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Psychedelic Quotes

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Psychedelic Quotes

“Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof's Holotropic Breathwork, born from 1970s psychedelic restrictions, uses rapid breathing, music, and bodywork for unconscious exploration and trauma healing, echoing ancient Yogic Pranayama (Rig Veda ~1700-1100 BCE, Upanishads ~800-500 BCE) and Sufi Dhikr ceremonies (from the 12th century).”

“The Roller Trip by Stewart Stafford A psychedelic Rolls-Royce ride, Lennons and pals giggle inside, Chauffeur whistles as secrets slip, Hourglass liquid lets sentience rip. Supplied narcotics set minds ablaze, Looping the loop in a magenta haze: "Ladies & Germs, to a scene obscene! Set sail to ecstasy we've never seen!" Wheels whirled wild in a swirling blur, Yokels mouth breathe where cows concur, Red light flare, fans storm captive glass, Mary Jane and Lucy on laughing gas. Below the speed limit, warp speed fast, Canary oil slides on a ghost ship's mast, Paisley spermatozoa in jigging fright, Tumbling back to earth as day flipped night. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

“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.”

“And what civilization is, is: six billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us: the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us, and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.”

“Psychedelic experience seems to temporarily crack open a kind of new critical window; a window of opportunity with with great neuroplastic potential, with an enriched interpretation of the world in terms of personal relevance, amplified analogical thinking, and a wider web of semantic association; one that not only reveals the elemental foundations of thought and perception to the conscious mind, but invites it to participate, orient toward significance, integrate a variety of personally relevant information, and produce insightful experiences and emotional breakthroughs that can mark the beginning of a process of re-orienting priorities, attention, attitudes, and behavior. A change in the mobilization, distribution, and utilization of limited energetic resources by the serotonin system, in other words; an opportunity for the master homeostatic regulator to integrate all the various pertinent variables, re-orient and re-align the self, body, and outside world.”

“No one can claim their particular vision of the divine as correct, if there are thousands of other 'visions' with which to compare it. And anyone who does try to claim the spotlight? Even a few decades ago, they could have started a cult. These days, they'll just get trolled online, then ignored.”

“Perspective shifted on why it must 'hurt to heal', and a series of questions kept coming to mind. I found myself wondering if these medicines always 'hurt', or do they hurt so much now to show us how separate we are from nature? Perhaps these 'revelations in pain' are necessary in order for a personal apocalpyse to occur so you may have a shift in perception, and a greater understanding of your role in the whole? To realize that we are not foreign from nature, nature is where we come from and where we return to.”

“When San Pedro begins to affect your consciousness, it first feels as though a subtle wave of change occurs, and can best be described as a vibration of sunlight penetrating your energetic field. The medicine’s spiritual correspondence relates to masculine energies, the energy of the sun, and (in my personal experience) serves as a vehicle for remembering light through a presence of warmth.”

“Funny, I'd forgotten that what comes to you when you take a psychedelic is not always a revelation of something new and startling; you're more liable to find yourself reminded of simple things you know and forgot you knew - seeing them freshly - old, basic truths that long ago became cliches, so you stopped paying attention to them.”

“LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry. They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality transformation.”

“I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.”

“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”

“The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity.”

“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.”

“The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities.”

“I hate cliché. And when you're a rock singer in 1966, or whatever it was, psychedelic blues, through to the '70s, which we know all about, and the '80s, which was a scramble to hang on in, and the '90s, which was a great time for experimentation... and I'm really still excited. The huge vast diagonals within the music that I've been involved with.”