Pihkal Quotes

“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, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterward that they'll never do it again.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“To demand that a person pee in a cup whenever you wish him to, without a documented reason to suspect that he has been using an illegal drug, is intolerable in our republic. You are saying to him, "I wonder if you are not behaving in a way that I approve of. Convince me that you indeed are.
Outrageous.
Intolerable.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“How he could be a good user of LSD," I asked, "And know about the spiritual dimension - all that sort of thing - and still be a crook? I don't understand."
"Then it's time you did. Psychedelic drugs don't change you - they don't change you character - unless you want to be changed. They enable change; they can't impose it...”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche. I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“MDMA, it was beginning to be apparent, could be all things to all people.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“I am completely convinced that there is a wealth of information built into us, with miles of intuitive knowledge tucked away in the genetic material of every one of our cells. Something akin to a library containing uncountable reference volumes, but without any obvious route of entry. And, without some means of access, there is no way to even begin to guess at the extent and quality of what is there. The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world, and insights into its nature.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“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.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“They might be drugs that alter the states of consciousness, or they might be states of transcendence reached in meditation. They might be moments of orgasm, or fugue states, or day-dreams that take you momentarily to a rewarding fantasy and escape from responsibility. All of these are treasures of the spirit or psyche that allow exploration along paths which are undefined and completely individual.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“A society of free people will always have crime, violence and social disruption. It will never be completely safe. The alternative is a police state. A police state can give you safe streets, but only at the price of your human spirit.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“Just the two major legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol, are together directly responsible for over 500,000 deaths a year in this country. Deaths associated with prescription drugs are an additional 100,000 a year. The combined deaths associated with all the illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and PCP, may increase this total by another 5,000. In other words, if all illegal drug use were to be curtailed by some stroke of a magic wand, the drug-related deaths in the country would decrease by 1 percent. The remaining 99% remain just as dead,”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“I returned to stalking the wild universe.
Final question, if you please. How do I stop being afraid?
"Know that there is no safety anywhere. There never was and there never will be. Stop looking for it. Live with a fierce intent to waste nothing of yourself and life."
There was one final message.
"Turn fear around. Its other face is excitement.”
― Ann Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“On New Year's Eve, when the children had gone up the hill to be with their father, I went to a Mensa party in San Francisco, but returned home relatively early, wanting to face the first few hours of the new year away from the noise and lurching of people who had drunk too much. I stood outside on the deck, in darkness, looking up at the star-frosted sky, letting myself feel without censoring the ache and hope that belonged to that night, and I sent out prayer for connection with someone who would be --finally -- the person I'd needed to be with all my life, someone who would have gone through his own changes and wars of the spirit and emerged a true adult. A grown-up man. Who wouldn't mind my being a grandmother, for Pete's sake. A man somewhat like Shura Borodin -- or what Shura seemed to be.
I cried a bit because the wanting was so very intense and the clear night sky so very indifferent, and everything I was in body and soul might yet grow old without a lover and friend who could be to me what I was capable of being to him. I toasted myself, hope, the new year and the magnificent cold stars with a bit of wine, then went to bed.”
― Ann Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“Psychedelics might best be defined as physically non-addictive compounds which temporarily alter the state of one's consciousness”
― Alexander Shulgin, PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“It's a grace to be alive!”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“Final question, if you please. How do I stop being afraid? "Know that there is no safety anywhere. There never was and there never will be. Stop looking for it. Live with a fierce intent to waste nothing of yourself or life."

There was one final message. "Turn fear around. Its other face is excitement.”
― Ann Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“I rose and walked toward the front door. There was only the slightest sense of physical weight, and every motion, every gesture of the body was graceful.

I walk in grace. I move in grace. I live in Grace.”
― Ann Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“Most people hold onto the familiar. Who wants to actually risk having his universe changed? I do. Me.”
― Ann Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“And we can explore the infinity on many levels but we all too often choose just one, the immediate present. One can pass an opened door again and again, each time seeing new things, but always the same doorway, the same door.

Go through - don't just look through. Looking is like a tale of power; to go through is the act of power. And suddenly a new dimension of doors, each unexplored.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“It was now an hour into the experiment, and still no acknowledgment of any activity from the MDMA. Then, came the unexpected question, the "off the wall" question.

"Is it all right to be alive?”

“You bet your sweet ass it's all right be be alive! It's a grace to be alive!"

That was it. She plunged into the MDMA state, and started running down the hill, calling out that it was all right to be alive. All the greens became living greens and all the sticks and stones became vital sticks and stones. I caught up with her and her face was radiant. She told me some of her personal history which she knew well, and which I knew well, but with which she had never come to peace.

She had come into the world by an unexpected Caesarean section and her mother had died during the delivery. And for fifty years she had lived in the guilt of having had her life given her at the cost of her mother's life. She had been in therapy with her family physician for about three years, largely addressing this problem, and apparently what she needed was the acknowledgment that it was all right to be alive. I didn't hear from her for a couple of months.

When she did call, she volunteered that she still felt very much at peace, and had discontinued her therapy.”
― Alexander Shulgin, Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

“Turn fear around. Its other face is excitement.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“it was a spiritual or psychic touching which was blocked from consciousness most of the time, but which existed nonetheless, from birth to death. We were all woven into one tapestry, and at some deep, unconscious level of ourselves, we each shared everything known and felt by every other living person on the planet.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“Why fight to change Theo? He is my own genetics. Peace be made with the little time left. We will be dust again. Make light with what intellectual glimmer we can come forth with, during our brief passage from darkness to darkness.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“And we can explore the infinity on many levels but we all too often choose just one, the immediate present. One can pass an opened door again and again, each time seeing new things, but always the same doorway, the same door. Go through—don’t just look through. Looking is like a tale of power; to go through is the act of power. And suddenly a new dimension of doors, each unexplored.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“And we can explore the infinity on many levels but we all too often choose just one, the immediate present. One can pass an opened door again and again, each time seeing new things, but always the same doorway, the same door.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“As one psychiatrist put it, “MDMA is penicillin for the soul, and you don’t give up penicillin, once you’ve seen what it can do.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“If on this page I shall have expressed it to you, then it is true that DOM has the glory and the doom sealed up in it. All that’s needed to unseal it is to surround it with a warm living human for a few hours. For that human, for those hours, all the dark things are made clear.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“Shelley says: Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call life; though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colors idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story

“Different drugs may sometimes open different doors in a person, but all of those doors lead out of the same unconscious.”
― Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story