Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Ralph Metzner

Quote by Ralph Metzner

“Shortly after inhalation, I experienced warm flushing sensations, a sense of wonder and well-being, strong auditory hallucinations, which included an insect-cicada sound that ran across my mind and seemed to link my body to the earth. Though I was indoors, there was a sense of the feel of the earth, the dry desert soil passing through my fingers, the stars at midday, the scent of cactus and sage, the feel of dry leaves through hands. Strong visual hallucinations in orblike brilliance, diamond patterns that undulated across my visual field (Davis, Wade & Weil, Andrew T. “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad” in: Ancient Mesoamerica, 3 (1992), p. 56).”

Quote by Ralph Metzner

Book:The Toad and the Jaguar
Create image

Work

The Toad and the Jaguar

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Ralph Metzner
Ralph Metzner

Ralph Metzner is a renowned psychologist, born on May 18, 1936. He has conducted extensive research in the field of psychology, particularly in the areas of consciousness studies, psychopharmacology, and human potential development. Metzner completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Stanford University, where he began his academic career. more

You May Also Like

“I lost all contact with the surrounding world, which completely disappeared…The awareness of my everyday existence, my name, my whereabouts and my life disappeared… I tried hard to remind myself of the existence of the realities I used to know, but they suddenly did not make any sense… There was no biographical or transpersonal content, images, archetypes…none of these dimensions seemed to exist, let alone manifest. I had no concepts, no categories for what I was witnessing (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”

Psychedelic ExperiencePsychedelicsEgo DeathAltered Consciousness5 Meo Dmt
Book:The Toad and the Jaguar
Create image

“My only reality was a mass of radiant swirling energy of immense proportions that seemed to contain all existence in a condensed and entirely abstract form. I became Consciousness facing the Absolute. It had the brightness of myriad suns, yet it was not on the same continuum with any light I knew from everyday life. It seemed to be pure consciousness, intelligence, and creative energy transcending all polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and demonic, terrifying and ecstatic, creative and destructive…My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved; I became one with the Source. I retrospect, I believe I must have experienced the Dharmakaya, the Primary Clear Light, which according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, appears at the moment of our death (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”

BuddhismEcstasyPsychedelic ExperiencePsychedelicsEgo DeathAltered Consciousness5 Meo Dmt
Book:The Toad and the Jaguar
Create image

“…Some timeless time later, dreamlike images began to emerge, the solar system, the Earth…the last to emerge was the sense of my everyday identity and awareness of my present life. I was sure that I had taken a dose that was excessive and that I was actually dying… I believed I was experiencing the bardo, the intermediate state before my rebirth in the next incarnation. Then I was seeing and experiencing many scenes from my past lives, playing out karmic history in my body but at the same time in a state of profound bliss, completely detached from these dramas (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”

DeathBuddhismPsychedelic ExperiencePsychedelicsEgo DeathAltered Consciousness5 Meo Dmt
Book:The Toad and the Jaguar
Create image

“All the elements were there: the frozen feeling bubbling up and permeating my body like quantum foam fizzing up to engulf the fragmenting mind, the feeling of acceleration, my dissolving self urging me to let go, to surrender, as I was sucked into the visionary maelstrom. … The experience was far more austere (than in the earlier trials – ed.) Reality is a hallucination generated by the brain to help make sense of our being; it is made of fragments of memory, associations, ideas, people you remember, dreams you’ve had, things you’ve read and seen, all of which is somehow blended and extruded into something resembling a coherent conscious narrative, the hallucination we call “experience.” Dimethyltryptamine rips back the curtain to show the raw data before it has been processed and massaged. There is no comforting fiction of coherent consciousness; one confronts the mindless hammering of frenzied neurochemistry (McKenna, Dennis. The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss – My Life with Terence McKenna. St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press, 2012, p. 160).”

Psychedelic ExperiencePsychedelicsDmtEgo DeathAltered Consciousness
Book:The Toad and the Jaguar
Create image

“Less trade is the last thing most countries need if they are to improve their economies and the standard of living of workers of a lower socio-economic status. Reducing immigration is one sure way to stymie economic growth. And then there are the policies that this populist mantra is designed to mask: cuts to essential services like health and education to fund tax cuts for higher income workers and corporations. It's like a pickpocket who arranges a distraction while happily fleecing his victims. (p.22)”

TradeImmigrationCorporationsTax CutsRight Wing PopulismEssential Services
Book:On Charlatans
Create image

“When an earthquake hits, things don't usually quickly return to normal. The rise of the populist right-wing charlatan has been a political earthquake. We can't expect normal programming to simply resume and the political battle to return to more normal fault lines. The charlatans are going to be around for a while. But there's one incontrovertible truth when it comes to charlatans: they eventually get found out. (p.125)”

Right Wing PopulismPolitical Norms
Book:On Charlatans
Create image

“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think…Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway.”

Samuel BeckettMolloy
Book:Molloy
Create image