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65be97a
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A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.
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enlightenment
spirituality
spiritual
70-s
acid
tripping
psychedelics
lsd
growth
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Tom Wolfe |
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9adf044
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The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud.
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drug-use
gonzo
psychedelics
journalism
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Hunter S. Thompson |
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b32af0a
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It's a remarkable experience to ask yourself identity-crisis questions from a comic book movie with a mostly straight face, but I don't recommend it.
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psychedelics
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Jonathan Talat Phillips |
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81fba23
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Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities -- call them spirits if you like -- other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.
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noetics
psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |
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bf70520
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The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.
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psychedelics
meditation
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Michael Pollan |
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d574fb8
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"I'm struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight--another form of consciousness "parted from [us]," as William James put it, "by the filmiest of screens." Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities--call them spirits if you like--other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them."
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nature
psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |
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29e48cc
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But along with the feeling of ineffability, the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience, regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation. William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.
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noetic-quality
psychedelics
mystical
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Michael Pollan |
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71cc169
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Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn't seem out of place on a Hallmark card flow with the force of revealed truth. Love is everything. Okay, but what else did you learn? No - you must not have heard me; it's everything! Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To resaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight.
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science
psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |