Notes from: How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
page 7
I've begun to wonder if perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set. Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an "experience of the numinous" to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.

page 37
Mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism. - Rick Doblin

page 66
In the early moments of her journey, Amy was overcome by waves of guilt and fear.
     "The visual I had was from the 1800s and I was up on stage. Two people next to me were slipping a noose around my neck while a crowd of people watched, cheering for my death. I felt drenched with guilt, just terrified. I was in a hell realm. And I remember Bill asking, 'What's going on?'
     "'I'm experiencing a lot of guilt.' Bill replied, 'That's a very common human experience,' and with that, the whole image of being hanged pixelated and then just disappeared, to be replaced by this tremendous sensation of freedom and interconnectedness. 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."

page 68
I joked to my wife as she drove home that I felt as if I had been repeatedly sucked into the asshole of God. - Richard Boothby

page 134
Everything is interaction and reciprocal. I myself am identical with nature. - Alexander von Humboldt

page 155
[Stanislav] Grof did extensive research trying to correlate his patients’ recollections of their birth experience on LSD with contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.

page 169
One patient [who Al Hubbard] treated in Vancouver, an alcoholic paralyzed by social anxiety, recalled Hubbard handing him a bouquet of roses during an LSD session: "He said,'Now hate them.' They withered and the petals fell off, and I started to cry. Then he said, 'Love them,' and they came back brighter and even more spectacular than before. That meant a lot to me. I realized that you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me."

page 210
Andrew Weil... saw a lot of bad trips and eventually developed an effective way to "treat" them. "I would examine the patient, determine it was a panic reaction, and then tell him or her, 'Will you excuse me for a moment? there's someone in the next room who has a serious problem.' They would immediately begin to feel much better."

page 215
Other societies have long and productive experience with psychedelics, and their examples might have saved us a lot of trouble had we only known and paid attention. The fact that we regard many of these societies as "backward" probably kept us from learning from them. But the biggest thing we might have learned is that these powerful medicines can be dangerous - both to the individual and to the society - when they don't have a sturdy social container: a steadying set of rituals and rules - protocols - governing their use, and the crucial involvement of a guide, the figure that is usually called a shaman. Psychedelic therapy - the Hubbard method - was groping toward a westernized version of this ideal, and it remains the closest thing we have to such a protocol. 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.

page 251
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. A spiritual insight? Maybe so. Or at least that's how it appeared in the middle of my journey. Psychedelics can make even the most cynical of us into fervent evangelists of the obvious.

If we are ever to get through the day, we need to put most of what we perceive into boxes neatly labeled "Known," to be quickly shelved with little thought to the marvels therein, and "Novel," to which, understandably, we pay more attention, at least until it isn't that anymore. A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art. It seems to me there is great value in such renovation, the more so as we grow older and come to think we've seen and felt it all before.

Page 412
A plant can't be caged, only an animal can be caged.

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The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.