The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually, the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.” (How to Change Your Mind Quotes)
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“But however it worked, it worked, or certainly seemed to: by the end of the decade, LSD was widely regarded in North America as a miracle cure for alcohol addiction.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Can recognition of one’s shallowness qualify as a profound insight?”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“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.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever’s already going on both inside and outside one’s head.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” wrote Humboldt, and that felt very much the case, and so, for the first time I can remember, did this: “I myself am identical with nature.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“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.” (How to Change Your Mind Quotes)
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“If you are told you will have a spiritual experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the collective unconscious, or help you access “cosmic consciousness,” or revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having exactly that kind of experience.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“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.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“It’s literally a reboot of the system—a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“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.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Nothing in my experience led me to believe this novel form of consciousness originated outside me; it seems just as plausible, and surely more parsimonious, to assume it was a product of my brain, just like the ego it supplanted. Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable gift: that we can let go of so much—the desires, fears, and defenses of a lifetime!—without suffering complete annihilation.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Our everyday waking consciousness “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“Psychedelic therapy creates an interval of maximum plasticity in which, with proper guidance, new patterns of thought and behavior can be learned.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief.” (How to Change Your Mind Quotes)
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“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.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
“You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers.” Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.”
Michael Pollan
How to Change Your Mind
