This book is amazing, reading it now. Some of the passages have a huge amount of wisdom in them:
To call psychedelic experiences "disorted" is the judgement of a sober, logical and materialistic thinking. However, a person under the infulence of a psychedelic drug may well regrad ordinary perception as severely limited, and therefore a distortion of the truth. I belive the problem is one of language: words belong to our normal consciousness and are inadequate to describe another.
Conventional scientists cannot afford to accept the existence of other realities without undermining their own permises. In spite of having achieved so much, science has failed to explain consciousness, and cannot even accept the validity of many important aspects of human existence, such as religion, 'life force' or love. Only by keeping "the doors of perception" safely closed can accepted science be kept intact. Yet science is the exploration of nature, and should not be restricted just to avoid upsetting the status quo.
As in the past, the people who lead us are fueled by the archetype of power, that aspect of the human psyche which drives to structure, control, and formulate rules and systems. The power drive shapes our world, and without it, mankind would have perished long ago. Whenit is kept in balance with its several complementary energies,it gives us form; it builds civilizations. But when the precarious balance is shifted, and too much energy flows fromthis archetype, structure becomes constriction, control becomes dictatorship, teaching degenerates into admonition and threat, vision and intuition create dogma, and caution evolves into paranoia. Communication with the loving and nurturing energy within us is lost, and with it the ability to choose wisely, either for ourselves individually or for our species.
Priests and kings, emperors and presidents, and all those who find comfort and safety within the structures maintained by the powerful, tend to be disturbed and angered by the individuals who insist on striking off in new directions, ignoring the guidance of appointed leaders. To those in authority, there is the unconscious threat of choas, the shattering of what is known, familiar and safe. The response to this threat can take many forms, from killing the offender (witch-burning) to - at the veryleast - warning him to keep his knowledge and opinions to himself (as with Galileo), lest they provoke the self-protective anger of the established order and of those who maintain power through it.
This has been the history of human development on this earth, a balance maintained - usally with great difficulty and often with violence - between the urge to control and the need to change and grow. And this is the way it should of been able to continue, but the technological growth-spurt of the past fifty years has put mankind's hands a body of knowledge that changes the equation. However, just as the nuclear and chemical warfare genies are out of the bottle, never to be put back again, so also will the psychidelic genie be forever amongst us.
Being human means being a soul that chooses - consciously or unconsciously - what it will do and what it will become. For my part, I perfer as much awareness as I can achieve in this lifetime, in order to make my choices wisely.
Anyone interested in psychedelics should read this.