17 Quotes by Alexander Shulgin

I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can analyze its availability.

It is essential that our present negative propaganda regarding psychedelic drugs be replaced with honesty and truthfulness about their effects, both good and bad.

Psychedelic drugs don’t change you – they don’t change your character – unless you want to be changed. They enable change; they can’t impose it.

The world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child. I had forgotten the beauty and the magic and the knowingness of it and me.

Some part of me can’t wait to see what life’s going to come up with next! Anticipation without the usual anxiety. And underneath it all is the feeling that we both belong here, just as we are, right now.

The potential of the psychedelic drugs to provide access to the interior universe, is, I believe, their most valuable property.

Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you’re using, decide just why you’re using it, and you can have a rich experience. They’re not addictive, and they’re certainly not escapist, either, but they’re exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works.

Funny, I’d forgotten that what comes to you when you take a psychedelic is not always a revelation of something new and startling; you’re more liable to find yourself reminded of simple things you know and forgot you knew – seeing them freshly – old, basic truths that long ago became cliches, so you stopped paying attention to them.