Magic, Magical, Miracle, Miraculous

Certain myths keep appearing and reappearing and many of them refer to the magic and
wonder of the sacred drug, the potion, the elixir of life.

I think it’s no accident that in so many myths passed down from generation to generation,
there is this theme of the magic potion.

If religion rejects the magical side of life, it cuts itself off from the living forces of the
world.

It is an experience which people have when they are, as it were, reborn into the world and
suddenly, with this kind of visionary light, they perceive its miraculous beauty.

It was a time of magic and the gathering of the new tribe. The tribe of expanded
consciousness.

It was these experiences that convinced me of the existence of a miraculous,
unfathomable reality that is hidden from everyday sight.

Literary genius is the near-magical use of words to bridge as far as possible the gulf
between the normal state of existence and the world I was then in.

No known religion has become mature without embracing both the spiritual and the
magical.

One’s identity is felt as something extremely ancient, familiarly distant, with overtones of
the magical, mythological and archaic.

Spiritual experience does not obliterate the here-and-now but makes it more radiant and
miraculous (or allows us to see how radiant and miraculous it always is).

The almost magical power exercised by certain works of art springs from the fact that
they remind us consciously or more often, unconsciously, of that Other World.

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 difference between magic, religion, and medicine have not always been so clear as
we make them, or prefer to make them.

The experience may be chaotic, beautiful, thrilling, incomprehensible, magical, ever-
changing.

The genuine Zen flavor is when a man is almost miraculously natural without intending
to be so.

The mystic is able to enlarge his vision, to look more deeply into the unfathomable
miracle of existence.

The psychedelic technique fulfills the hopes of many troubled individuals for magical
intervention, a quick solution to their problems.

The spirit will return to its mythological roots and the magic landscapes from which is
sprang.

The use of psychedelic substances for ritual, religious and magical purposes can be traced
back to ancient shamanic traditions and is probably as old as mankind.

There is a “magic theatre” wherever you look, if you can only relax and forget about
yourself as an actor caught in a net struggling to get out.

They might begin to see the whole life process as a miraculous cosmic drama that is
carefully orchestrated by a divine cosmic force.

Throughout history, the alchemist has always been a magical awesome figure. The
potion. The elixir.

Under the weight of mental knapsacks, receptivity to the voice of mystical or magical
thinking is limited.

We live on the edge of the miraculous every minute of our lives. The miracle is in us and
it blossoms forth the moment we lay ourselves open to it.

You must let go of the clutching personal self, in order to let this deeper self within you,
which you interfere with, come through and perform its miracles.

A typical path of the heroic journey begins when the ordinary life of the protagonist is
suddenly interrupted by the intrusion of elements that are magical in nature and belong to
another order of reality.

All of us carry around in the back of our head this mysterious other world which I have
called the world of visions. The little twinkling lights of Christmas decorations remind
us of this other world; they seem in some way magical.

As long as human beings have had these kinds of bodies, living on a planet of this sort,
certain myths keep appearing and reappearing and many of them refer to the magic and
wonder of the sacred drug, the potion, the elixir of life.

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.

Current psychopharmacology is a superstitious form of black magic sponsored and
supported by the federal Food and Drug Administration, a government agency about as
enlightened as the Spanish Inquisition. (That was Timothy Leary.)

Even in our sophisticated society, the dream and the hallucination retain a vestige of their
magical powers. Many surmise that somehow they contain a more important message, a
final truth of which waking awareness is incapable.

In the face of the unbelievable magnitude of the Whole Show, in the face of Eternity, we
should all be continually, every second of the incredible day and night, humbly,
reverently awed and thankful for the miracle of our impossible existence.

LSD was a means of exciting consciousness and provoking visions, a kind of hurried
magic enabling youthful seekers to recapture the resonance of life that society had
denied.

Magic is a psychological branch of science, dealing with the sympathetic effects of
stones, drugs, herbs and living substances upon the imaginative and reflective faculties
and leading to ever new glimpses of the world of wonders around us.

Tom Robbins said ”Science only gives people what they need. Magic gives them what
they want.” We agree, but hasten to add that science can give people magic. (That was
Timothy Leary.)

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.

If any single theme dominated young people in the 1960’s, it was the search for a new
way of seeing, a new relation to the world. LSD was a means of exciting consciousness
and provoking visions, a kind of hurried magic enabling youthful seekers to recapture the
resonance of life that society had denied.

In the course of my research, I found that in the mythology of every religions tradition I
am aware of, there’s some magic plant that talks, heals, mystifies, intoxicates, or turns
into fire, that either brings you to God, or gets you in a whole lot of trouble, or both,
depending on the context.

It is clear that psychedelics have the potential to cut through whatever blocks stand
between us and higher experiences, magically letting us enjoy, if only temporarily,
transcendent states. I hope it is not necessary to belabor the point that this potential is
realized if only set and setting support it.

Psychotropic substances of plant origin had already been in use for thousands of years in
Mexico as sacramental drugs in religious ceremonies and as magical potions having
curative effects. (It wasn’t just in Mexico but in many if not indeed all parts of the
world.)

Sometimes, there is very little actual perceptual distortion of the environment, but the
latter is emotionally interpreted in an unusual way. It can appear incredibly beautiful,
sensual and inviting; or comical; very frequently, it is described as having a magical or
fairy-tale quality.

We have now learned that many species of these strange growths possess a power such as
early man could only have regarded as miraculous. Indeed they may have given to him
the very idea of the miraculous and inspired many of the themes that come down to us in
our heritage of folklore.

Although scientific interest in psychedelic substances is relatively recent, their ritual use
can be traced back to the dawn of human history. From time immemorial, plants
containing powerful mind-altering substances have been used for the diagnosing and
healing of diseases, enhancement of paranormal abilities, and for magical or ritual
purposes.

The most human thing about man is his eternal, childlike hope that somehow, someday,
the deepest yearnings of his heart will come true. Who is so proud and unfeeling that he
will not admit that he would be deliriously happy if, by some strange magic, these deep
and ingrained longings could be fulfilled? If there was eternal everlasting life beyond
death after all?

A belief in miracles is indispensable to the survival of any spiritual life.
He explores the magical place.
I can now understand the psychology of divine inspiration or of magical thinking.
Indians called the magic mushroom God’s flesh.
Intelligence evolves when the occult and magical become the objective-scientific.
Love is a magic potion.
Paradises abound in gems or self-luminous, magical flowers.
Sex under LSD becomes miraculously enhanced and intensified.
Spiritual insight reveals a mystery and magic.
The archetype is truly awesome if not outright miraculous. (eyes closed)
The key to the mystery of life is chemical, the Elixir, the magic potion.
The most ordinary, the most trivial events, are seen as jewels and miracles.
The new society will be one of mythic integration where magic will live again.
There is a magical kind of beauty which we say is transporting.
They activate our capacity for the miraculous.
This emergence is always so miraculously unexpected.
This is magic.
Under LSD, the world becomes the world of miracle and beauty and sublime mystery.
Unlike their parents, they believe in magic.
We have scrubbed the world clean of magic. We have lost even the vision of paradise.
What a miracle this is!
With glass, a whole building could be turned into something magical and transporting.
Without the miracle, nothing has happened.

I had never heard music played like that before. I suddenly understood the very essence
of music, the secret of its magic.

I wanted to shout and sing of the miraculous new life and sense and form, of the joyous
beauty and the whole mad ecstasy of lovliness.

I was looking at what Adam had seen on the morning of his Creation, the miracle,
moment by moment of naked existence (what Huxley saw while looking at a flower).

In a flash, the Door in the Wall would slide open and wherever you were, in a room,
lying on the grass, walking on the beach, would be magically transformed.

It was a fantastically joyous occasion. The magic of love filled the room, and we have
never known such joy.

It was something magical, something out of another world, which was thrown into this
world.

How easy, I kept saying, to turn whatever one looked at, even a human face, into a pure
object, an object of the most magical beauty, strangeness, intensity of thereness, of pure
existence!

I had the most profound experience of my life. From this single experience, the whole
scope, depth and direction of my life have changed miraculously. Indeed a miracle has
happened to me.

It was a magical time. Visions of utopia flooded my brain. The pictures the psychedelics
beamed into my mind opened me up to the world in new ways and showed me what is
possible when love, trust and faith replace envy, possessiveness and violence.

The legs of that chair, how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished
smoothness. I spent several minutes or was it several centuries?–not merely gazing at
those bamboo legs, but actually being them or rather being myself in them.

I cannot say exactly what the mysterious change was. I saw no new thing, but I saw all
the usual things in a miraculous new light, in what I believe is their true light. I saw for
the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous, beyond any words of mine to describe, is
the whole of life.

I was experiencing an ever-increasing state of ecstasy. This was accompanied by a
clearing and brightening of my perceptual field. It was as if multiple layers of thick, dirty
cobwebs were being magically torn and dissolved, or a poor-quality movie projection or
television broadcast were being focused and rectified by an invisible cosmic technitian.

All of a sudden I found myself in a completely new and magical world. The little green
strands of the shag rug were undulating in a most delightful way. The lights reflecting off
the glass coffee table top sparkled with a kind of moist luminescence. The furniture, the
walls, the floor, were all pulsing and undulating in slow waves as if the whole room was
breathing. The rate of the waving motion seemed to be coordinated with my breathing.

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.

A piece of bark on the tree was magically smooth.
He saw “miracle,” heard “holy music.”
I was transcended to a magical realm.
It was a world where miracles were possible, acceptable and understandable.
It was like walking into some enchanted, magical forest kingdom.
It was magic, far-out beautiful magic.
No spectacle had ever affected him with such a magic spell.
Returning to my miraculous home, this familiar home is where I began so long ago.
The girl turned into a presence, magic and mysterious.
The vistas through the shrubbery were magically intriguing.
There was no question that magic was real.
They were all high on the magic.
We could see with the miracle of LSD vision.

a magic key to paradise, a paradise of beauty and depth of knowing and understanding
which had been dormant within me

a truly miraculous instrument for new perceptions and insights about those aspects of
reality which concern him personally

all joyous color and sound and magic and hope and maybe just the same old chips of
glass, beads, and mirrors, but seen in a glorious new way

an object of the most magical beauty, strangeness, intensity of thereness, of pure
existence

influencing the mind-body-essence of man, as a magic, spiritual drug, a new world age
which begins to act evolutionarily

out of the everyday world of common, conceptualized experience into the magical Other
World of nonverbal visionary experience

phenomenal kaleidoscopic displays, magic sparkling fountains, majestic fireworks (eyes
closed)

that the universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game and that there is no
separate “you” to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed

the purest of soul-searching, high-classic, rock-concert music, the sound of the
miraculous space between eternity—between paradise

the element of the miraculous which we feel both at the stars in heaven and at our own
ability to be conscious

the world of miracle and beauty and divine mystery where experience is what it always
ought to be

the world of saints, heroes, magical forests, visions of delightful temples and jeweled
mansions (eyes closed)

to cross over from the ordinary world to the world of the miraculous (Break on through to
the other side.)

psychedelic art—trying to express something in a non-conceptual highly figurative and
often emotive way, through symbols which may themselves be magical (the power to
turn us on)

a glimpse of its magic
a magical atmosphere
a magical flight or ascent to the heavenly regions
a magical influence
a miraculous opportunity for growth, healing and expansion
a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight
a nature that had been magically transfigured
a realm of magic and miracles
an atmosphere of magic
an opening into the magic space
appeared as if bathed in a clear, magic brilliance
ascend in magical flights
beautiful, magical
beneficial magical-mystical effects of LSD
enters the land of miracles
experiencing the magical dimensions of the here and now, the ever-widening Present
eyes closed—details of forms more minute and miraculous than anything seen on earth
flipped out of their conditioned mind sets into the world of magic, myth and Mysticism.
giving rise in the human soul as if by magic
highly charged and magical
inspired magic
intoxicants, love potions, sources of dreams and visions and for magical purposes
magic dreams
magic lights and music
magic, myth, and mystery
magic plants (plants that can get you high)
magical lights and shadows
magical mystery tour (Beatles song)
magical personality transformations
magical potions having curative effects
magical self-liberation
magical significance
magical strangeness
magically lovely
miracles that surround us
one of those wonderful, magical moments when a new world is ready to be born
passed through the gate and entered the spell of the magic
precious stones of magical virtue
ritualized sex magic
seen the world in this magical aspect
sexual magic
sparkling, a time of magic
that magical place where every pebble is a precious stone
the amazing magic
the enchanting magic
the key to miracle and meaning
the magic and beauty of it
the magic blue sky
the magic of love
the magic of LSD
the magic of music
the magic of noble forms and colors artfully blended
the magic of the mysterious, miraculous pill
the magic of this spectacular experience
the magic panorama
the magic that can set you free
The Magic Theatre, price of admission, your mind
the magic world of ancient gods
the magical aspects of the Mysterium
the magical city
the magical dance of forms
the magical effect of LSD
the magical immediacy and connection with life
the magical journeys of the shaman
the “magical link” through which the divine presence begins to manifest itself
the magical Other World of nonverbal visionary awareness
the magical power of heaven
the magical qualities governing these states
the magical, spiritual component that was really what acid was all about
the magical virtue of the sacrament
the miracle he has experienced
the miraculous transformation of an enclosed convent garden into a fragment of heaven
the mythical, magical community at Millbrook
the world a miracle of glory
the world of the magical and mythical
these magic moments
these wonderful, magical, mystical drugs
this magical charge
this magical electrical energy
this most magical stimulant
this natural magic of glinting metal and self-luminous stone
those magical realms
20th century magic potions, the psychedelics
visionary magic
visual magic