How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

by Michael Pollan

“Mysticism,” he likes to say, “is the antidote to fundamentalism.”

“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”

Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure.

“People will think they are going mad, when in fact they are beginning, when they take it, to go sane.”

I realized that you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.”

It’s often said that a political scandal is what happens when someone in power inadvertently speaks the truth.

R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.