosophy come no nearer than an intellectual or emotional description

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

an undifferentiated unity wherein the knower, the knowledge and the known are
experienced as a single reality

an unending series of colorful, very realistic and fantastic images, constantly changing in
shape and color like the pictures in a kaleidoscope (eyes closed)

became aware of fantastic dimensions of being, all of which possessed a profound sense
of reality

become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open
to the spirit

blindness to divine Reality—complete ignorance of the reason and purpose of human
existence

burst through the shell of language and convention into the country of the real under
impetus of the psychedelics

characterized the reality in which self and world are separated as “the schizoid
catastrophe, the Western neurosis”

distinction between God as described in terms of conventional thought and God as he is
in reality

enlightenment, full awareness of that blissful Reality whose attributes include
inconceivable wisdom, compassion, light, beauty, energy and gaiety

experiences accompanied with such a powerful sense of authenticity and reality (more
real than reality is a common description)

experiences visits to other realms of reality, many of which are fantastic and
mythological in nature (eyes closed)

experiential dimensions that are clearly beyond the confines of what is agreed upon in the
West as objective reality

explorations of domains that in Western culture are not considered part of objective
reality

freeing oneself from distractions that interfere with the perception of higher realisms or
more beautiful aspects of existence

had a very real insight that their existence is part of an intricate, interconnected cosmic
order

has provided us with some brand new clues into the meaning of the ancient journeys into
other realities

how real, definite and memorable an event of sudden conversion may be to him who has
the experience

immediate contact through chemicals with the reality of “consciousness, energy and
bliss”

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

is no longer an emotionally charged ego, but finds himself an element in the given reality
which is not an affair of objects and subjects, but a cosmic unity of love

Jungian archetypes having that peculiar quality of external reality and alien intelligence
(eyes closed)

knowledge other than the contents of our surface consciousness, which can apprehend
reality only in the form of one abstraction or thought at a time

limits of mechanical emotions and robot mentation that are inescapable as long as one
remains within one dogmatic model or one imprinted reality-tunnel

more real than the phenomenal world as it is experienced in a more usual state of
consciousness

multiple levels of reality which differ in their complexities and are mutually interacting
and interdependent

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

mystical experience, visionary breakthroughs to a deeper, more comprehensive reality
than that perceived by our rational everyday consciousness

nondefinable aspects of reality far beyond accepted limits of science (Science has limits.
Reality has no limits.)

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

real worlds revealed when the mode of consciousness has been changed from the
utilitarian to the aesthetic or spiritual

realistic and authentic experiences related to individual stages of the biological birth
process

realness of experience and forms of thinking now unknown (That’s unknown to most
people, not everyone.)

reveal extraordinary capacities of the human psyche and important aspects of reality
normally hidden from our awareness

reveals a rich spectrum of dimensions of reality that are ordinarily hidden from human
awareness and are not available in the everyday state of consciousness

see through the whole paranoid game and mutate to a wider, funnier, more hopeful
reality-map

seeing that the mind, the basic reality, remains spontaneous and ungrasped whether one
tries to grasp it or not

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

states of consciousness that transcend ordinary space/time limitations and operate in a
reality that is more aptly described in the language of subatomic physics

suggesting, indicating the very essence and reality of religion by dropping religious forms
and terms altogether

the actual reality of this one unique event—neither long nor short, neither fast nor slow,
but eternal

the awakening of the senses, the open eye, the naked touch, the real-eye-zation that this is
it! I am eye! I am hear! I knose! I am in contact!

the Clear Light of reality itself or undifferentiated consciousness which underlies all
being, knowledge and perception

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

the conviction that the subject is seeing himself for the first time as he really is—with all
mental blocks and defenses down

the enormity of the experience, the total confirmation, in that it was all intensely seen, the
clarity and reality of what was felt

the existence of these elements in the human unconscious and the possibility of
experiencing them consciously in a vivid and realistic way

the experience of oneself as a potentially unlimited field of consciousness that has access
to all aspects of reality

the incomprehensibility of nonordinary reality from the point of view of ego
consciousness

the knowledge that nothing that is utterable is real because this indescribable state is so
much greater

the metaphysical realization that man’s consciousness is a particular mode of the ultimate
reality and is, in essence, identical with the ground of the whole universe

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

the possibility of confrontation with the source level of reality, felt as Holy, Ultimate,
Ineffable, in an atmosphere charged with the most intense affect

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

the radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality (God is radiant not a crackpot dictator
demanding blind obedience.)

the realization that what he thought was his identity was in fact only a tiny fragment of
the Real Self—and this is liberation

the socially approved sensation of reality, more or less the world as perceived on a bleak
Monday morning

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

the “unreality” of time and space (that time and space aren’t what we think they are, that
we can go beyond the limits of what we think of as time and space)

the very highest form of Bliss, wherein he achieved the state of total identification with
all of reality

the view of the world, not as it ordinarily appears but as it really is, when seen by human
consciousness at its greatest height and intensity

the world of consensus reality, often referred to as objective reality (This is the narrow,
limited, trivial “reality” of the ego.)

timelessness, presence of God, ultimate reality, blessedness and peace, mystery, and
rebirth

to begin the world again, to create the new Garden of Eden, to transcend ordinary reality,
to enter the New Age

to expand the consciousness by reducing or eliminating the psychological defenses that
separate the world of the supernatural from the world of everyday reality

to feel in herself an awakening to dimensions of reality to which she previously had been
indifferent (or rather dimensions of reality which she knew nothing about before LSD)

to focus the attention on reality itself, instead of our intellectual and emotional reactions
to reality

to speak of reality as “nondual” rather than “one”, since the concept of one must always
be in relation to that of many

transcendence—becoming aware of a reality which lies outside of time and space and the
ego

transcending everyday realities and exploring realities quite outside the realm of ordinary
consciousness

vision of the inner reality, looked into the deepest foundation of things, gazed into the
very heart of things

what all of us have always been, a part of the divine substance, a manifestation of love,
joy and peace, a being identified with the One Reality

a state of which, because there are no longer any God-eclipsing obstacles between
themselves and Reality, they are able to be aware continuously of the divine Ground of
their own and all other beings

an abstract one-at-a-time translation of a universe where things are happening altogether-
at-once, a universe whose concrete reality always escapes perfect description in these
abstract terms (Words are “abstract terms” and can be spoken only one-at-a-time.)

levels of reality denied by Western mechanistic science, but recognized and
acknowledged by many ancient and non-Western cultures and by the great mystical
traditions of the world

persecuting men who are merely attempting to experience that part of their nature that
they feel most entitles them to regard themselves as human, namely, their encounter with
Ultimate Reality or what they call God

the Church’s disagreeable insistence on the reality of the totally malignant spirit of
cosmic evil, everlasting damnation and on the absolute distinction between the Creator
and the creature

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

Western culture’s preference for consensus reality, lack of a genuine understanding of
altered states of consciousness and strong tendency to pathologize all such states without
discrimination (It is “consensus reality” based on ego that is really pathological.)

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

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

a broadening and deepening of reality consciousness
a broader range of reality
a clear perception of reality
a clear view of Reality
a comprehensive and timeless reality
a consciousness clear as crystal and open to truth, reality or God
a deception of symbols pretending to be realities
a deepened and thereby religious reality consciousness
a deeper level of reality perceived by psychedelics
a fantastic visionary adventure that tears ordinary reality asunder
a glimpse of a higher order of reality
a glimpse of reality
a glimpse of the higher reality
a glimpse of the splendor of Ultimate Reality
a lack of real understanding about nonordinary states of consciousness in Western culture
a level of reality which he had never experienced before
a marvelous, captivating and mystery-producing encounter with Ultimate Reality or God
a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight
a new and better reality
a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality
a new dimension of reality
a new-reality view based on post-Einsteinian DNA science
a penetration to deeper dimensions of reality
a perception of the real structure of the world
a powerful means of mediating experiences of other realities
a profound and meaningful experience of certain realities that are alien to our culture
a real healing force
a real Heaven
a reality that is beyond human knowledge but nevertheless can be experienced directly
a reality we once knew and forgot
a reality which is not an affair of objects and subjects, but a cosmic unity of love
a realm beyond the physical reality
a sense of heightened reality in vision
a sense of reality beyond anything ever experienced or imagined previously
a sense of sacredness and of ultimate insight into the true and real nature of existence
a single infinite reality which is consciousness itself
a snowstorm of reality
a special reality of a new and different significance entirely
a timeless order of reality outside the world as we know it
a unified world view with meaning beyond that drawn from empirical reality
a vision of higher reality such as comes in moments of scientific or psychological insight
a vision of the Primary Clear Light of Pure Reality
a vision that was so real and convincing, so directly and deeply felt
a visionary glimpse of a deeper reality, an insight into the true basis of the universe
a way to perceive reality differently
a world of potential underlying the world of measured reality
able to see reality with new eyes
acquiring real knowledge of the process of life while in the drug state
an enlargement of reality rather than a deviation from it
an enormously complex continuum of realities
an entirely new way of looking at reality and our existence
an erotic sense of reality, rather than an aggressive dominating attitude toward reality
an eternal and universal reality
an experience of a deeper, duality-surmounting reality
an experience that is felt to define ultimate reality: boundless, timeless and ineffable
an experience vividly real
an extremely wide range of phenomena which occur on different levels of reality
an imperishable, spiritual reality which is our true home
an infinite number of realities and space-time dimensions
an intensification of reality
an unending series of colorful, very realistic and fantastic images (eyes closed)
another tier of reality
aware of his real, organic relationship with God
aware of the limitless realities in the nervous system
bathed in a luminous reality
become more intensely aware of the living vibrations of the real world
beyond games, in touch with only the living moment, this immediate reality
brings into view an entirely different picture of reality
can look across the border into other realities
communing with higher reality
confusing fixed convention with fluid reality
confusing words and ideas with reality
conscious of a deeper reality
consensus “reality” with its fashions and fake morality
contact with transcendental realities
could look at reality with eyes unclouded by convention
creating a better and more optimistic reality-tunnel, transcending ego games
different experiential realms and aspects of reality
direct contact with reality
directly understanding the mystery of given reality
disclosed the nature of reality to him
discovered infinite realities within the brain
divine reality
dramatically expanded perception, opening up entirely new levels of reality
enlightened by contact with Reality
entered dimensions of consciousness that permanently altered their concept of reality
eternal realities
eternal, spiritual reality
eternal union with the infinite reality
eternally real
existential experience of a deeper, self-encompassing reality
experience the source level of reality
experience their own divinity and attain profound insights into the nature of reality
experiences of other realities
experiences that do not conform to everyday reality and defy rational explanation
exploring and mapping new realities of internal experience
exploring the realities of one’s nervous system in a creative rather than a clinical setting
exploring the unlimited sensory reality about us
exposing new layers of reality
extended reality
feel themselves merge with divine realms that transcend daily reality
gaining deeper insight into reality
getting rid of conceptualized pseudo-knowledge and opening ourselves to reality
glimpses into transcendental reality
God intensely real
God, the ultimate reality, not an idea conceived but a reality experienced
greater awareness of ultimate reality
high velocity, high altitude, swift-changing realities
images of a higher reality and deeper meaning than those of the ordinary everyday world
immediate insight into ultimate reality
in the presence of inspiring realities
in touch with a deeper truth about reality and the nature of existence
initiated from the world of clock time to the world of real time
intense, clear awareness of shifting realities, all within
intense reality
interrelated perceptions, thoughts, feelings regarded as a new reality
introduced to the realities of religious existence through drugs
is awakened into reality
land yourself in a new reality-matrix
living reality
LSD a means of inhabiting a supremely sensual reality
many ways of organizing perception, new ways of constructing reality
mistakes the abstract world of things and events for the concrete world of reality
moving on to a different level of reality
multiple realities
my first awareness of my real self
mystical reality
new glimpses into the nature of reality
new levels of energy, new layered realities, new stages of evolution
new philosophical and spiritual insights into the nature of reality
new realities
nonordinary realities
outside consensus reality-tunnels
perceive an inner reality, tremendous, beautiful and significant
personal experiences of spiritual realities
powerful mind-blowing experiences that shatter conventional ideas about reality
psychic realities experienced during altered states of consciousness
pure, absolute and eternal reality
pure Truth—a truth which is Reality
real rip-roaring fun
real understanding
realities that had never been dreamed
realities that modern man, for the most part, has not the slightest direct awareness of
realities which are the essence of their being
reveals the frozen nature of the artificial stage-set men call reality
revelation of the deepest spiritual realities
searching for the other side of reality
searching for the Reality of life
see things for the first time “as they really are”
seeing into the abode of reality as it is and not reality as it seems to us
seeing reality directly, in its “suchness”
seeing the truths that were hidden beneath everyday reality
spiritual awareness of a greater sense of reality
spiritual realities
states of consciousness that point to the existence of another kind of reality
sudden and profoundly impressive perception of ultimate reality
that essentially infinite and omniscient consciousness which is the ultimate reality
that human personality is multidimensional, that we exist in many realities at once
that light which was the central reality of our beings
that real oneness with God
that the ultimate reality is the universal
that Universal Reality is pure consciousness which is experienced in perfect bliss
the broad spectrum of human realities
the central experience of reality from which religions originally arose
the certainty that such knowledge is truly or ultimately real
the clear light of reality
the cloudless conviction of reality which characterized this vision
the complex, detailed, well-formed, “realer than real” hallucinations (eyes closed)
the concept of religion as mysticism or vivid inner experience of Ultimate Reality
the conscious world of consensus reality and the archetypal world of the unconscious
the cosmic reality
the creative interpretation that uncovers new realities
the culturally shared illusion of reality (That’s “reality” based on ego.)
the dead robot actors on the fake-prop TV studio stage set that is called American reality
the deepening sense of reality and truth which is gained
the delicious comfort of a calm reality
the disintegration and reconstruction of reality
the divergence between reality and our conceptions of it
the divine aspects of reality
the divine reality within and beyond us
the drug’s real potential
the enlightening and liberating knowledge of Reality
the eternal reality
the eternal reality within which and by which all the rest has its being
the experience of unusual realities
the “experiencing of reality”
the experiential reality behind the many myths
the fiction of the isolated ego as the real individual
the Final Reality
the full conviction that all I heard and felt was real
the Greater Reality
the identity of the human spirit in its pure and real essence with the Supreme Spirit
the illusion that the ego is real
the immeasurable and infinite reality
the immediate awareness of Reality
the infinite number of points where divine reality is wholly and eternally present
the infinite reality in whose consciousness and being we live and move
the inner meaning, the spiritual and universal reality
the intense realness, the unusual sensations
the knowledge of eternal reality
the length of time it took me to realize that now I was back in the real world
the limited vision of reality prevailing in modern society
the living reality, knowable only by personal experience
the living reality of God as the Eternal Now
the loosening of symbolic reality
the magnitude, the sense of ultimate reality
the marionette show of normal reality
the means whereby reality is seen clearly
the more intense reality of the inner life
the multi-faceted realities that the LSD experience opened up
the mysterious real world which words and ideas can never pin down
the mysterious reality
the mystic state of One Single Realty
the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality
the naked reality behind the symbol
the new image of reality and of human nature
the new reality that unfolds in the psychedelic experience
the new realities of expanded consciousness
the new vision of reality which is revealed
the one divine reality
the opening of mind and heart to reality
the other order of reality
the otherworldly reality
the perception of new realities
the physical reality of relationships between organisms
the plastic-doll nature of social reality and social ego
the prison of reality (That’s “social” reality, not the full, real, ultimate reality.)
the puppet show of reality
the radiant stuff of reality
the real beginning of a New Age
the real path
the real realm
the real self
the Real Thing, the ultimate illumination
the real truth and source of all human joy and happiness
the realities that reveal themselves
the reality behind appearances
the reality that underlies all religions
the realm of archetypal reality (eyes closed)
the reverent sense of clear reality
the real, divine world
the reality behind appearances
the reality beyond symbols
the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill
the reality underlying all realities
the realm of nonverbal experience, reality as we perceive it directly
the robot-reality of the domesticated hive
the spark, the flash that reveals reality
the strangling of reality (That’s what society does.)
the sudden confrontation with the real-reality
the suggestible state where new reality programs could be imprinted
the transcendental realities
the ultimate non-dual reality
the ultimate reality beyond all dualities
the uncensored cortex, activated, alert and open to new realities
the universal reality of nature
the unknown, the real present in which we live
the “unreality” of the ego
the veil of conscious reality
the visionary experience of a deeper reality
the wholeness of eternal reality
the wisdom and superior reality of internal perceptions
the world of archetypal realities (eyes closed)
the world unmeasured, the infinite and undivided, the supreme spiritual reality
these higher valued areas of reality
this “heightened sense of reality”
this intuition of absolute reality
this new reality that unfolds in the psychedelic experience
this new vision of many realities
this new vision of reality
this other reality which is tumultuous, volcanic, astonishing, ineffable
this other world of beauty and higher reality
this paradisal more-than-real world
this special excursion into super-reality and the extension of all senses
this phenomenon of perceiving the other as she “really is”
this undefined reality
to a higher reality, a special way of knowing
to allow different, new pictures of reality to arise
to contact the reality we have all long lost contact with
to deepen the consciousness of reality by way of a total mystical experience
to develop new conceptual or theoretical frameworks for the observed clinical realities
to enhance their sense of reality
to examine reality for its intrinsic value
to experience multiple realities
to experience reality in its fullness and wholeness
to experience the reality behind humanity’s religious beliefs
to free the real self
to harmonize his life with the Reality he senses
to intensify and extend the mind’s apprehension of its reality
to look at your heretofore hidden self, the real you
to pass beyond ordinary consciousness and see things as they are in Reality
to penetrate to a deeper reality below the externals of egocentric consciousness
to penetrate to a reality more native, to a world beyond time
to penetrate to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time
to see into a spiritual plane of reality
to see the realities of which, in his former state, he had seen shadows
transition from role to reality
ultimately real
vision of the Primary Clear Light of Pure Reality
vision of ultimate reality
when at last reality breaks through, as it must
when one is united at one’s deepest level with the source level of reality
when reality is revealed and all hindrances to ecstatic bliss removed
wiping away preconceptions about reality
wonder in the presence of inspiring realities