Norman Mailer Quotes

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.

The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.

Drop Out--detach yourself from the external social drama which is as dehydrated and ersatz as TV. Turn On--find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high. Tune In--be reborn. Drop back in to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior that reflects your vision.

Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.

Drugs shouldn't be used for recreation although they can be, but ultimately the point of psychedelics is to put you in touch with the powers of the universe.

The first time I stepped onto the rooftop of the Potala Palace in Lhasa in 1985, I felt, as never before or since, as if I was stepping onto the rooftop of my being: onto some dimension of consciousness that I'd never visited before.

I saw Krishnamurti speak one time. And I thought, I'm not going to live here.

My next book is Scene by Scene: as Seen by Fay Wray. It'll be about different incidents. Just my feelings about quite a few people. Attitudes. My thoughts about the universe and simple things like that.

Spirituality is not about looking up or down - it's about looking inward.

The more I go inside, the more there is to see.

The spiritual quest is a journey without distance. You travel from where you are right now To where you have always been. From ignorance to recognition.

I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.

Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it.

An enlightened man had but one duty - to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led.

The spiritual quest begins, for most people, as a search for meaning.

It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.

We are going to the moon that is not very far. Man has so much farther to go within himself.

We are known in a depth of darkness through which we ourselves do not even dare to look. And at the same time, we are seen in a height of a fullness which surpasses our highest vision.

I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can't have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.

Perhaps the longest journey is the journey within.

This be my pilgrimage and goal Daily to march and find The secret phrases of the soul, The evangels of the mind.

A good traveller is one who knows how to travel with the mind.