“If you’d told me back then that I’d one day decide to face my agonizing emotions, twisted thoughts, and relief-seeking impulses without translating them into symptoms to be treated with prescribed pharmaceuticals, I’d have called you crazy. If you’d told me that I’d eventually decide to…”

“Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else’s life.

One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a…”

“In this book, I will examine anesthetic consciousness as a cultural habit ingrained in White European and North American colonialist culture, and that can be traced to habits of comportment that emerged in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as a response to a confluence of social and historical events. As a cultural habit, anesthetic consciousness is characterized by tendencies to objectify…”

“We are not the only species to have prospered through imitation; biomimicry has a long and colorful tradition in the living world. There are behavioral mimics like the cowbird chick, coloration mimics like the viceroy butterfly that resembles the poisonous monarch, and shape and texture mimics like the walkingstick, an insect that looks like a twig. Biomimicry helps…"“

“Suddenly a great flood of familiarity washes away the memory of strange lands and people I have seen and blots out all sense of time that has elapsed since I last saw all this. I know how everything – the streets, the houses, the passers-by – are looking at this moment. It is as if I had…”

“Almost before I knew it I was in Philadelphia, and all too soon to please me, for my trip was so pleasant I dreaded the finish of it. A number of newspaper men and a few friends joined me at Philadelphia to escort me to New York. Speech-making was the order from…”

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a…”

““For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is…”

“We enjoy none of this give-and-take when we cast out bread upon the waters by sending a written missive out into the world. The recipients are invisible and inscrutable, and we have to get through to them without knowing much about them or seeing…”

“The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not…”

“It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes…”

“Typically, Ayahuasca visions—notably those that are most powerful—present scenarios that are totally unrelated to drinkers’ lives, daily concerns, or past experiences. Often, drinkers (myself included) feel as if a veil is lifted and they are presented with another world. This world, it seems, exhibits internal…”

“There is one very important and at first apparently paradoxical relationship between losing the sense of self in a flow experience, and having it emerge stronger afterward. It almost seems that occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a strong self-concept. Why this should be…”

“At times, I contemplated devoting the entire book to each life I have written about here, but I wanted to emphasize the diversity of experiences of mental illness, the fact that, when questions are examined from different angles, the answers continually change. The book begins by telling the story of a man torn between…”

“While on that bus ride, and perhaps because of my heightened interest in how we communicate, I was struck by the thought that the demise of the Goddess, the plunge in women’s status, and the advent of harsh patriarchy and misogyny occurred around the time that people were..”

“The patient’s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient’s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined. Such disorders, and their depiction and study, indeed entail…”

“I believe that most of us are too quick to name things when we are with small children. By simply naming a thing and letting it go at that when a child asks, ‘What is that?’ we communicate that the name or label is the most important thing, that naming is sufficient. We deprive our children of their sense of…”

“By 30 minutes, she spoke more clearly:

I felt the DMT go in and it burned in my vein. It was hard to breathe into it. Then the patterns began. I said to myself, ‘Let me go through you.’

At that point I opened, and I was very much somewhere else. I believe it was at that point that I went out, into the universe—being, dancing with, a star system.

I asked myself, ‘Why am I…”

“In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness…”

“But whatever I am, or have since become. I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of…”