Psychedelic Quotes & Sayings

In her eyes was the reflection of everything that mattered: old diners with neon signs, vinyl records, celluloid film, drive-in movies, Pears soap, department stores, her brother's old blue Camaro car and the smell of coal dust in the rainy sky of a summer lightning storm.
... And all the nice bright colors of the past that she thought were gone for good came flowing back into her life like a wave of nostalgia flooding over her, reds, yellows, blues and greens drenching her gray memories in psychedelic ribbons and glittering fireworks.
... She hoped that the world would always hold those miniscule yet beautiful, deep and mysterious traces of memory. — Rebecca McNutt

We have the tools, the intellect, the will to create a caring global culture. It isn't going to come without a recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is the birth right of every human being on the planet. It is as much a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality, our national identity, our consciousness of self. And any society which attempts to hold back or impede this dimension of self-expression, when the history of that society is written, it will be called barbarous. — Terence McKenna

By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence. — Terence McKenna

'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position. — Terence McKenna

I think some of the musicians are more like punk rock musicians. It's like an art as opposed to being a musician. It's definitely more radical psychedelic bands, more than anything. — Wayne Coyne

There is no such thing as recreational drug use. — Alan I. Leshner

I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago. — Terence McKenna

Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer. That's why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity, to the latest cult out of Los Angeles. — Terence McKenna

You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers. — Timothy Leary

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. — Terence McKenna

If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first
century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides
telescopes are unnatural. — Timothy Leary

Through all of history mankind has ingested psychedelic substances. Those substances exist to put you in touch with spirits beyond yourself, with the creator, with the creative impulse of the planet. — Ray Manzarek

In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

In teaching color, you teach people how to look something and see the tone in it and break it down to be able to paint it and reproduce that color. But then, I'm psychedelic, so I look at color differently. I like colors that are in contrast with one another, so that they flicker back and forth. — John Van Hamersveld

Psy Free was a trio consisting of guitar, organ and drums. I was the drummer. We did what the name suggests: psychedelic, free music. — Klaus Schulze

As a songwriter, oddly enough, my influences were people like Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and Buddy Holly. Some psychedelic stuff, too. — Ric Ocasek

There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depends heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood. — Paul Lockhart

Anyone who grew up in the psychedelic '60s probably experienced their share of hypnagogic fireworks. Just as sex got me hooked on anatomy, so drugs were probably what first got me interested in entoptic phenomena, phosphenes, and hypnagogic imagery. — Peter Blegvad

If life wasn't real it would be the craziest psychedelic trip ever — Joe Rogan

It's mind-altering when you slip into someone else's shoes. That's psychedelic, man. — Bryan Cranston

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it. — Antonin Artaud

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available. — Terence McKenna

It should come as no surprise to readers of the MAPS Bulletin that psychedelic plants are used as a sacrament by many native cultures all over the world. It may not be so obvious that these same plants are often incorporated into the coming-of-age ceremonies of these various societies. — Rick Doblin

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

Terror of the future can be put out to pasture with psychedelic shamanism. — Terence McKenna

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

Norm Zuckerman was approaching seventy and as CEO of Zoom, a megasize sports manufacturing conglomerate, he had more money than Trump. He looked, however, like a beatnik trapped in a bad acid trip. Retro, Norm had explained earlier, was cresting, and he was catching the wave by wearing a psychedelic poncho, fatigue pants, love beads, and an earring with a dangling peace sign. Groovy, man. His black-to-gray beard was unruly enough to nest beetle larvae, his hair newly curled like something out of a bad production of Godspell. Che — Harlan Coben

The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind — Terence McKenna

The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant. — Terence McKenna

To fall in hell, or soar angelic, you need a pinch of psychedelic. — Humphry Osmond

I always saw Michael Gambon wearing madly psychedelic socks, and I always thought that's it is one of the few areas where men can really express colour and have a bit of a dandyish quality to their outfit. — Daniel Radcliffe

When I think about the real pioneers of the psychedelic movement in a musical sense, not just the culture, everything had a handmade sort of vibe to it. We're inventing our culture as we move along into this. — Chris Robinson

The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our "inner eye" as such. — Sebastian Marincolo

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. — Terence McKenna

The Indians' botanical knowledge is disappearing even faster than the plants themselves. — Richard Evans Schultes

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

At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos. — Timothy Leary

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us. — Terence McKenna

Certainly neo-Platonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics. — Terence McKenna

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. — Rick Strassman

I think of going to the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going to the Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figured out what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way the Body Works itself into Nature. — Terence McKenna

I'm influenced by the music of the '60s. It's a mishmash of everything. To me, psychedelic can be all the way to a DJ. House music can be very psychedelic. Flying Lotus is very psychedelic. Even though it's urban and technological, it's also mind-expanding, anything-can-go mishmash. — Anton Newcombe

A great essence of life lies in the distinctive impacts mankind is able to make on earth, notwithstanding the challenges, oppressions and oppositions we face — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

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. — Terence McKenna

The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology. — Timothy Leary

Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience. — Terence McKenna

What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine. — Terence McKenna

I saw the comics in the East Village Other, and they weren't superhero comics, they were all about hippies and all about things hippies were interested in. And there was one page in particular, a full page strip called "Gentle's Trip Out" signed "Panzika", and it was totally, totally psychedelic, and really, I don't know if it made any sense at all but it looked so great, and I thought, "This is what I want to do, this is my big influence," and it was. — Trina Robbins

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

Memory training is great psychedelic training. — Terence McKenna

What is the psychedelic experience? What promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our children? And what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel coming from the people in this room this evening? And I submit to you that it is nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a thousand years, the still small voice of the Logos of the planet. — Terence McKenna

I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I'm completely hopeful ... This is how it should be. This is what it's like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace. — Terence McKenna

Eros is an ego-overwhelming, boundary dissolving, breakthrough creating force scripted into human life that is pretty intrinsically psychedelic. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

I've been a huge Psychedelic Furs fan for a long time. I love Butler's paintings, too. I like all their songs. I'll even crank 'Pretty in Pink,' I don't care. — Norman Reedus

I wanted to create something really aggressive and psychedelic — Lykke Li

Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them. — Timothy Leary

The psychedelic experience is simply a compressed instance of what we call understanding, so that living psychedelically is trying to live in an atmosphere of continuous unfolding of understanding, so that every day you know more and see into things with greater depth than you did before. This is a process of education. — Terence McKenna

The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is? — Terence McKenna

As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions. — Stanislav Grof

I remember writing a song when I was about 15. This is the one I can remember. I know I'd been writing poetry for a long time, since I was about eight, but I remember my first one that I put to chords. I was really trying to be like the psychedelic era Beatles, I was obsessed. All I could think about was Beatles and Hendrix. So I tried to write a psychedelic song, and it was the worst. I couldn't even ... If I read it now - I still have the book somewhere - it makes me cringe out loud. It was just about psychedelic stuff. — Ladyhawke

Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness ... Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities ... The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away. — Terence McKenna

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. — Terence McKenna

I always wanted to make a cover album consisting of obscure psychedelic music from the 1960s - all re-shaped and customized, Ulver style. — Kristoffer Rygg

All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact. — Terence McKenna

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. — Sheila Weller

To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. — Terence McKenna

My first psychedelic experience with Aldous still directs my life today. — Laura Huxley

Puerto Rico was the Republic of Texas on jet-fuel testosterone and psychedelic estrogen. — David R. Martin

I mean people have compared us to like the Grateful Dead and all these like psychedelic sixties bands. — Jon Fishman

My altered perception of reality while on psychedelic drugs came as a total shock to me. — Susan Schneider

You want a showman, go see rock 'n' roll bands today. You want to have a shamanistic experience, get psychedelic, then you watch The Doors. — Ray Manzarek

To use your head, you have to go out of your mind. — Timothy Leary

I didn't want to make a record that's just drones or completely experimental. A lot of the time bands that make this psychedelic style of music are just a bunch of dudes hanging out together and jamming. — Tamaryn

Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena. — Terence McKenna

Monotheism strenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style that periodically places the ego and its values in perspective through contact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic mystery of plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy and wholeness, what Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious. — Terence McKenna

Those of us who are working with these strange substances trying to find the best way of using them, both in the treatment of illnesses and for the exploration of the human mind, need men like Bishop to come forward and explain that our purposes are serious and good, to emphasize that this is not a diversion, an amusement or an attempt to relieve people of their spare cash.

-Robert Dickins — Cameron Adams

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree. — Terence McKenna

Drugs allows us to taste the beyond but do not make us masters of the transcendental. — Satyananda Saraswati

This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience. — Terence McKenna

What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity. — Terence McKenna

We're not dropping out here, we're infiltrating and taking over. — Terence McKenna

I think that understanding man's place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience. — Terence McKenna

Another aspect of the psychedelic vision for me that has been very profound, is the sense that every-thing is alive or at that at least, there is no distinction between what we call living and non-living. — Andrew Weil

Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there. — Terence McKenna

I am completely convinced that there is a wealth of information built into us, with miles of intuitive knowledge tucked away in the genetic material of every one of our cells. Something akin to a library containing uncountable reference volumes, but without any obvious route of entry. And, without some means of access, there is no way to even begin to guess at the extent and quality of what is there. The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world, and insights into its nature. — Alexander Shulgin

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it. — Timothy Leary

Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness. — Stanislav Grof

If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. — Alan W. Watts

When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT.
Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT.
As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule. — Rick Strassman

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination. — Terence McKenna

What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. — Terence McKenna

My aura is psychedelic, flow non-prehistoric metamorphic boric like acid no hat tricks a classic so park that ass like Jurassic — Bahamadia

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience. — Terence McKenna

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after awhile you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip-the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. — Hunter S. Thompson

If I like hardcore straight-edge punk music, gentle psychedelic folk music, gangster rap, indie-rock with a lot of guitar pedals, and I find inspiration from all these things in different songs of mine, shouldn't I be allowed to make any of this kind of music that I want? And it's the same for the comic books, why should I only make autobiographical stories? Or only political stories? Or only superhero stories? Or only comedy stories? I am a bit creatively desperate, when I sit with a pen and paper I am desperate for ANY idea that makes me excited, I don't care what kind of idea it is! — Jeffrey Lewis

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new. — Jerry Saltz

Mornings are cool like a spy,
cool like a rebel,
cool like a rhetorical street fighter,
cool like an unfilled spot where wit and joy once stood,
cool like the man who can make productive use of his demons,
cool like the deciphered eccentricities of good friends,
cool like the later protest-and-psychedelic era. — Brian D'Ambrosio

So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions. — Terence McKenna

The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies, various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s, made it absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration. — Stanislav Grof