Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.
The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip.
Reality itself is not static. This is one of the things that the psychedelic is trying to put across, that the reality we're embedded in is itself some kind of an organism and is evolving toward a conclusion.
There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.
What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.
Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.
Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.
By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.
In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade.
Memory training is great psychedelic training.
This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you're taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.
The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It's larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don't know what to make of something like that. It's the reverse of our expectations.
It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).
No one can accuse Stuart Young of avoiding the big issues - with insight and verve, he tackles head on the existence of God, the mystery of human consciousness and the transformative effects of psychedelic drugs. Recommended.
If you want to have the right to have that conversation with your agent - "I know you sent it to me, I know you like it, but I just really think it's terrible" - you need to have the full details about script. You don't want to be in that situation where your agent says, "What about after the first 20 pages where it turns into a psychedelic musical?" And you're like "What? I thought it was an action-rom!"
I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.
We're in a situation now where we've got five long-play records of sort of eerie psychedelic pop music. I don't think that we can make another one. That's really my position on it. If we were to do a film soundtrack or something else where I could take the rest of the band with me. I really don't think bands should make more than five records anyway. In fact, five is one too many. We'll have to see how it pans out.
I am surprised by the word psychedelic. João Gilberto Noll does not accept realism in a straightforward way, but I am more inclined to call Quiet Creature a realist text than I am to call it a psychedelic one. The transcendent aspect of the psychedelic experience is totally absent.
