Key Quotes - Online
Liberation
The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self. - Albert Einstein It is the prayer of my innermost being to realize my supreme identity in the liberated play of consciousness, the Vast Expanse. Now is the moment, Here is the place of Liberation. - Alex Grey Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.- Alan Watts There is no liberation to compare with freeing oneself from the illusions and delusions of the age in which one lives. - Terrance McKenna For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. - Aldous Huxley
Shamanism & Spirituality
“Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.” - Terrance McKenna “I am convinced that the way forward for the human race is to recognize and protect the fundamental right of sovereignty over consciousness, to throw off the chains of our divisive religious heritage, to seek out forms of spirituality (or no spirituality at all if we so prefer) that are truly supportive of liberty and tolerance, to help the human spirit to grow rather than to wither, and to nurture our innate capacity for love and mutual respect. The old ways are broken and bankrupt and new ways are struggling to be born. Each one of us with our own talents, and by our own choices, has a part to play in that process.” - Graham Hancock “If we recognize the power of entheogenic substances to open us to the universal truth and full dimension of human experience, and if we accept the role of the shaman as hierophant and psychopomp into this realm, as enacted for example by the Huichol mara'akame, we have to conclude that today in Western society we are deprived of two key resources for complete human growth. Young people, in their hunger for meaning, will still gravitate toward entheogens. The more experienced among us may try to ease their journey, but in the absence of qualified guides not all will benefit from their experience.” ― Rick Doblin,
Cultural conditioning is like bad software. Over and over it's diddled with and re-written so that it can just run on the next attempt. But there is cultural hardware, and it's that cultural hardware, otherwise known as authentic being, that we are propelled toward by the example of the shaman and the techniques of the shaman. ... Shamanism therefore is a call to authenticity. - Terrance McKenna One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness. - Terrance McKenna 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. - Terrance McKenna Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late. - Terrance McKenna Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit. - Terrance Mckenna Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world-wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centre piece of any model of the world that you build. - Terrance McKenna
Hippies / 1960’s – 70’s counterculture movement
Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, be-flowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life. - Timothy Leary Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration. - Timothy Leary Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization. - Timothy Leary
A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah. - Ronald Reagan The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it freedom, but in the final analysis freedom is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation. - Robert M. Pirsig The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence. - Walter Isaacson Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time.- Janis Joplin Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. - Abbie Hoffman I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win. - Abbie Hoffman I think we are constantly faced with the same decision. The decision to be blindly obedient to authority versus the decision to try and change things by fighting the powers that be is always, throughout history, the only decision. - Abbie Hoffman
Psychedelics – Use, place, opinions
“Part of what psychedelics do is they de condition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.” - Terrance McKenna “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” - Terrance McKenna “If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing existential impasse. “Andy Letcher
“Students of the psychedelic realm know that one's expectations are a powerful determinant of the direction, content, and outcome of the experience. So, we should say at the outset that the experiences recounted here were preceded by careful preparation, where the trip was presented as a learning experience and a process of self-discovery. They all took place in safe, supportive environments. They generally did not fit the stereotypical model of teenagers dropping acid at a rock concert, looking for awesome visuals and good vibes.” ― Rick Doblin “Psychedelics are not a substitute for faith. They are a door to authentic faith, born of encountering directly the sacred dimension of everyday experience. This is not the only gate to that discovery, but it is the most ancient and universal, and potentially the most accessible to the majority of the human race.” ― Rick Doblin “The cultural integration of psychedelics won't happen overnight, and the question of young people is perhaps the most difficult involved. The first step is for people who have knowledge of these substances to share it, "coming out" about their own experiences. Drug education should be honest and present a balanced picture of risks and benefits.” ― Rick Doblin “These days, when I knock on the doors of the Tryptamine Palace, I am no longer greeted with unconditional love, but instead, I am reminded of the responsibility that comes with ultimate knowledge: an undeniable responsibility to myself, to my tribe, to my species, to my planet.” ― James Oroc Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself. - Timothy Leary TURN ON. to contact the ancient energies and wisdoms that are built into your nervous system. They provide unspeakable pleasure and revelation. TUNE IN. to harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. DROP OUT. detach yourself from the tribal game. current models of social adjustment - mechanized, computerized, socialized, intellectualized, televised, sanforized - make no sense to the new LSD generation who see clearly that American society is becoming an airconditioned anthill. - Timothy Leary The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment. - Timothy Leary Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them. - Timothy Leary
People have to go out of their mind before they can come to their senses - Timothy Leary Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. - Timothy Leary Human beings have a right to change their consciousness, and it is unconscionable and absolutely wrong for any government or any person to stand in the way of someone choosing to change their consciousness.- Timothy Leary