Not HOW the world is, is the mystery, but THAT it is.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN




After them came the queen. So radiant was her countenance that everyone thought the dawn was breaking.... Upon a deep green achmardi she bore the perfection of Paradise, both root and branch. That was a thing called the Grail...A hundred squires, so ordered, reverently took bread in white napkins from before the Grail, stepped back in a group and, separating, passed the bread to all the tables....whatsoever one reached out his hand for, he found it ready, in front of the Grail, food warm or food cold, dishes new or old, meat tame or game....the Grail was the fruit of blessedness, such abundance of the sweetness of the world that its delights were very like what we are told of the kingdom of heaven....whatever drink one held out his goblet for, whatever drink he might name, mulberry juice, wine, or red sinopel, he found the drink in his glass, all by the power of the Grail, whose guests the noble company were.

WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH
PARZIVAL





...every medieval winter was a long involuntary fast, and this involuntary fast was followed, during Lent, by forty days of voluntary abstinence. Holy Week found the faithful marvelously well prepared, so far as their body chemistry was concerned, for its tremendous incitements to grief and joy, for seasonable remorse of conscious and a self-transcending identification with the risen Christ. At this season of the highest religious excitement and the lowest vitamin intake, ecstasies and visions were almost a commonplace. It was only to be expected.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL



Timothy Leary's dead...
O no he's outside, looking in...

MOODY BLUES






Fasting was not the only form of physical mortification resorted to by the earlier aspirants to spirituality. Most of them regularly used upon themselves the whip of knotted leather or even of iron wire. These beatings were the equivalent of fairly extensive surgery without anesthetics, and their effects on the body chemistry of the penitent were considerable. Large quantities of histamine and adrenaline were released while the whip was actually being plied; and when the resulting wounds began to fester (as wounds practically always did before the age of soap), various toxic substances, produced by the decomposition of protein, found their way into the blood stream. But histamine produces shock, and shock affects the mind no less profoundly than the body. Moreover, large quantities of adrenalin may cause hallucinations, and some of the products of its decomposition are known to induce symptoms resembling those of schizophrenia. As for toxins from wounds---these upset the enzyme systems regulating the brain, and lower its efficiency as an instrument for getting on in a world where the biologically fittest survive.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





You are the owner and operator of your own brain.

TIMOTHY LEARY



Visionlike effects and vision-inducing devices have played a greater part in popular entertainment than in the fine arts. Fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacles---those are essentially visionary arts....An interesting feature of these popular visionary arts is their close dependence upon contemporary technology. Fireworks, for example, were once no more than bonfires. (And to this day, I may add, a good bonfire on a dark night remains one of the most magical and transporting of spectacles...)

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL


Once the search is in progress, something will be found

OBLIQUE STRATEGIES






Athanasius Kircher's invention---if his, indeed, it was---was christened from the first LANTERNA MAGICA. The name was everywhere adopted as perfectly appropriate to a machine, whose raw material was light, and whose finished product was a colored image emerging from the darkness....The twentieth-century equivalent of the magic-lantern show is the colored movie. In the huge, expensive "spectaculars," the soul of the masque goes marching along---with a vengeance sometimes, but sometimes also with taste and a real feeling for vision-inducing fantasy....The immensely magnified cactus blossoms, into which, at the end of Disney's THE LIVING DESERT, the spectator finds himself sinking, come straight from the Other World.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





Visionary experience is fundamentally subversive. Such experience taps directly into a source of meaning, purpose, or information that bypasses and, therefore, undermines established authoritarian structures.






What the mystics experience is not religion or philosophy, but reality.

COLIN WILSON
THE GOD OF THE LABYRINTH





Practiced systematically, these [yogic] exercises result, after a time, in prolonged suspensions of breath. Long suspensions of breath lead to a high concentration of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood, and this increase in the concentration of CO2 lowers the efficiency of the brain as a reducing valve and permits the entry into consciousness of experiences, visionary or mystical, from "out there."

Prolonged and continuous shouting or singing may produce similar, but less strongly marked, results. Unless they are highly trained, singers tend to breathe out more than they breathe in. Consequently the concentration of carbon dioxide in the alveolar air and the blood is increased and, the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve being lowered, visionary experience becomes possible. Hence the interminable "vain repetitions" of magic and religion. The chanting of the CURANDERO, the medicine man, the shaman; the endless psalm singing and sutra intoning of Christian and Buddhist monks; the shouting and howling, hour after hour, of revivalists---under all diversities of theological belief and aesthetic convention, the psychochemico-physiological intention remains constant. To increase the concentration of CO2 in the lungs and blood and so to lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve, until it will admit biologically useless material from Mind-at-Large---this, though the shouters, singers and mutterers did not know it, has been at all times the real purpose and point of magic spells, of mantrams, litanies, psalms and sutras. "The heart," said Pascal, "has its reasons." Still more cogent and much harder to unravel are the reasons of the lungs, the blood and the enzymes, of neurons and synapses. The way to the superconscious is through the subconscious, and the way, or at least one of the ways, to the subconscious is through the chemistry of individual cells.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





There will always be one more river, not to cross but to follow. The journey goes on forever, and we are fellow voyagers on our little living ship of stone and soil and water and vapor, this delicate planet circling round the sun, which humankind call Earth.

EDWARD ABBEY
DOWN THE RIVER





Before I studied Zen,
I knew there was a mountain;
After studying Zen for ten years,
I knew there was no mountain;
After studying Zen for twenty years,
I know there is a mountain...

Zen saying