Huston Smith Quotes

Drugs don't have spiritual potential, human beings have spiritual potential. And it may be that we need techniques to move us in that direction, and the use of psychoactive drugs clearly is one path that has helped many people.

Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness.

Through all of history mankind has ingested psychedelic substances. Those substances exist to put you in touch with spirits beyond yourself, with the creator, with the creative impulse of the planet.

The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it's called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.

Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness.

A religion made up solely of heightened religious experiences would not be a religion at all. ...The major religious traditions address the mysteries (with or without entheogens), but they have other business to do: widen understanding, give meaning, provide solace, promote loving-kindness, and connect human being to human being.

I've found psychedelics to be keys to worlds that have always existed, that have to be talked about.

We must carry out exercises in thought and exercises in will if the portals of the supersensible world are to open for us. It is this world that we must enter if we want to know the eternal aspect of ourselves and of the universe.

Amputechture' is my personal way of describing enlightenment, or just the celebration of this person who is a shaman and not a crazy person.

I do believe there's a human right to experiment with your consciousness, as long as you're harming no one else.

Lord, catch me off guard today. Surprise me with some moment of beauty or pain so that at least for the moment, I may be startled into seeing that you are here in all your splendor, always and everywhere, barely hidden, beneath, beyond, within this life I breathe.

This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.

I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don't see any indication that being religious makes you more moral.

God doesn't want religious duty. He doesn't want a distracted, half-hearted, 'Fine, I'll read a chapter...now are You happy?' attitude. God wants His word to be a delight to us, so much that we meditate on it day and night.

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree.

If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don't. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don't.

If you are ready for mystical experiences, you have them.

There is an assumption if you are not religious, you have fallen, or you are further from God, or you are not doing the right thing. The judgment on me, with regard to my changes, is that he must be out all night partying or banging prostitutes and doing blow. This whole thing for me was absolutely the contrary. It was actually that God started to become very real to me, inside.

I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.

We neither need a political revolution nor a religious revolution. What we need is an inner transformation in human beings.

The inner attitude of the heart is far more crucial than the mechanics for coming into the reality of the spiritual life.

There's a fire that burns away the lies, manifesting in the spiritual eye.

What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.

When therefore the first spark of a desire after God arises in thy soul, cherish it with all thy care, give all thy heart into it; it is nothing less than a touch of the divine loadstone, that is to draw thee out of the vanity of time, into the riches of eternity.

This new large-scale spiritual awakening is occurring primarily not within the confines of the established religions, but outside of those structures. Some of it, however, is also happening within the existing churches and religious institutions wherever the members of those congregations do not identify with rigid and exclusive belief systems whose unconscious purpose is to foster a sense of separation on which the egoic mind structures depend for their survival.