Alan Watts Quotes

Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.

If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid.

LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry.

Drugs took me to places; they were like portals. It's kind of a cliché, but they were like portals to altered states of consciousness into ways of imagining the world, or seeing a world beyond this world, or seeing a world beyond this world that I might not have gotten to unless I discovered meditation and a very deep, intense spiritual path based on contemplation and meditation.

Jesus man! You don't look for acid! Acid finds you when it thinks you're ready.

Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.

In the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien alkaloids and the plant-mind behind them, you find out a truth that can barely be told. And most of it can't be told.

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.

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.

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.

The power of psychedelics... is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.

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.

The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness.

There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure.

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

That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth.

It’s hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.

I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction ... that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid.

The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

I never took drug to escape. I know some people take drugs to escape, but I took drugs because I was an experimenter. And an artist. And I was always trying to go to the other side of that veil and get information, like all writers have done through the millennia. To get some insights on how the whole thing works, if there's any way to know how it works, and write about it.

I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating.

I'm not regretful about dropping acid, but I could have stopped it a little sooner.

LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.

To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.