Know, “Unshakable Conviction,” Certainty, Confidence
A universe which grows excludes the possibility of knowing how it grows in the clumsy
terms of thought and language.
After having had the LSD experience, I know that there can never be love where there is
secretiveness and darkness. Love only endures in the bright light of the day.
Albert Einstein said, “…To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting
itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty…”
All energy is available to him who knows that it must not be grabbed, held, possessed or
used for any other purpose except spiritual.
All who have taken LSD know that there are levels of consciousness of which we know
nothing in our normal state.
An individual tuned into cosmic consciousness usually has no doubt that he or she is
confronted with the ultimate reality.
Anyone who has learned to pay attention to and trust his intuitions, knows that his mind
contains a source of information about reality quite apart from his senses.
As long as the person knows what’s involved, whatever he does to his own consciousness
is his own business.
At times, the scenery of the Beyond bears very little similarity to anything known on
earth. (eyes closed)
Because the ego never actually exists, those who are most captivated by its illusion are
still playing. They take it seriously and do not know that they are playing.
Childhood is not thought-ful but wonder-ful. Angels know truth and beauty directly,
intuitively, not through the mediation of ideas and therefore early childhood is angelic.
Each of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute uses of which are known
to cause profound changes in consciousness.
Each of us potentially has access to vast realms of knowledge through his own mind,
including secrets of the universe known so far only to a very few.
Everyone says give LSD to the medical profession. The medical profession has had LSD
for 23 years and hasn’t known what to do with it. (It’s now a lot more than 23 years.)
Faith is the first step. Then comes illumination and with it certainty and then
emancipation.
From my “heavenly” trips, I know that I am but one of the myriad manifestations of the
Self that is undying and unborn.
He (Leary) knew how important it was to have a warm supporting setting to experience
the ego-shattering revelations of the mushroom.
He may reach philosophic conclusions of rare profundity and of “absolute truth,” perhaps
in areas completely foreign or little known to him previously.
He prays best who does not know that he is praying, for prayer is self-forgetful
absorption in God.
I begin to congratulate the priest on his gamesmanship, on the sheer courage of being
able to put up such a performance of authority when he knows precisely nothing.
I know from first-hand experience that the LSD-type drugs in the right hands are superb
psychiatric tools.
I know now that I never knew what people were talking about when they talked about
feelings till I took LSD.
I will have enjoyed more living in the latter part of my life than most people ever know.
(That was actor Cary Grant.)
If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you, I
would let you know.
In the 20th century, mythology speaks almost a dead language, for the modern mind
knows of no order of truth higher than historical fact. Myth is therefore rejected.
Insights are accompanied by an emotion which reinforces the conviction that a fragment
of Truth has been discovered. We call this kind of learning “revelation.”
It doesn’t matter a bit if you don’t understand, because each of you is quite perfect as you
are, even if you don’t know it.
It is faith or loving confidence which guarantees that visionary experience shall be
blissful. (Without that, the trip can be a bummer.)
It is the essence of scientific honesty that you do not pretend to know what you do not
know.
It would appear that everybody who experiences these levels develop convincing insights
into the utmost relevance of the spiritual dimension in the universal scheme of things.
Knowing about God is not enough. Transformation of the self is only through realizing or
feeling God.
Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that
lives itself through each of us—that’s the art of living.
Memory has a deep dimension, a sensation of being immeasurably ancient and knowing,
as somehow prior to time and space.
metaphysical knowledge—It is impossible for one who experiences it to entertain the
slightest doubt of its truth.
Most people are walking in their sleep. Turn them around, start them in the opposite
direction and they wouldn’t even know the difference. (That was Al Hubbard.)
No known religion has become mature without embracing both the spiritual and the
magical.
No one should take LSD unless he knows that he’s going into the unknown. He’s laying
his blue chips on the line.
No one should take LSD unless he’s well prepared, knows what he’s getting into and is
ready to go out of his mind. Be with someone you trust emotionally and spiritually.
Now I know what Blake and St. John of the Cross were talking about. This experience is
what I was seeking when I became a Catholic.
Our society knows little of the important rites of passage and initiations provided by other
civilizations. Our society suffers from the lack of these means of growth.
People who go to church don’t know that the power they sing to, pray to, kneel before, is
asleep within them.
Perception will be known for what it is, a field relationship as distinct from an encounter.
(You are not encountering the universe and fighting it from outside. You are a part of it.)
Poor Jesus! If he had known how great an authority was to be projected upon him, he
would never have said a word.
Realization is bringing to consciousness what is true all the time in the “unconscious”, in
the Self and spirit which the ego does not know.
Religious ecstasy was not discovered by the drug cults. It has been known for centuries.
(Make that millennia, not just centuries.)
Religious ideas are like words—of little use and often misleading, unless you know the
concrete realities to which they refer.
So long as man identifies himself with the ego, he is trying to be God. It is only when he
knows that his center of being is the infinite that he is really free to be man.
Such well-known concepts as the “primordial essence” and the “ultimate Ground of
Being” take on an immediacy and clarity hitherto unknown.
The atomic structure of matter is known intellectually but never experienced by the adult
except in states of intense altered consciousness.
The Christian must accept by faith. The mushroom of the Aztecs carries its own
conviction; every communicant will testify to the miracle that he has experienced.
The conscious ego doesn’t know that it is something which that divine organ, the body, is
only pretending to be.
The consciousness-expanding drugs give a glimpse into the mind. One could almost say
that LSD gives a glimpse into the very soul of man, taps a universal knowing.
The content of the experience is self-validating and known with absolute certainty to be
true.
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the
first time.
The essence of metaphysical realization is the discovery that the conscious Self, the
ultimate knower in man, is substantially identical with the infinite.
The experience is capable of giving intense visions and intense new awareness and
conviction of awareness of one’s own place in the universe.
The experience will teach you what you need to know in order to grow and mature,
which is to gradually dissolve your over-protective defense structures.
The Indians know about the harmonious non-destructive utilization of the land’s
resources.
The knowledge through participation in ultimate reality, in the sense of being able to
KNOW and SEE what is REAL, carries its own sense of certainty.
The lion he now knew can take full pride in being a lion and has no reason to be
disturbed that he is not a man.
The man who catches a glimpse of this vision seldom doubts that he has reached a realm
of truth that takes precedence over every other thing.
The “mind seeking to know the mind” or the “self seeking to control the self” has been
defeated out of existence and exposed for the abstraction which it always was.
The most strongly enforced of all taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you
really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent and isolated ego.
The mystic knows that in some mysterious and indescribable manner, God and his
universe are one.
The region of death becomes knowable and death itself is seen primarily as a rite of
passage to a spiritual mode of being.
The rift between God and nature would vanish if we knew how to experience nature,
because what keeps them apart is not a difference of substance but a split in the mind.
The self may know, with knowing how it knows, the single Reality. (You circulate your
blood and digest your food, but you don’t know how you do it.)
The strong conviction of belonging and of having a personal worth gives new meaning to
the outer world and changes in the perception of it.
The Tao belongs neither to knowing or not knowing. If you really understand the Tao
beyond doubt, it’s like the empty sky. Why drag in right and wrong?
The Tao doesn’t “know” how it produces the universe just as we don’t “know” how we
construct our brains.
The time will come within a century when an educated man will be he who knows who
he is and where he came from, knows on the basis of direct psychedelic experience.
The two worlds, the divine and the human, are actually one. The realm of the gods is a
forgotten dimension of the world we know.
The ultimate reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the inner
light of even the most cruelly tormented mind.
The very fact that man, as an ego, can attempt to accept or know himself is the certain
sign that he is more than ego and is beginning to realize it.
The very use of the term “the unconscious” for the inmost depths reveals how little
Western man knows of what is actually his central consciousness.
The West knows all about machines and fails to realize that all the wisdom has come
from the East.
There is a realm of spiritual wisdom which religion as we know it can express by analogy
only.
There was a long and distinguished tradition of consciousness exploration, yet it was
known to so few.
These plants are found all over the world all the way back in history and probably used
and known about before the creation of any system of mind-changing exercises.
They consider me insane, but I know that I am a hero and living under the eyes of the
gods.
To “know” reality, you cannot stand outside it and define it; you must enter into it, be it
and feel it.
To know truth, one must get rid of knowledge. (That means getting rid of what the ego
thinks is knowledge, based on words.)
To the degree that we do not yet know what man is, we do not yet know what human
sexuality is (or what anything else is).
Totalitarian states know that the artist is not a harmless eccentric but one who, under the
guise of irrelevance, creates and reveals a new reality.
Under LSD you come to know that God is not apart and aside from Man but that God is
within Man and that Man is within God.
Until you have experienced the effects of the drug, you cannot know how narrow your
previous ideas about the world were.
Upon the certainty of this union with God depends the entire joy, power and world-
transforming character of the mystical experience.
We know relatively little about the creative spark, only slightly more than we do about
the unconscious from which it springs.
We must wake up and realize we know little. There is much more and the mystery is
beautiful.
What art was available to the great knowers of Suchness? They probably paid little
attention to art if their mind can see the All in every “this.”
Who wants to talk to a preacher when you know damn well they’re all working for the
establishment.
Within the course of a lifetime, we see certain signs that seem familiar and remind us of
those times when we knew.
You can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the
certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you.
You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what’s always been going on,
whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time.
You gaze into the big picture, thinking about the cosmos and know everything’s
connected.
Your consciousness extends beyond the language you know and the culture in which you
exist.
A know-it-all attitude, that of a “big shot” will usually cause suffering. That’s what
peyote can do to a man who thinks he knows everything. Peyote will bend him down and
turn him inside out.
A truly unselfconscious person had a kind of unaggressive but nonetheless unshakable
assurance, which at a deep level is religious faith or at its deepest level a kind of
metaphysical certainty.
All questions about the mysteries of life seem to be answered and there is no need to go
any further. Communicating this to those who have not had this experience is neither
possible nor necessary. It becomes a self-validating and deeply personal experience.
Although the Christian tradition does not recognize it, it seems obvious that if there is a
hereafter, then there must be a herebefore. And now I KNOW there is, for I was already
there when my mortal self was conceived.
Because they know nothing of spirituality and regard the material world and their
hypotheses about it as supremely significant, rationalists are anxious to convince
themselves and others that miracles do not and cannot happen.
Ego focuses consciousness on the few immediately neighboring pieces of the game board
because ego knows that one glance across the game board or beyond it puts the whole
thing in perspective.
Every person who has a genuine mystical experience reports that he sees the unity, reality
and infinity in space and time of all creation. He feels joy, peace and a sense of the
sacred. He knows that his experience is true.
Goodness knows what sort of a world a creature with more effective senses and a better
mind than ours would live in! (Man already has the best senses and mind, but is blocked
off from them and thus doesn’t use them. LSD opens it all up.)
I think it’s time to be brave and honest. I know that if everybody who’d ever taken a
major psychedelic stood up and said “Yeah, I did that and this is how it shaped my life,”
the world would be a better place the next day.
If you can throw off the grip of your learned mind and experience the message contained
in the computer which you carry behind your forehead, you would know the awe-ful
truth.
In order to become directly acquainted with God, rather than merely to know about God,
one must go beyond symbols and concepts, which are obstacles to the immediate
experience of the divine.
Intellectual growth often shows that we were wiser than we knew, especially in the sense
that mythological images foreshadowed ideas which, at the time of their origin, could not
be expressed in some more exact or scientific symbolism.
It is an inevitability of language and thought that all ideas of God, the infinite and the
Self, suggest some object apart from other objects, some “thing” to be known from other
things.
It is one thing to note that civilization as we know it has depended upon the ego concept;
it is quite another to assert that it must, as if this convention were somehow in the nature
of things.
Millions already know that beyond the fears of the state-sanctioned psychiatry and
governmental policy, under the right set and setting psychedelics can lead to joy,
mystery, rebirth and realization beyond belief.
Our intellectual discomfort in trying to conceive knowing without a distinct “someone”
who knows and a distinct “something” which is known, is like the discomfort of arriving
at a formal dinner in pajamas. The error is conventional, not existential.
Our minds are all linked, yet we’ve made this consensual agreement to pretend that we
don’t know it. We all just play out this game of creating different forms and names and
individualities.
Our rational instrumentation is principally responsible for the reduction of our total
potential of apprehension, of knowing and being. (The more one is dominated by their
ego, the further they are from reaching their Real Potential.)
Some part of us knows that an essential part has been lost, and culture does not provide
adequate compensation. Thus the longing for the “good old days,” for a more perfect
world.
The conventional duality of subject and object, knower and known, feeler and feeling, is
changed into a polarity. The knower and the known become poles, terms or phases of a
single event which happens, not to me or from me, but of itself.
The conventional wakeful state in which awareness is hooked to conditioned symbols,
flags, dollar signs, job titles, brand names, party affiliations and the like, is the level that
most people, including psychiatrists regard as reality; they don’t know the half of it.
The dust on the shelves has become as much of a mystery as the remotest stars; we know
enough about both to know that we know nothing. “Something unknown is doing we
don’t know what”.
The “experts” are forbidden to do research in this area, while those who have done
research are criminals and hence, regarded as untrustworthy, yet they must know things
that the experts do not, since they have had the experience.
The foundation or “ground” of our existence and awareness can’t be understood in terms
of things that are known. We have to speak of it through myth, metaphors, analogies,
what it’s LIKE, not what it IS.
The subject knows with perfect conviction that he will in the future respond in terms of
the new insights and new orientation instead of making the old, painful and non-
productive responses he has made in the past.
The veil which made you see duality drops away and you experience the world as a
blissful sport of God’s energy. You see the universe as supremely blissful light,
undifferentiated from yourself and you remain unshakable in this awareness.
The wise man has penetrated through the verbal curtain, seen and known and felt the life
process. The great writer is the wise man who feels compelled to translate the message
into words.
Theologians said to Galileo, “We will not look through your telescope because we
already know how the universe is ordered. If your telescope were to show us anything
different, it would be an instrument of the devil.”
There exists inside the human nervous system, inside our cellular structures a tissued,
biochemical memory-bank. The person who stumbles onto this inner room sees and
knows exactly what has been seen and known by visionaries of the past.
This is what LSD seems to tell him. It tells him that he is still in Eden, if only he knew it.
It is only necessary to spit out the apple and look at the world through psychedelic eyes.
The apple is his intellect or way of looking at things.
Traditional Western scientists like to assume an all-knowing position and discard any
notion of spirituality as primitive superstition, regressive magical thinking, lack of
education, or clinical psychopathology.
Unconsciously, if not always consciously, everyone knows that this Other World is there,
inside the skull—and any news about it, any discussion of its significance, its relevance
to other aspects of life, is a matter of universal concern.
We are liberated and enlightened by perceiving the hitherto unexperienced good that is
already within us, by returning to our eternal Ground and remaining where, without
knowing it, we have always been.
We can literally relive early events from our lives. We can be two months old or even
younger, once again experiencing all the sensory, emotional and physical qualities as we
first knew them.
We do not know what we want because we are only dimly aware of anything wantable.
We have taught ourselves to pursue goals but we have more words than experience for
what we mean.
We mount into the Intuitional domain, and, without the props of Sense in any way to
steady us, either by sensations perceived or suggesting relations, we know universal
principles of Being face to face.
When the Self is no longer identified with the ego, when in certain spiritual practices, it
penetrates and realizes its own depths, it simply KNOWS that it is eternal and all-
inclusive.
When you cut your finger, you do not heal yourself. You don’t even worry about it
healing. You know it is going to heal because you have faith in a greater power. You trust
your subconscious then, and you must learn to trust it about other things as well.
William James was well aware that a deep religious conversion is the best therapy for
alcoholism. The importance of deep spiritual experiences for overcoming alcoholism was
also well known to Carl Gustav Jung.
Willingness to be insecure is the ultimate security. Willingness to suffer is the essence of
divine joy. Willingness to be finite is to know one’s infinity. Willingness to be a slave is
to be truly free. Willingness to be a fool and a sinner is to be both a sage and a saint.
Wise men throughout history have told us again and again, in legends and myths,
aphorisms, poems and allegories that there exists within us a source of direct information
about reality that can teach us all we need to know.
With the ego and mind unplugged, what is left? It’s something Western culture knows
little about, the open brain, the uncensored cortex, alert and open to a broad sweep of
internal and external stimuli hitherto screened out.
You haven’t eaten, you haven’t tasted, you haven’t fucked, you haven’t seen colors, your
fingers haven’t touched rock and soil until you’ve had acid and then you know you’re
alive and you know what life is.
“Holy madness” or “divine madness” is known and acknowledged by various spiritual
traditions and is distinguished from ordinary insanity; it is seen as a form of intoxication
by the Divine. Revered seers, mystics, and prophets are often described as inspired by
madness.
If certain conditions are fulfilled, human beings may cease to behave as the pathetic or
deplorable creatures they mistakenly think they are and be what in fact they always have
been, if they had only given themselves a chance of knowing it—enlightened, liberated,
“godded in God.”
If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that uncomfortable data cannot be swept
under the rug indefinitely. Galileo, we know, was not silenced; his manuscripts were
smuggled out and published after his death, laying the groundwork not just for the
science of astronomy, but for experimental physics in general.
It is a complex revelatory insight into the essence of being and existence. This insight is
typically accompanied by feelings of certainty that such knowledge is ultimately more
real and relevant than our concepts and perceptions regarding the world that we share in a
usual state of consciousness.
It is significant that those who have been surprised by a mystical experience seldom fail
to feel that their experience is religious. Intuitively they become aware—at least
subjectively— that their state of mind somehow links them with the saints and prophets
of the ages.
It should be one of the chief tasks of the guide to help the subject select out of the wealth
of phenomena among which he finds himself, some of the more promising opportunities
for heightened insight, awareness and integral understanding that the guide knows to be
available in the psychedelic experience.
Metanoia is that profound state of consciousness which mystical experience aims at—the
state in which we transcend or dissolve all the barriers of ego and selfishness that
separate us from God. It is the state of direct knowing, immediate perception of our total
unity with God.
Of great relevance for the creative process is the facilitation of new and unexpected
synthesis of data, resulting in unconventional problem-solving. It is a well known fact
that many important ideas and solutions to problems did not originate in the context of
logical reasoning, but in various unusual states of mind.
Often, there is an actual experience of truths, they are KNOWN to be truths, which, when
presented in conceptual terms to the mind in its normal state, seem incomprehensible and
absurd. Such propositions as “God is love” are realized with the totality of one’s being
and their truth seems self-evident in spite of pain and death.
Once a person has experienced a visionary state of mind, one can no longer confuse the
lie with the truth. One has seen where one comes from and who one is, and one no longer
doubts what one is. There is no emotion or external influence that can divert one from
this reality.
Only when the ordinary perception of the material world is transcended can
consciousness connect with the heavenly regions. For those who have had the privilege
of such experience, the existence of Heaven, God and celestial beings ceases to be a
matter of belief and becomes self-evident reality.
Organized religion had little offer. Faith in an invisible divinity was not enough. What
LSD promised was the direct, unmediated experience of self-transcendence—the
mystical enlightenment where we KNOW what the philosophers and the prophets talk
about.
Profound religious experience is always moving and probably the most captivating and
shattering experience known to man. When I say “shattering” I mean that the experience
shatters certain fundamental assumptions about life which stand in the way of a broader
and more humane view.
So many practitioners of the inexact sciences (e.g., psychology, anthropology, sociology)
let it be known most clearly that they already know what reality is. For these poor
drudges, reality is the world of nonpoetry in accordance with the great Western myth that
all nature outside the human skin is a stupid and unfeeling mechanism.
Stop thinking and just look, but don’t look analytically. Liberate yourselves from
everything you know and look with complete innocence. Look as though you’d never
seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name and belonged to no
recognizable class.
The function of the guide is multifold: head nurse, tutor, baby-sitter, Mother Earth,
sympathetic ear, scullery maid, priest, trouble-shooter, tourist guide, doctor, navigator,
soulmate, and blank screen. The competent guide knows that it is the subject’s session,
not his.
The inner experience of the spiritual Self and its intimate association with the personal
self, gives a sense of internal expansion, of universality and the conviction of
participating in some way in the divine nature. In the religious traditions and spiritual
doctrines of every epoch one finds numerous attestations on this subject.
The most lasting value of the drug experience for me appears to be a number of
convictions, most of them religious in nature, which are so strong that it makes not one
iota of difference whether anyone agrees with them or not. (When you know the truth, no
one can talk you out of it. The truth is the truth.)
The thought of death does not in the least disturb me, because I am firmly convinced that
our spirit is altogether indestructible and thus continues from eternity to eternity. It is like
the sun, which to our eyes seems to disappear beyond the horizon, while in actual fact it
goes on shining continuously.
The various “other worlds” with which human beings erratically make contact are so
many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people,
most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as
genuinely real by the local language.
These experiences have been known for millennia. Descriptions of them can be found in
the holy scriptures of all the great religions of the world, as well as in written documents
of countless minor sects, factions and religious movements. They have also played a
crucial role in the visionary states of individual saints, mystics and religious teachers.
Until Western science is able to offer plausible explanations of all the observations
surrounding such phenomena as spiritual experiences, the concepts found in mystical and
occult literature have to be seen as superior to the present approach of most Western
scientists, who either do not know the facts or ignore them.
We are confronted by the very real possibility that the known and unknown uses of these
drugs that could prove to be legitimate and beneficial for individual persons and society
may be suppressed until some future century when investigation will be permitted to
proceed unhampered by popular hysteria and over-restrictive legislation.
We may encounter entities, situations, and places that bear little or no resemblance to the
realities we know in our day-to-day lives. It is here that we go beyond more familiar
experiences and enter the world known to shamans and seers, the world of deities and
suprahuman beings known from myths and fairy tales. (eyes closed)
We must achieve “freedom from the known”—freedom from the unanalyzed postulates
in terms of which we do our second-hand experiencing, freedom from our conventional
thoughts and sentiments, freedom from our stereotyped notions about inner and outer
reality.
You have to pass beyond everything you have learned in order to become acquainted
with the new areas of consciousness. Ignorance of this fact is the veil which shuts man
within the narrow confines of his acquired, artificial concepts of “reality”, and prevents
him from coming to know his own true nature.
Your soul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it never was before, living an eternity in
a night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand. What you have seen and heard is cut with a
burin in your memory, never to be effaced. At last you know what the ineffable is and
what ecstasy means. Ecstasy!
All the learned games of life can be seen as programs that select, censor and thus
dramatically limit the available cortical response. Consciousness-expanding drugs unplug
these narrow programs, the social ego, the game-machinery. And with the ego and mind
unplugged, what is left? What is left is something that Western culture knows little about:
the uncensored cortex, activated, alert and open to new realities.
Among Jung’s best known contributions is the concept of the “collective unconscious,”
an immense pool of information about human history and culture that is available to all of
us in the depth of our psyches. Jung also identified the basic dynamic patterns or
primordial organizing principles operating in the collective unconscious, as well as in the
universe at large. He called them “archetypes.”
Harvard—Over 400 “subjects” shared high-dosage psychedelic experiences with the
researchers in an atmosphere of aesthetic precision, philosophic inquiry, inner search,
self-confident dignity, intellectual openness, philosophic courage and high humor. The
historical impact of this “swarm” of influential scholars has not yet been recognized by
the still-timid press, popular or scientific. (That was Timothy Leary.)
I do not feel that any church known to me is seeking the truth. Each is certain it has the
truth. They do not want to help me find the truth; the only want me to worship that which
they have already decided is the truth. They are not interested in my soul, except to
surrender it to some concept they have. They are more interested in making me behave in
a certain pattern which they have decided is best for me.
I was proud to know that my people had a medicine that was God-powerful. Listen to me,
peyote does have many amazing powers. I have seen a blind boy regain his sight from
taking it. Indians with ailments that hospital doctors couldn’t cure have become healthy
again after a peyote meeting. Once a Crow boy was to have his infected leg cut off by
reservation doctors. After a peyote ceremony, it grew well again.
If a man believes that he is happy and hilarious and grooving on everything around him,
the only sane description of his state is to say that he’s euphoric, not to say that he
imagines he is euphoric. What the skeptic really seems to be claiming is that he knows
what the subject feels better than the subject knows-i.e., that the subject doesn’t feel what
he feels but feels something else.
In the transpersonal realm, we experience an extension of our consciousness far beyond
the usual boundaries of both our bodies and our egos, as well as beyond the physical
limits of our everyday lives. The more I have explored this realm in my own research, the
more I am convinced that these experiences in transpersonal consciousness can include
the entire spectrum of existence itself.
In this state, the subject finds it difficult to see any negative aspects in the world and in
the very structure of the cosmic design; everything appears perfect, everything is as it
should be. At this point, the world appears to be a friendly place where a childlike,
passive-dependent attitude can be assumed with full confidence and with feelings of
complete security.
Many psychiatrists, even though they talk constantly of the unconscious mind and are
always speculating on the unconscious thoughts of their patients, appear to know this part
of the mind only as an intellectual construct and not as a direct experience. Furthermore,
many of them appear to be quite frightened of patients who actually live in their
unconscious minds, particularly if patients have made this contact by using drugs.
None of these people has the slightest idea of why the Indians use peyote, or what the
effects of the drug are. Since they do not know, and will not try to understand, they
presume that it can only be evil and therefore must be prohibited. Certainly, they feel, a
practice which is so incomprehensible to Christianity cannot be religious and therefore
has no right under the constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.
Our difficulty is not that we have developed conscious attention but that we have lost the
wider style of feeling which should be its background, the feeling which would let us
know what nature is from the inside. Perhaps some intimation of this lost feeling
underlies our perennial nostalgia for the “natural life” and the myth of a golden age from
which we have fallen.
That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced
awareness. The various “other worlds” with which human beings erratically make contact
are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most
people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is
considered as genuinely real by the local language.
The ecstatic experience of a mystical nature is probably the most captivating, moving and
awesome experience known to man. It is also the most thoroughly transforming and most
enlightening of all human experiences. More than any one single facet of religion, it
constitutes the psychological foundation on which the whole enterprise known as
“religion” is built. It is the ultimate source from which the strength of religion flows.
The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of
happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and
of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfaction of life are
to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their
thoughts, their emotions and their sensations.
The reality and concrete nature of these experiences, as well as their convincing quality,
presented for a while a very serious conflict for the “scientist” in me. Then, all of a
sudden, the resolution of this dilemma emerged; it became clear to me that it was more
appropriate to consider the necessity of revising present scientific beliefs than to question
the relevance of my own experience. (That was Stanislav Grof.)
This transcendence of space and time is a key concept in all mystical experience. In our
present mode of mental consciousness, we experience the world in terms of space and
time; we experience everything separated in space and going from point to point in time.
It is well known that modern physics calls the whole space-time system in question, and
the transcendence of the space-time dimension is central in mystical experience.
We were convinced that drug effects were almost entirely determined by what people
around the tripper did. If the environment radiated safety, beauty, wisdom, then even
neurotic subjects would have experiences that were safe, aesthetic and revelatory. The
theory held that all “bad trips” could be converted to “good trips” if the environment was
intelligently managed to provide support. (That was Timothy Leary.)
We’re not just our bodies. That’s an illusion. Our physical forms are just a temporary
condensation of consciousness in material form. This one consciousness is our true
identity, and we all know this deep within us. I know that you know that we all know that
we are one. We’re all just playing this game. In ordinary reality, we’ve deliberately gone
to sleep on this knowledge.
Western cultures have bred a type of human being who feels strongly alienated. He has
lost his connection with the surrounding universe. He does not know that the “ultimate
inside” of himself is the same as the “ultimate inside” of the cosmos or that, in other
words, his sensation of being “I” is a glimmering intimation of what the universe itself
feels like on the inside.
When the backlash against psychedelics began, the therapeutic community fell all over
itself in its eagerness to denounce the LSD work as bad science and the researchers who
had been involved in it as charlatans. A curious situation arose whereby those who knew
the most about psychedelics were relegated to the sidelines of the debate, while those
who knew the least were elevated to the status of “expert”.
When there is “knowing,” grammatical convention requires that there must be someone
who knows and something which is known. We are so accustomed to this convention in
speaking and thinking that we fail to recognize that it is simply a convention and that it
does not necessarily correspond to the actual experience of knowing. (If “a light flashed”,
the flashing IS the light.)
You have to go out of your mind to use your head. You have to pass beyond everything
you have learned in order to become acquainted with the new areas of consciousness.
Ignorance of this fact is the veil which shuts man within the narrow confines of his
acquired, artificial concepts of “reality” and prevents him from coming to know his own
true nature.
If the potential exists for the upheaval of a person’s “change of life flow,” then it is
unprofessional, if not criminal, to fail to advise him of this potential outcome. And if you,
yourself, as the investigator, are uncertain of the potential ramifications of such an
experiment, then you are remiss in exposing others to that which you are not personally
familiar. One must personally know the experience to understand properly another’s
experience.
Psychiatrists should listen to what their patients say about drug experiences; patients
often know more about the workings of the unconscious mind from direct experience
than doctors do from their intellects. Teachers should try to learn from students who
know more about the subject than they do. In these ways, we will come to have better
information than what we now get from experts who do not know what they are talking
about.
When subjects were given a psychedelic drug without knowing what to expect or how to
respond, being left alone in a dark room or threatened by unfamiliar researchers
demanding cooperation in psychological testing, it is easy to understand why so many
experiences became psychotic. If nonpsychotic experiences are desired, subjects must be
prepared, feel secure in a friendly environment, and above be willing and able to trust in a
reality greater than themselves.
An overwhelming conviction in the value of the experience is felt.
As a result of this spiritual fulfillment, an amazingly deep new optimism has come to me.
As egos, they do not know the ultimate reality at all.
As the mystics of all traditions say, “Those who have seen KNOW”.
Because this power is so true, within it there is confidence.
Buddha smiles his knowing Buddha smile.
Consciousness as we know it is an act of restraint.
Eternities are reached; infinity is known. The relation of all things is known.
God knows how to produce the universe just as I know how to breathe.
I know that I could never have understood this experience had I not lived it myself.
If you come to know the nature of the mind, then you also come to know the Truth.
In school, we never go to know things, we only go to know words.
It cannot be known, only experienced.
Just as the heart knows its job, your brain is ready to do its job.
Listening to the music and seeing the visions, you know a soul shattering experience.
LSD is the most precious substance the world has ever known, a million dollars an ounce.
LSD opened up paths of thinking that I never knew existed.
Not knowing how near Truth is, people seek it far away.
One has the feeling of certainty.
Only absorption in the loving and knowing Ground can rid the mind of all fears.
Reason is not the same that it shall be when we know more.
The highest mystical awareness comes only when there is freedom from the known.
The nature of the one reality must be known by one’s own clear spiritual perception.
The Phenomenal is at first all that we know. (Infants don’t have egos yet.)
The ultimate reality cannot be described in terms of any finite or known category.
There is a world far better than the one we have always known.
To be more evolved is to know more joy, not less.
to make the best of both worlds—Most people didn’t know what Huxley meant.
Very few people in the U. S. know how to use marijuana.
We can explore mythological and other realities that we previously did not know existed.
We cannot know reality directly through intellectual activity.
We know almost nothing about the physiology of consciousness.
We know how to move our hands or how to breathe though we can’t explain it in words.
We must come to feel what we know to be true in theory.
When “He” appears, we know it.
When it really comes down to it, what do any of us know?
You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
All of us look at each other knowingly, the feeling that we knew each other in that most
distant past, the realization that we are and always have been one.
I know myself to be part of a larger, unrestricted creative network that could be described
as divine.
I know that this is a new me. The drug does things nothing else could do. Everyone
should be confronted with its virtues.
I participate in a kind of harmonious and convincing equilibrium, in the way everything
truly is and how everything should be.
Now I know that life is a constant flowing and we are part of each other. I have read it,
thought it, but now I know and am overwhelmed with gratitude.
sex—I can feel myself fusing with the other person. It is difficult to know even
anatomically what part of myself is me and what part is the woman.
The extraordinary part is that Aldous is experiencing that which he has known for a long
time.
The “myself” which I am beginning to recognize, which I had forgotten but actually
know better than anything else, goes far beyond my childhood.
Why the colors are so bright! The world seems alive! I’m seeing for the first time! It’s
alive! Well, of course, it’s alive. Your eye knew that all along.
He knows himself to be one with all, for he is no longer separating himself from the
universe by seeking something from it. (He realizes that he can’t separate himself from
the universe because he is the universe.)
I feel for the first time that I really know you.
Now I know what I only suspected before.
Now I know what Leary means by the “energy” liberated under LSD.
Now I know why the fairy tales are full of jewels.
A supreme feeling of confidence flowed through me, and all doubts and fears melted
away.
For the first time in my life, I knew what the word “beauty” meant. Now I understand
that I had never even begun to penetrate what beauty was all about.
He experienced a comprehensive familiarity with the complex network of his being such
as he had never known before.
I broke into a full joyous laughter at the mystery and the beauty of it all. How little we
know about the soul’s journey.
I didn’t know there could be such joy and freedom in rhythm and movement (or such joy
and freedom in general).
I didn’t know what I was seeking, but I felt its immanence, and it seemed an answer to
every hunger I had ever known.
I experienced a sense of initiation and participation in a great mystery, everything became
knowing and known.
I felt as though I was remembering something I had known before I was born, but had
forgotten by identifying with the physical and mental world as total reality.
I felt in me an unshakable conviction that there is indeed a universal and God-created
energy which expresses itself as rhythm in all things.
I felt myself in a universal place or space where I knew that the whole universe was in
each of us.
I felt waves of joy and an overpowering conviction that “all shall be well and all manner
of thing shall be well.”
I glowed like a new-born soul. The well-known landscape lost all of its familiarity and I
was setting out upon a journey of years through heavenly territories.
I had broken through the walls of ordinary consciousness, and what I glimpsed dwarfed
the world I had previously known.
I had the notion that “this is it,” “this is the moment of truth,” “I know that everything
leads to this,” “this is complete harmony and ecstasy.”
I knew every tree, every bush; but it was transformed, transfigured into the perfection of
a world newly created.
I knew myself to be this single, encompassing Consciousness. I knew that Its identity was
my true identity.
I knew that my Self outlasts physical death and that my essence, the me that is eternal,
exists without form.
I knew that the experience was not the result of a psychosis brought on by the drug but a
glimpse into a world beyond ordinary reality.
I knew that the Golden Age was all about me and it was we who had been blind to it, but
that it had never passed away from the world.
I lost the boundaries of my physical body. I felt that I was standing in the center of the
cosmos. I had never known this world. I was never created. I was the cosmos.
I now knew what the shamans meant when they said, “the mushroom takes you there to
the place where God is.”
I saw a gleaming, blinding light with a brilliance. I knew that I was looking at God. (eyes
closed)
I was dead and yet I was never more joyously alive; thus I knew that after death, the soul
is more alive than we can ever be while living (without LSD).
I was overjoyed—filed with wonder and delight. I knew the reasons behind existence,
time, space, goodness, pain—and I rejoiced.
I was wholly unconscious of what my body was resting on or what was under my feet. I
didn’t know whether the wind was riding on me or I on the wind.
I wept without restraint, knowing that within my heart, love and beauty and God had
become one.
It became a tactile experience of a kind that overshadowed any love-making I had known
before.
It occurred to me how strange it would be if some inkling of this state drives one mad as
if the mad person knows this state exists and not being in it drives him mad.
It seemed more real than ordinary consciousness and all of it seemed “revisited,”
something one had known once.
It was a fantastically joyous occasion. The magic of love filled the room, and we have
never known such joy.
Margaret said she felt like a monkey. Not only did she feel like one, she was a male
monkey, and she had an erection, and she felt it and she knows what it feels like.
Music seemed to awaken a depth in me that I never knew existed. With each note I
seemed to soar to higher heights.
My gratitude for the moment when the veil parted and I knew that “I” am so much more
than I thought was so immense that I often discovered myself sobbing with joy.
My heart was filled with joy that was overwhelming, just a beauty and peace that I have
never known.
My spirit cried out, or seemed to cry out, “Let me tell everyone this wonderful thing I
know, this secret that explains everything and will bring such rejoicing and happiness!”
Peace and joy engulfed me and I knew that the kingdom of heaven was truly within and
that LSD had made this day the most important one in my life.
The Shaman lost all fear of death, knowing it to be literally impossible. “Man has created
death.”
There came a knowing beyond all doubting, convictions unshakable in their strength, as
if LSD had pulled back a curtain and allowed the light of wisdom to shine through.
There was a beatific smile on the faces. You knew that they were transported into some
inner heaven.
There was awareness of unutterable bliss coupled with the conviction that this was the
only real and eternal state of being.
There were some unfamiliar faces that manifested, but they were presences I trusted and
somehow, intrinsically knew. (eyes closed)
To touch a fabric with one’s fingertip was to simultaneously know more about both one’s
fingertip and the fabric than one had ever known about either.
All identity with self dissolved. There was no sense of time-space, only an awareness of
Being. At no time was there a sense of the individualized self. I never knew when “I”
entered the stream, only the emergence out of it.
As I wept with joy, feelings of love became so intense that I knew they could only be of
divine origin and that this feeling was actually God residing within myself and in all
other persons.
Cosmic laughter was different from any way of laughing I had known. It came out of me
as though propelled by a force much larger than the person laughing. It came right up
from the center of my being.
Deep emotions can be understood only after they have been felt. I knew that it was
impossible to communicate them. They must forever remain mysterious, an unsolved
mystery to all who had not had such feelings.
Every atom of my body and soul had seen and felt God. The world was warmth and
goodness. There was no time, no place, no me. There was only cosmic harmony. With
every fiber of my being I knew it was so.
For what seemed an immensely long time, I dazed without knowing, even without
wishing to know what it was that confronted me. I was so absorbed in looking, so
thunderstruck by what I actually saw.
God, Who had always been so vague and remote before, was now real and near and I
knew that He would never again be invisible to me. Thus, I was given another rich and
lasting reward.
His emotional state was one of “tranquility, a quiet kind of happiness and a security
coming from the knowledge of having accomplished something enormously worthwhile,
of having made some very great advances.”
I don’t know if I can say anything more about this experience. I realized at the time that I
had made it perfectly clear in my books and was only amazed that I didn’t always
understand what I was saying. (That was Alan Watts.)
I felt within me the same glorious rhythm I had experienced all day. Now I knew this
joyous rhythm to be no less than the rhythm of the universe itself. I knew that at last I
was beginning to find God.
I found myself wishing that every living person might be given LSD and see beauty equal
to that which I had witnessed, have the same feelings, know the blessed nearness of God
and that these feelings might stay uppermost in all of us at all times.
I had the feeling that I knew what the purpose and the reason for life was. The feelings
that I had at the time could not be very well described in psychiatric terms but best
described in either religious or poetic ones.
I looked into her mind and I had my eyes closed. Margaret came inside my mind and we
were together there, inside my mind. Suddenly, she manifested herself inside my mind
with a cat face and smiled at me with a cat mouth. I knew I’d always be with her.
I saw my world shrink to a micro-speck floating in the eternity of the cosmos and I
smelled enlightenment and was promised answers to the questions I didn’t even know
how to ask.
I was convinced that if we were to know peace within ourselves, the need for spiritual
development must be recognized, appreciated and stressed far more than it is in our
culture.
I was no longer as I knew myself to be, a small point of awareness confined in a body,
but instead was a vast circle of consciousness in which the body was but a point, bathed
in light and in a state of exaltation and happiness impossible to describe.
It seemed as if I could distinguish every leaf, every blade of grass. It was like walking
through a fairyland, a tranquil, dreamlike landscape unassociated with anything I had
previously known.
“Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” were the words that seemed best to
capture the nature of my experience. I felt free to be exactly who I was, free of fear and
social constraints, and filled with love and compassion for all beings.
My own personal drama was no more significant than light playing on a movie screen.
Even feelings of joy, ecstasy, and liberation in letting go of attachments were less
important than the insight and sense of knowing, or remembering, inexpressible truth.
Seemingly, some element of my former personality had died, but some other part that
was far more vital had been reborn. Whatever it was that wanted to come to life was
important, but I didn’t yet know how or why.
The ancient days were restored before my eyes and to my ears, and I exulted in the
perception with such conviction of reality that I ascribed it to no power of my own, but
knew it as an exterior and universal fact.
The psychiatrist asserts it is “fact” that the subject sat in a catatonic state for two hours,
refusing to talk; the subject knows the “truth” to be that he was spinning far out of space-
time into an ecstatic dance of neurons which made words inadequate and irrelevant.
There was a huge opening in the sky, I saw God. I had a tremendously mystical
experience. I was deeply moved, deeply in love. And when I say love, it’s not like the
level we know from analysis. It was the absence of all anger, the absence of all conflict.
I became conscious in myself of eternal life…I saw that all men are immortal; that the
cosmic order is such that all things work together for the good of each and all; that the
foundation principle of the world…is what we call love and that the happiness of each and
all is in the long run absolutely certain.
I felt that I was part of some intricate, unified network that was all-inclusive and eternal
and I felt that in that place I would continue to exist in some form forever. My belief in
the finality of death was undermined by an event that was so real it could not be denied
and I could no longer believe that death was the end of everything.
I was amazed and intrigued. I’d learned first-hand how limited our everyday notions of
consciousness are. I knew that the experience had touched something very deep in me. I
recognized a level of reality in the experience that could not be ignored. I wanted to know
more and was willing to take the risk.
I was not I any more but a consciousness that encompassed a vastly broader spectrum
than I ever dreamed of. It doesn’t last, but once you have known it, you can never forget
that it exists. When the experience becomes integrated into your life, the fear of death
disappears— and we can only truly begin to live when we no longer fear death.
In a letter to Humphrey Osmond, Aldous Huxley described a mescaline experience,
during which he came to the conclusion that “I didn’t think I should mind dying, for
dying must be like this, a passage from the known, constituted by lifelong habits of
subject-object-existence, to the unknown cosmic fact.”
It dawned on me that all the building blocks of the social structure were really nothing
but an imposing veneer that kept you from being godlike, and that as soon as we knew
the true potential of our own energy frequencies to overcome or pass through the artificial
walls, the human spirit could be liberated.
One could “feel” his “parental heritage” and their contributions to his “cellular structure”.
I knew what in my body came from my mother and what came from my father. I could
feel my mother and father in my body. I felt I knew how my mother’s body feels like to
her and what my father’s body feels like to my father.
There was unity and life and the exquisite love that filled my being was unbounded. My
awareness was acute and complete. I saw God and all the saints and I knew the truth. I
felt myself flowing into the cosmos, levitated beyond all restraint, liberated to swim in
the blissful radiance of the heavenly visions.
To concoct anything by way of description that would even hint at the magnitude, the
sense of ultimate reality…this seems such an impossible task. The knowledge which has
infused and affected every aspect of my life came instantaneously and with such
complete force of certainty that it was impossible, then or since, to doubt its validity.
Was I going mad? Did the psychedelics rob me of my senses? No. They brought me to
my senses. The world around me—people, scents, colors, sounds—all was intensified. I
never knew how keen my senses were! And that other sense—the sense of oneness with
all creation!
I had the feeling of going deep within myself to the self stripped bare of all pretense and
falseness. It was the point where a man could stand firm with absolute integrity—
something more important than mere physical life. The white light experience was of
supreme importance—absolutely self-validating and something worth staking your life
on and putting your trust in.
I kept getting visions of this “golden dawning” of consciousness in man which would
enable us to get things whole, to see life’s miracles, to know that indeed all is in
everything from blade of grass to man and woman. It was a vision of some ideal
existence in which there was only the sense of wonder and all fear gone, of a certain state
of being that was there not to be judged, but simply to be.
I was experiencing how consciousness manifests itself in separate forms while remaining
unified. I knew that fundamentally there was only One Consciousness in the universe.
From this perspective my individual identity and everybody else’s appeared temporary
and almost trivial. To experience my true identity filled me with a profound sense of
numinous encounter.
I was struck by the thought that since I’d first seen Julia, I’d felt that I’d known her for a
long time. That sounds trite, but what can I say? How else do you describe that feeling? I
simply felt that I’d known her for a long time. I told her so. “You HAVE known me for a
long time,” she replied. “But it was a long time ago.” “In school?” trying to remember.
She laughed and put her cheek against my arm. “In a kind of school,” she said softly.
Large trees known for their longevity, such as sequoias and redwoods, were experienced
in the sessions as representing timeless and centered consciousness uninfluenced by the
turmoils and upheavals in the external world. Other insights associated with similar
experiences were related to the mystical consciousness and deep religious significance of
certain plants.
Now I could hear, as if for the first time, the depth of the wisdom in their teachings and in
the mystical doctrines of all ages and all cultures. As I sought for words to express my
own ineffable experience I gained a new appreciation for those individuals who had
attempted to communicate their own insights in writing or art. I also became interested in
understanding intuitive ways of knowing.
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time and my impression of its truth has
ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,
parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness
entirely different.
We were dealing with a powerful aphrodisiac, probably the most powerful sexual releaser
known to man. The effect was sensory—contact was intensified thousand-fold but also
deeper. The union was not just your body and her body but all of your racial and
evolutionary entities with all of hers. It was mythic mating. Neurological union. Cellular
sex. Archetypes merging. It was the direct reliving of thousands of matings.
When I realized that I was being born again, that life goes on and on and on, the feeling
was overwhelming. I was filled with confidence that it was okay to die, because the
consciousness that inhabits the flesh has a higher destiny. It never began and it won’t end.
It just keeps going. Then I was struck with wave after wave of value wisdom, as though
the forms behind human spirituality were hitting me for the first time.
I sensed a complete connectedness of everything. It was obvious to me that all of the
separateness I ordinarily perceived was, in fact, an artifact of cultural conditioning, and
was indeed less “real” that what I was supposedly hallucinating. At that moment, I knew
that I was, for the first time, experiencing things as they are, utterly continuous. There is
no discontinuity. There is not one thing and another thing. It is all the same thing, the
Holy Thing.
A deep “cosmic confidence” pervaded my being. I felt liberated and wholly secure.
Acid awakened something in me like a waiting genius that I knew was there.
Deep within was the thirst for a greater knowing of the ancient wisdom.
He felt certain that something extremely important had happened to him.
He felt during the experience that he “knew” the other as he had never known her before.
I do not have to have faith that what I saw was true. I KNOW that it was.
I felt a wonderful new optimism and a sense of peace and harmony and letting be.
I felt an amazing array of emotions with an intensity I did not know was possible.
I had known the living spirit of nature.
I had never known what awe was.
I had not known that one could love with such intensity.
I knew beyond the shadow of any doubt that there was a divine spirit behind all creation.
I knew that the rich emotions I had experienced held some deeper meaning.
I knew that this was the truth.
I knew the meaning of things I never comprehended before.
I was convinced that I’d seen the answer.
My intellect was seriously tweaked. I learned how much I didn’t know.
My watch, I knew, was in another universe.
People looked familiar, even those I didn’t know.
The experience unfolded range upon range of reality I hadn’t known existed.
The reality I knew had cracked and through the cracks shone another order of reality.
There was a feeling of knowing everything there is to know.
a laugh that is delicate, though intense, born of tenuous vibrations, a laugh that is “in the
know”, that grasps the infinite subtleties of an infinitely absurd world
a magic key to paradise, a paradise of beauty and depth of knowing and understanding
which had been dormant within me
a sense of boundless freedom and he who experiences it has not the slightest doubt as to
the completeness of his release
a sense of certainty that this knowledge is ultimately more relevant and “real” than the
perceptions and beliefs we share in everyday life
a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have
this, but the consciousness that he has it already
a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own
scientists know to be true in theory
a state of consciousness without differentiation of the knower, the knowing and the
known
a stirring emotional encounter sufficient to change one’s established values and the
resolution to act upon the revelation
an enhanced sense of relaxation and loosening of inhibitions, together with an increase in
self-confidence
an undifferentiated unity wherein the knower, the knowledge and the known are
experienced as a single reality
awe, bliss, a sense of certainty, feelings of extraordinary creative awareness or spiritual
breakthrough
encountered surpassing states of awareness and returned with the conviction that they had
attained the truth
finally knowing the meaning of genuinely meeting another person without the subtle
masks that separate man from man
insights into aspects of people’s lives on psychedelic drugs that you could never have
known and they turned out to be true
knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that
lives itself through each of us
knows directly the mysterious workings of Nature which science is only beginning to
guess at
Leary one of the wisest, most illuminatory beings that the world has ever known
(Michael Hollingshead said that.)
not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, where death
was an almost laughable impossibility
psychiatrists whose proprietary claims to a revealed understanding of the mind and whose
antagonism to consciousness expansion are well known
radiant, the child-like smile of absolute knowing, knowing beyond words, peace that is
not static but flowing
that view of life or mode of living and knowing, which lies at the heart of the psychedelic
experience
the awakening of the senses, the open eye, the naked touch, the real-eye-zation that this is
it! I am eye! I am hear! I knose! I am in contact!
the conviction that the subject is seeing himself for the first time as he really is—with all
mental blocks and defenses down
the genius for knowing the Holy, the awesome knowledge that the stuff of which we are
made is also Divine
the purest forms of intuition, unaccountable yet powerful convictions of knowing how
things really are, of sensing directly that something is true
the root of religion, namely religious experience, the most captivating and transforming
experience known to man
the sacred mushroom that gives visions and transports the eater to “the world where
everything is known”
the sage or “divine-man” whose consciousness transcends the opposites and who,
therefore, knows himself to be one with the cosmos
those Other Worlds of transcendental experience where the soul knows itself as
unconditioned and of like nature with the divine
to come into direct contact with the truth itself without allowing theories and symbols to
stand between the knower and the known
to wear out one’s intelligence in order to unify things without knowing that they are
already unified
ways of knowing and feeling that the categorical rationalism of the West fails to pick up
or even denies
the potentials of the drug experience for revealing new levels of consciousness and
bringing about changes in personality and behavior faster and more effectively than any
other method known to us
the sense of perceiving truths not known before…insights into depths of truth unplumbed
by the discursive intellect…the mysteries of life become lucid…illuminations, revelations,
full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain
the state in which we transcend or dissolve all the barriers of ego and selfishness that
separates us from God, the state of direct knowing, immediate perception of our total
unity with God
assertions of having known the origin and goal of history, of having found the answer to
the ancient query, “What am I?”, of having intuited the harmonious structure of the
universe, of having experienced the primacy of love and the brotherhood of man, or of
having realized the reality of life that transcends temporal death
a confidence in the integrity of the self
a feeling of knowing the ultimate meaning of life itself
a joyous confidence
a joyful knowledge, the joy of knowing
a knowing of knowing
a new sense of spiritual security and confidence
a reality we once knew and forgot
a sense of knowing
a spiritual experience so definite that there can be no mistaking it
a state of self-confidence, satisfaction and relaxation
a timeless order of reality outside the world as we know it
a universe with many more dimensions than we know
a vision that was so real and convincing, so directly and deeply felt
a way of knowing your inner self
absolute certainty in the truth
After-Death, where there is a survival of consciousness, but not of the body as we know it
break through to a sense of mystic clarity and certainty
clear certainty
cosmic-religious experiences, feelings of great enrichment and increased self-confidence
direct contact with life, to know life apart from “interruptions”
direct insight—know the truth by not knowing
experiences sensations more intense than any he has known
exuding a confidence that comes from a humorous cosmic awareness
feeling so wonderful I did not know how to say it
have never known what fascination there is in the ecstasy of beauty
“inmost certainty”
knowing and feeling that the world is an organic unity
knowing that you know
liberated to know God
listening to music, discovering entirely new dimensions in pieces that he knew quite well
may reveal possibilities of experience which the subject did not know existed at all
men knowing themselves only as bodies inhabited by an “I” and not as spiritual beings
perceiving truths not known before
realizing immediately things we otherwise know only abstractly
self-evident revelations of the highest truth
self-evident truth
that the happiness of each and all of us is in the long run absolutely certain
that truly to know is not to know
that ultimate “freedom from the known”
the boldness with which the mystic often asserts his convictions
the certainty that such knowledge is truly or ultimately real
the cloudless conviction of reality which characterized this vision
the conviction of an intuition
the conviction of truth
the feeling of pure knowing
the full conviction that all I heard and felt was real
the greatest journey known to man
the heightening of color and form perception of well-known objects
the knowing glance
the living reality, knowable only by personal experience
the most powerful drug yet known to man
the self-validating certainty of direct awareness
the smile of one who knows better
to a clearer, more integrated way of existing than I have ever known
to a higher reality, a special way of knowing
to “be still and know that I am God”
to celebrate life, to know that we are eternal
to free Western man from the limitations of consciousness as we know it
to know “in one’s bones”
to know that you exist on a multiple of levels
to know the true meaning of an expanded consciousness
truths which we all know in the unconscious depths of our being
truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten
unmistakable but quite indefinable
where time as we know it has no existence