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felt like mysteries were being unveiled and yet it all felt familiar and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known. I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, including the distinct sense that death was illusory, in the sense that it is a door we walk through into another plane of existence, that we're sprung from an eternity to which we will return.
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Michael Pollan |
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existential distress
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Michael Pollan |
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20cddff
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Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.
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Michael Pollan |
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the biological, the psychological, the philosophical, or the spiritual--has yet earned the right to claim it has the final word. It may be that by layering these different perspectives one upon the other, we can gain the richest picture
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Michael Pollan |
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R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.
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Michael Pollan |
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This hall of epistemological mirrors was just one of the many challenges facing the researchers who wanted to bring LSD into the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy: psychedelic therapy could look more like shamanism or faith healing than medicine. Another challenge was the irrational exuberance that seemed to infect any researchers who got involved with LSD, an enthusiasm that might have improved the results of their experiments at the s..
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Michael Pollan |
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nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.
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Michael Pollan |
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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.
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Michael Pollan |
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The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.
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Michael Pollan |
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The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.
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Michael Pollan |
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Sigmund Freud wrote that "there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, our own ego." Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists. The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything."
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Michael Pollan |
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75369b7
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Wrangham estimates that cooking our food gives our species an extra four hours a day. (This happens to be roughly the same amount of time we now devote to watching television.)
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Michael Pollan |
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Ninety percent of a cooked egg is digested whereas only 65 percent of a raw egg is; by the same token, the rarer the steak, or more al dente the pasta, the less of it will be absorbed. Dieters take note.
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Michael Pollan |
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65d910d
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Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations--a kind of controlled hallucination. This raises a question: How is normal waking consciousness any different from other, seemingly less faithful productions of our imagination--such as dreams or psychotic delusions or psychedelic trips? In fact, all these states of consciousness are "imagined": they're mental..
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Michael Pollan |
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85da748
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Each of the tastes has been selected by evolution for its survival value. Either it guides us toward nutrients we need to survive, or it steers us away from ingesting things that might endanger us.
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Michael Pollan |
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Some researchers attribute the increase in gluten intolerance and celiac disease to the fact that modern brands no longer receive a lengthy fermentation.
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Michael Pollan |
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In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work so much as attentiveness.)"
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Michael Pollan |
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In the course of a lifetime, sixty tons of food pass through the gastrointestinal tract, an exposure to the world that is fraught with risk.
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Michael Pollan |
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The Johns Hopkins experiment shows--proves--that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. It uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity's secularism. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a re-sacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that is our best defense against not only soullessness, but against religious fanaticism. And it do..
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Michael Pollan |
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7607573
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What to my (spiritually impoverished) mind seemed to constitute a good case for the disenchantment of the world becomes in the minds of the more psychedelically experienced irrefutable proof of its fundamental enchantment. Flesh of the gods, indeed.
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Michael Pollan |
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The only discordant note in the conversation came when I casually dropped the slang expression for psilocybin when asking him about going hunting for 'shrooms. "I really, really hate that word," he said, almost gravely, adopting the tone of a parent upbraiding a potty-mouthed child. The word never crossed my lips again."
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Michael Pollan |
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bc5cef6
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For young Americans in the 1960s, for whom the psychedelic experience was new in every way, the whole idea of involving elders was probably never going to fly. But this is, I think, the great lesson of the 1960s experiment with psychedelics: the importance of finding the proper context, or container, for these powerful chemicals and experiences. Speaking of lines, psychedelics in the 1960s did draw
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Michael Pollan |
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It's often said that a political scandal is what happens when someone in power inadvertently speaks the truth.
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Michael Pollan |
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One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful--wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It's so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near..
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Michael Pollan |
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4b8895b
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When one is screening raw footage of people in costume tripping on mushrooms and dancing sloppily to a reggae band, a little goes a long way,
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Michael Pollan |
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EAT WELL-GROWN FOOD FROM HEALTHY SOILS.
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Michael Pollan |
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This was huge for me. I saw that if I can name and admit a feeling, confess it to someone, it would let go. A little older and wiser, now I can do this for myself.
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Michael Pollan |
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REGARD NONTRADITIONAL FOODS WITH SKEPTICISM.
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Michael Pollan |
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I would never have found it if not for psychedelics. This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one's repertoire of conscious states.
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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 wi..
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psychedelics
science
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Michael Pollan |
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f5b7777
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And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. [I felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness,
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Michael Pollan |
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A month before our breakfast, Griffiths had received the Eddy Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, perhaps the most prestigious lifetime achievement prize in the field.
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Michael Pollan |
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Carhart-Harris suspects that the loss of a clear distinction between subject and object might help explain another feature of the mystical experience: the fact that the insights it sponsors are felt to be objectively true--revealed truths rather than plain old insights. It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person's opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity. Which is precisely what the mystic on ..
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Michael Pollan |
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74660c3
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I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time and that certain ideas I had long thought about and written about--having to do with the subjectivity of other species and the way they act upon us in ways we're too self-regarding to appreciate--had taken on the flesh of feeling and reality. I looked through the negative spaces formed by the hydrangea leaves to fix my gaze on the swamp maple in the middle of the mea..
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Michael Pollan |
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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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meditation
psychedelics
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Michael Pollan |
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This leaves companies like General Mills and McDonald's with two options if they hope to grow faster than the population: figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same three-quarters of a ton of food, or entice them to actually eat more than that. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, of course, and the food industry energetically pursues them both at the same time.
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Michael Pollan |
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YOU ARE WHAT WHAT YOU EAT EATS TOO.
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Michael Pollan |
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IF YOU HAVE THE SPACE, BUY A FREEZER.
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Michael Pollan |
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57296bb
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EAT LIKE AN OMNIVORE.
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Michael Pollan |
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3b35f91
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century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.
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Michael Pollan |
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8ebeea3
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People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets.
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Michael Pollan |
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4cce890
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When most of us think about food and health, we think in fairly narrow nutritionist terms--about our personal physical health and how the ingestion of this particular nutrient or rejection of that affects it. But I no longer think it's possible to separate our bodily health from the health of the environment from which we eat or the environment in which we eat or, for that matter, from the health of our general outlook about food (and healt..
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Michael Pollan |
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2ced0eb
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In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today.
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Michael Pollan |