Terence McKenna

"LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it."
-McKenna quoting Leary

"If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on."

“The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.”

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

“Our culture difinitely takes an egocentric dominator view. The fear of the psychedelic experience is quite literally the fear of losing control. Dominator types today don’t understand that it’s not important to maintain control if you are not in control in the first place.”

“Alkaloids in plant, specifically the hallucinogenic compounds such as psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and harmaline, could be the chimical factors in the protohuman diet that catalized the emergence of human self-reflection. The action of hallucinogens present in many common plants enhanced our information-processing activity, or environmental sensitivity, and thus contributed to the sudden expansion of the human brain size. At a later stage in this same process, hallucinogens acted as catalysts in the developpement of imagination, fueling the creation of internal stratagems and hopes that may well have synergized the emergence of language and religion.”

“If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways.”

“The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.“

“When we look within ourselves with psilocybin, we discover that we do not have to look outward toward the futile promise of life that circles distant stars in order to still our cosmic loneliness. We should look within; the paths of the heart lead to nearby universes full of life and affection for humanity.”

“I think what’s really happening is that a dialogue opens up between the ego and these larger, more integrated parts of the psyche that are normally hidden from view.”

“Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we’re embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.”

“we can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.”

“The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech.”

“We are alienated, so alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.”

“It is no coincidence that a rebirth of psychedelic use is occuring as we acquire the technological capability to leave the planet. The mushroom visions and the transformation of the human image precipitated by space exploration are spun together. Nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new human order. A telepathic, humane, universalist kind of human culture is emerging that will make everything that preceded it appear like the stone age.”

“There is a belief that there is a hyperobject called Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience if this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space.”

“The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual.”

“The plant-human relationship has always been the foundation of our individual and group existence in the world. What I call Archaïc Revival is the process of reawakening awareness of traditional attitudes toward nature, including plants and our relationship to them.
My conclusion is that taking the next evolutionary step toward the Archaïc Revival, the rebirth of the Goddess, and the ending of profane history will require an agenda that includes the notion of our reinvolvement with and the emergence of the vegetable mind. That same mind that coaxed us into self-reflecting language now offers us the boundless landscapes of the imagination. Without such a relashionship to psychedelic exopheromones regulating our symbiotic relationship with the plant kingdom, we stand outside of an understanding of planetary purpose.”



Timothy Leary

"LSD, wisely used by professionals, could reprogram enough nervous systems to accelerate consciousness and intelligence before we laid ourselves and our planet waste.""To use your head you have to go out of your mind" "You are a God, act like one"

"The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems capable of deciphering the mission of DNA."

"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 adjustement - mechanized, computerized, socialized, intellectualized, televised, sanforized - make no sense to the new LSD generation who see clearly that American society is becoming an air-conditioned anthill."

"The neurogenetic meaning of the cultural revolution is now clear. Neurochemicals are designed to be pursuitist, not escapist. They open the nervous system to the possibilities of future post-terrestrial evolution."

“What human beings consciously wish is often quite at variance with the results their reflex patterns automatically create for them.”

“The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology.”

“To use your head you have to go out of your mind.”

“The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.”

“The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we can program. And if we don’t take the responsibility for programming it, then it will be programmed unwittingly by accident or by the social environnement.”



John C. Lilly

"In spite of Leary and many other people who have said that LSD expands your consciousness, I don't think it does. I think what it does is to constrict consciousness and make it as if it were into a searchlight beam in a certain set of directions so you can break through into spaces you couldn't break through before. Without the drug you have full peripheral vision as it were. You have full hearing and full presence and you know everything that you know outside that situation, so it has the same advantages that meditation does. It gives you a very broad consciousness that is unimpaired and unchanged in the sens of consciousness itself."

"The experienced, wise, energetic, intelligent individual functioning in a loose coalition with others in a wide network is far more effective than he is in a tightly organized group."



Alexander Shulgin

“It is essential that our present negative propaganda regarding psychedelic drugs be replaced with honesty and truthfulness about their effects, both good and bad.”

“The potential of the psychedelic drugs to provide access to the interior universe, is, I beleive, their most valuable property.”

“... How is it [, then] that the leaders of our society have seen fit to try to eliminate this one very important means of learning and self-discovery, this means which has been used, respected, and honored for thousands of years, in every human culture of which we have a record?”




Ann Shulgin

"Despite thousands of years of spiritual using visionary plants in native cultures worldwide, modern governments have, with very few exceptions, attempted to repress the use of consciousness-opening plants and chemicals by classifying them alongside dangerous narcotics and stimulants as addictive -which they are not- and without social value.



Stanislav Grof

“People who get involved in systematic deep self-exploration using non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as meditation, experimental psychotherapy, or responsible use of psychedelics, tend to develop a distinct and unified view or vision of themselves and reality.”

“These substances function as unspecific amplifiers that increase the energetic niveau in the psyche and make the deep unconscious dynamics available for conscious processing.
This unique property of psychedelics makes it possible to study psychological undercurrents that govern our experiences and behaviors to a depth that cannot be matched by any other methods and tools available in modern mainstream science. In emotional and psychosomatic disorders, for positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.”

“I believe that used responsibly and in a mature way, the entheogens mediate access to the numinous dimensions of existence, have a great healing and transformative potential, and represent a very important tool for spiritual development.”




Georg Feuerstein

“The use of drugs like mescaline may serve an appropriate purpose. Indeed, “Psychedelic” drugs have been widely used in the spiritual traditions of the world, including the Yoga of Patanjali, though they were never advertised as ultimate keys to enlightenment, merely as stepping-stones on the spiritual path.”

“Psychedelic drugs undoubtedly open the doors to the mind’s panopticon, but what we see in the mental mirrors are mere distortions of reality, not reality itself.”




Swami Satyananda Saraswati

“Drugs allows us to taste the beyond but do not make us masters of the transcendental.”



Albert Hofmann

“Evolution of mankind is paralleled by the increase and expansion of consciousness.”





Rick Strassmann

“The history of human use of plants, mushrooms, and animals for their psychedelic effects is far older than written history, and probably predates the appearance of the modern human species.”



Robert A. Wilson

“Consciousness is chemical in nature and changes as its chemistry changes.”

“We are all evolving into the use of new neurological circuits, which will make us superhuman in comparison to our present average state. The activation of these new circuits creates a great deal of temporary weirdness until we learn to use them properly. This is the theory of such scientifically oriented yogis as Sri Aurobindo, Gopi Krisna and Dr Tim Leary.”

“Mescalito could be both an archetype of Jung’s Collective Unconscious and an anthromorphized human translation of a persistent signal sent by the molecular intelligence of the vegetative world.
Mescalito is a genetic signal in our collective unconscious, but activated only when certain molecular transmission from the plant world are received.”

“Do you think anybody but yourself has the right to experiment on your nervous system?”