the answer is never the answer. what’s really interesting is the mystery. if you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer – they think they have, so they stop thinking. but the job is to seek mystery, evolve mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. the need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. -Ken Kesey

Humans humanize technology. Technology does not necessarily dehumanize humans.

the answer is never the answer. what’s really interesting is the mystery. if you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer – they think they have, so they stop thinking. but the job is to seek mystery, evolve mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. the need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer. -Ken Kesey

Not all who wonder are lost

“Men have never fully used the powers they posses to advance good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to nature to do the work they are responsible for doing” -John Dewey

The observation is contrived by the observer

I can’t die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwards, I’ll have a whole lifetime in which to die.”

“A religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends, myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values, and rules with which to regulate a culture or society” – 145

“By attaching responsibility for military defeat to a stigmatized minority, a leader can ameliorate the national image of weakness and vulnerability” – Prisoners of Hate –

A major problem in human relations is that our words and actions convey unintended meanings to other people, just as their words and actions have unintended meanings to us.

Biased perceptions and thinking become set in a mental vise…This rigid frame, the prison of the mind, is responsible for much of the hate and violence that plague us

Our brain has developed a capacity to create for us a world of our own making and imagination. Very few of us live in the real world. We live in the world of our perceptions, and those perceptions differ dramatically according to our personal experience – Willard Gaylin, 1984

Events that consistent with the national self-image are believed and accepted as confirmation of the nation’s virtue; events that might sully the image of the nation are discounted or minimized.

The brain’s representations of the body, of movements, and of sounds are all shaped by experience. Our brain is marked by the life we lead and retains the footprints of the experiences we have had and the behaviors we have engaged in

The task is…not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees. – Erwin Schrodinger

Moment by moment we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, we choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves. –

We are beginning to realize that emotions and imagination are more potent in shaping public sentiment and opinion than information and reason

The story of the way in which ideas put forth about the makeup of human nature, ideas supposed to be the results of psychological inquiry, have been in fact only reflections of practical measures that different groups, classes, factions wished to see continued in existence or newly adopted, so that what passed as psychology was a branch of political doctrine. – John Dewey, Freedom and Culture

If we want individuals to be free we must see to it that suitable conditions exist

The average person is surrounded today by readymade intellectual goods as he is by readymade foods, articles, and all kinds of gadgets. He has not the personal share in making either intellectual or material goods that his pioneer ancestors had. Consequently they knew better what they themselves were about, though they knew infinitely less concerning what the world at large was doing

The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own person attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions similar to those which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity, and dependence upon the Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions

As Huey Long is reported to have said, Fascism would come in this country under the name of protecting democracy from its enemies

Talking and writing about drugs affect a user’s experience –

The unavoidable fact of the matter is that a substance becomes a drug in the pejorative sense when and only when a law interdicts it – only when somebody decrees that it is a drug, that it is another antithesis to sobriety

The declaration of the War on Drugs in 1973 represented a relocation of the enemy from a country half a world away to our own cities and towns. It was – and to some extent still is – a way of revenge against U.S. citizens held responsible for the defeat in Vietnam.

By criminalizing drugs the law has introduced multitudes of otherwise lawful people into the mystique of criminal life, and in many cases forever alienated them from ‘respect for the law’

Drug experiences tend to be predetermined by the user’s expectations of them

There is a certain delight in finding oneself no longer part of a bland and amorphous mainstream, but the member of a smaller and more intimate community of ‘others’

The drugs we take, and our anticipation of what they will do to or for us, are epxressions of who and what we wanted to be. Embedded in our choice of highs is the question of our aspirations, fears, and identity

The mind is like a wild monkey – Old Buddhist Proverb

They were now ready to undertake the final and most daring phase of the MK-ULTRA program: LSD would be given to unwitting targets in real-life situations

The enormous range of experienced produced by LSD stems from the differences in (1) the character structure and attitudinal predispositions (or ‘set) of the subject, and (2) the immediate situation (or ‘setting’).

The ‘pure’ observer was an illusion, and those who thought they could conduct an experiment without ‘contaminating’ the results was deceiving themselves

There is strong evidence that ergot, from which LSD is derived, was the mysterious kykeon used over two thousand years by the Ancient Greeks in the annual Eleusinian Mysteries – Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles,

Psychedelic drugs held the promise of changing mankind and ushering in a new millennium and therefore no one had the right to keep them from the average citizen

After I took LSD, suddenly I saw it. I saw it all. I listened to them and watched them, and I saw that what they were saying and doing was not so crazy after all – Ken Kesey

When you smoked marijuana, you immediately became aware of the glaring contradiction between the way you experienced reality in your own body and the official descriptions by the government and media…[they] did not tell the truth or did not know what they were talking about

We are not drug addicts, we are not criminals, we are free men, and we will react to persecution the way free men have always reacted – Arthur Kleps

Like LSD, FREE could shake people out of the rut of ordinary perception and catalyze some sort of revelation

LSD makes you more of what you are  – Aldous Huxley

The capacity to absorb its critics is among the chief characteristics of American capitalism, and one of the keys to its enduring hegemony. Although they begin by posing a symbolic challenge to the status quo, rebellious styles invariably wind up creating new conventions and new options for industry.