Kindle Notes & Highlights
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April 25 - August 28, 2021
Soon, I felt immersed in incredibly detailed imagery best described as Islamic architecture and Arabic script, about which I knew nothing. Then (forgive the poetic license), I seemed to fully become the multidimensional patterns or to lose my usual identity within them as the eternal brilliance of mystical consciousness manifested itself. Suddenly this consciousness was experienced as outside of time, a pinnacle from which history could be viewed. My awareness was flooded with love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or wildly imagined to be possible.
we do not make skiing illegal because some people injure themselves or others, and that there are many who really love to ski, do it skillfully and responsibly, and find it life-enhancing. Still skiing is not for everyone, and there are those who for medical or psychological reasons, or for pure lack of interest and motivation, may be well advised to explore other life activities instead.
there is good reason to affirm that there is indeed an eternal dimension of awareness deep in the core of the human mind where creativity, love, and beauty reign supreme.
this book is based include psilocybin, LSD (d-lysergic acid diethylamide), DPT (dipropyltryptamine), MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine), and DMT (dimethyltryptamine). However, this is a book not about “drug experiences” per se, but rather about the profoundly meaningful states of consciousness
It is my conclusion that these incredibly beautiful, awe-inspiring, and, for some, terrifying experiences are best understood not as being “within the drugs,” but rather as being within our own minds.
Often they appear to occur unintentionally, whether brought about by stress, concentration, sleep deprivation, fasting, diet, or concomitant changes in our own brain chemistry, or by the action of what many believe to be divine grace. What makes the responsible use of psychedelic substances so important, however, is that it provides reliability and potency.
Perhaps the most highly evolved minds among us come close to genuinely living in both worlds, the eternal and the temporal.
When peak experiences occur, they usually tend to be humbly received.
experience when they enter a high nave of a Gothic cathedral or a spacious mosque with a beautiful interior dome. Perhaps the environmental perceptions somehow resonate intuitively within our nervous systems, evoking a feeling of reverence quite independent of whatever affiliations we may have with organized religious institutions. Some may encounter similar intuitive feelings when looking at the Milky Way on a clear night, when watching a spectacular sunrise or sunset, when holding the hand of a beloved person at the moment of death, or when first embracing a newborn child.
In my experience, the range of alternative states of consciousness facilitated by LSD, DPT, psilocybin, and DMT is very similar, if not identical. The substances primarily appear to differ from one another in terms of speed of onset, arc and length of action, and abruptness of returning one to the everyday world.
INEFFABILITY AND LANGUAGE Books, such as the one that you hold in your hand in either paper or digital form, are collections of words—written symbols or squiggles that can be expressed in spoken sounds. This
The seer who wrote the Tao Tê Ching, an ancient Chinese Taoist Scripture, captured this frustration well in the verse, “He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.” Similarly, the nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev wrote simply that, when trying to speak about mystical experiences, “a word that’s spoken is a lie.”
Our sentences require a subject and a predicate—a temporal sequence. And sometimes in mystical states of consciousness, there is no time.
I had always experienced a mild awareness of a sacred dimension, especially as manifested in the pristine beauty of the rugged and fragrant pine forests
200 mg of niacin (Vitamin B-3, also known as nicotinic acid, which briefly causes mild dizziness and tingling sensations)
In the classical literature of mysticism, the first visionary or mystical experience is often understood to signal the Awakening or beginning of spiritual development, to be followed by Purgation, often including what St. John of the Cross back in the sixteenth century called “The Dark Night of the Soul.” Then gradual Illumination unfolds with eventual glimpses of a return to unitive consciousness, coupled with becoming an increasingly compassionate presence in the everyday world.
The poet William Wordsworth in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood may have been more on target, writing that “trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
I have known vivid or lucid dreams, some that were “dreams within dreams” in which one recognizes the dreaming process, that contained similar detail, but never with this degree of conscious control and focus, and never with such clear, enduring memory.
The philosophical term “entelechy” refers to a purposive, meaningful process of unfolding content within awareness.
Katherine MacLean’s statistical discovery of positive changes in the domain of personality structure called Openness following mystical experiences.
The old stereotype depicted by some theologians of a heroic ego, inflated with its self-importance, trying to charge through the gates of heaven with upraised sword to claim the holy grail of enlightenment is clearly simply “an old stereotype.”
Some people call it “homecoming,” feel welcomed by parts of their minds they hardly knew existed, and report a familiar sense of “having been there before.” A common verbal expression is, “Of course, it always has been this way,” often accompanied by feelings of joy and even laughter at the thought that one ever could have doubted or forgotten this fundamental sense of belonging in the universe.
Still others may describe the ascent (or descent if you prefer) to mystical realms of consciousness as “melting” or “dissolving,”
Hindu concept of the ego as a drop of water that ceases to exist as a separate being when it falls into the ocean and becomes an integral part of something much larger than itself.
Abraham Maslow called attention to reports of altered time perception amid creative fervor, when a poet or artist becomes “oblivious of his surroundings and the passage of time.”
Flow is a spiritual experience
The heavenly realms are not experienced as located in a particular place, either in our universe or in another galaxy, like some vacation spot where one could send a spaceship if we knew the vectors to program in a targeted address. Rather, mystical consciousness is claimed to be “everywhere and nowhere”
Philosophers have long pondered deterministic forces in life and how they may be balanced with human freedom. From the perspective of mystical consciousness, this may simply be one more of those paradoxes of “Both/And,” where there is truth to be found in both perspectives and ultimate understanding continues to elude us.
But even that would not explain why, among all the images he may have seen in life, Hindu gods would make their appearance in his field of consciousness during an LSD session.
What is so important here is the discovery that the monster has meaning and in itself is an invitation to enhanced psychological health and spiritual maturation. Its purpose is not to torment, but to teach. That bears repeating: its purpose is not to torment but to teach!
Challenging trips, fear
My mother is a monster; my mother is a monster. But, miraculously, as soon as I scream this, the terrifying vulture splits into a thousand little vultures just as small and helpless as us three little chicks in our eggs. I am overwhelmed by pity and compassion and I see how painful and helpless the vulture’s own life has been.
“How lovely is Thy dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts! My soul longs, yea faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.”
The movement through fractals presented by Simon Powell in his film Manna—Psilocybin Inspired Documentary is among the finest I have encountered to date.
I acquired some experiential learning, notably about how paranoia develops when one is unable to trust and needs to maintain control and how there are alternative states of consciousness devoid of beauty or meaning, the experience was not therapeutic, inspiring, or life-enhancing.
It has seemed to me that there is something within our minds that requires acknowledgment of our interconnectedness with and dependence upon other people in everyday life, at least on some occasions, before the doors to eternal realms of awareness can fully open.
The horrible thing about surgery is you’re medicated so your conscious brain forgets the experience, but your subconscious mind and your body know what’s happening.
“I didn’t experience what I wanted, but I experienced what I needed.”
people struggling with alcoholism tend to produce artwork dominated by curved, paisley-type lines, whereas those struggling with obsessive-compulsive tendencies tend to rely almost exclusively on rigid, straight lines.
when people uncover traumatic memories, often of physical, verbal, or sexual abuse, that have been sealed away within their minds, interaction with a skilled therapist may prove very helpful in assimilating those memories into the overall functioning of the mind, thereby decreasing chronic anxiety and depression and facilitating the establishment of a more mature, better-integrated identity.
People who lose their fear of death typically appear to live more fully,
people chose to “be strong,” deny their feelings,
Repeatedly I have heard, “The pain is still there, but it doesn’t bother me like before.”
in one study, high-functioning people suffering from autism and Asperger’s Syndrome.
A pilot study of fifteen mentally and physically healthy people who had repeatedly failed attempts to overcome their nicotine addictions, smoking an average of nineteen cigarettes per day for an average of thirty-one years, found an abstinence rate of 80 percent six months after a brief treatment intervention that included a maximum of three psilocybin sessions.
intense, often mystical experiences during the action of psilocybin strongly predicted decreased alcohol consumption and craving one week after psilocybin administration,
very low doses of psilocybin have been reported to offer relief for people who suffer from the excruciating pain of cluster headaches.
Plato belonged to the Eleusinian mystery religion wherein participants received a psychedelic brew called kykeon makes perfect sense, though it is conceivable that Plato could also have been a natural mystic whose innate biochemistry was sufficient to occasion mystical experiences without facilitation by entheogens.
consciousness, perhaps a manifestation of alternative
time-lapse and time-accelerating photography of Louis Schwartzberg (Movingart.com).
I do not recommend this mushroom for use by the general public. However, in my opinion, this species and its relatives can be helpful for sparking creativity in artists, philosophers, theologians, mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, computer programmers, psychologists, and other intellectual leaders. I personally believe that the computer and internet industries and astrophysics have been inspired through use of this fungus, which has stimulated the imagination and fields of vision of scientists and shamans with complex fractals, hyperlinking of thoughts and mental tools for complex
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from Exodus (33:20), “You cannot see God and live.”
