A bit of everything, from 11th century Sufi poets to 20th century ethnobotanists
"Reality is plural"
- some guy on a forum
"Moderation in everything, even in moderation"
- read this somewhere but don't remember
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
- Aldous Huxley
"The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity."
- Alan Watts
"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
- Alan Watts
"Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now."
- Alan Watts
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"
- Benjamin Franklin
"Dance is active meditation, when we dance we go beyond thought, beyond mind and beyond our own individuality, to become one in the divine ecstasy of union with the cosmic spirit."
- Goa Gil
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
- Hunter S Thompson
"I feel like a lizard deep in the Saharan desert, mercilessly scorched by the mid-day sun but anytime it begins to overwhelm me I simply smile and surrender more deeply to it."
- some guy on a forum, describing the experience of cosmic oneness under the influence of psychedelic substances
"The trance state of prophecy is like no other visionary experience. It is not a retreat from the raw exposure of the senses (as many trance states) but an immersion in a multitude of new movements. Things move. It is an ultimate pragmatism in the midst of Infinity, a demanding consciousness where you come at last into the unbroken awareness that the universe moves of itself, that it changes, that its rules change, that nothing remains permanent or absolute throughout all such movement, that mechanical explanations for anything can work only within precise confinements and, once the walls are broken down, the old explanations shatter and dissolve, blown away by new movements. The things you see in this trance are sobering, often shattering. They demand your utmost effort to remain whole, and even so, you emerge from that state profoundly changed."
- from Frank Herbert's
God Emperor of Dune “We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
- Terence McKenna
“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.”
- Terence McKenna
“The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation”
- Terence McKenna
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
- Rumi
“Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself.”
- Rumi
“Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”
- Rumi
“All people on the planet are children, except for a very few. No one is grown up except those free of desire.”
- Rumi
"Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, other members uneasy will remain. If you have no empathy for human pain, the name of human you cannot retain"
- Saadi
"I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men's hands even at the height of their arc of rage because we have finally realized there is just one flesh we can wound. "
- Hafiz
"It is better to live alone, there is no companionship with a fool; let a man walk alone, let him commit no sin, with few wishes, like an elephant in the forest."
- Gautama Buddha
“How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn't matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it.”
- Alexander Shulgin
"One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will."
- Rachel Carson
"In music though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition – the point of the composition. If that was so the best conductors would be those who played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end. Say when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room – that’s the where you should arrive; the whole point of the dancing is the dance. But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives us a completely different impression. It’s all graded and what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of – come on kiddie, kiddie, kiddie. And now you go to kindergarten and that a great thing because once you finish that you get into firstgrade. And then come on first grade leads to second grade, and so on. And then you get out of grade school and you go to high school, and its revving up – the thing is coming. Then you’ve got to college, and then maybe grad school. And when you’re through with graduate school you go out and join the world. Then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance. And then you have that quota to make, and you’re going to make that. And all the time the thing is coming, its coming; that thing, the great success you’re working for. Then when you wake up one day when your about forty years old, you say ‘my god, I’ve arrived.’ I’m there! And you don’t feel very different than what you’ve always feel. And there’s a slight let down because you feel it was a hoax. And it was a hoax - a dreadful hoax. They have made you miss everything; by expectation. Because we thought of life by analogy with a journey – with a pilgrimage. Which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end; success or whatever it is or maybe heaven after your dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing and to dance while the music was being played."
- Alan Watts
- By wat0n
- By paeng
- By Puffer Fish