Altered State of Consciousness Quotes

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

My dreams tend to be like dog dreams. I'm usually so tired that I hardly dream at all. In a way, I do think that the zone one performs in - without getting too ooga-booga about it - it's like that moment when you wake up in the morning and you're emerging from a dream state but you're not quite up. Where are you? Can you hear the birds? Or is that the traffic? It's that zone in which I perform. It’s like one foot in reality and one foot in a dream state. I spend most of my life in that state!

The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.

For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.

It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are in the presence of the mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide.

I'm delirious. Spots are crawling before my eyes." "Those are spiders.

It doesn't matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that's frightening.

The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

Alcohol make you drunk, man. It don't make you meditate, it just make you drunk. Herb is more a consciousness.

What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.

The tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self.

The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it posible with their help, and after suitable internal and external perparation, to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak. I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug.

Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.

DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.

Pause now to ask yourself the following question: 'Am I dreaming or awake, right now?' Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer.

After half an hour the drug hit me like a sensuous tidal wave. I turned into a tactile temptress and wanted to stroke the whole world. It gave me untold confidence.

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 was totally absorbed. I was in another world, or another dimension; all sense of time evaporated.

When I black out, it's the happiest time of my life.

If you're truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.

It's as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.

When you dance, do you feel desire? Do you feel as if you were summoning up a greater energy? When you dance, are there moments when you cease to be yourself?

The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.

It's the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed.

I read to be taken out of myself, to become ecstatic.