“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe…..Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense….the basic fact of cosmic consciousness is implied in its name - that fact is consciousness of the cosmos - this is what is called in the East the ‘Brahmic Splendour’, which is in Dante’s phrase capable of transhumanizing a man into a god. Walt Whitman speaks of it as ‘an ineffable light - light rare, untellable, lighting the very light - beyond all signs, descriptions, languages.”

“The mystic insight begins with a sense of a mystery unveiled, of a hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any definite belief…
The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it. This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive mind, to shine in its glory even through the apparent folly and wickedness of Man. The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory; the haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun. But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision: what others dimly seek he knows, with a knowledge beside which all other knowledge is ignorance.”

“We should expect a certain strangeness of form and shape, thoughts that can only be apprehended by intuition, a language pregnant with meanings, expressions that would have the value of genuine symbols, because they are the best possible expressions of something as yet unknown - bridges thrown out toward an invisible shore.”

“The detail remains the privileged example of pure visuality, because it is what apparently remains when the ‘codes’(as Roland Barthes said) are subtracted away from an image. If, following logic that recurs throughout modernism, we mentally subtract whatever can be assigned a meaning, we are left with ’pure’ color, ‘pure’ motion, ‘pure’ form – lines, shapes, impressions – that then appear to be nothing other than the transcendental ground of visuality itself. It is a powerful dream, and it is not one we are likely to wake up from anytime soon.”

“What would really be at stake in the idea of a psychedelic socialism would be a radically different conception of freedom to the one which we have inherited from the bourgeois liberal tradition. Within that tradition, freedom is basically equated with the capacity to own, and dispose of private property. Freedom is a property of individuals and it is indissociable from individual property. What’s public and collective is inherently oppressive – a fetter on the freedom of the individual. Psychedelic socialism would be one manifestation of a quite contrary tradition, which understands freedom and agency as things which can only be exercised relationally, in the spaces between bodies, as modes of interaction. It would be the creation, constitution and cultivation of spaces of collective creativity (be they schools, laboratories, dance floors, ashrams, workshops, or gymnasia) which it would seek, while recognizing how hostile capitalism must always be to them.”

“Technologies of the self’ - techniques of self-transformation like yoga, meditation, (or even psychedelics, in theory) - to use Michel Foucault’s term, have no inherent political meaning. The question from a political perspective is if and how they can be used to raise political consciousness, challenging entrenched assumptions of capitalist culture, enabling people to overcome their individualism in order to create potent and creative collectivities.”

“There’s a fascinating confluence between the idea of ‘higher’ consciousness which emerges in some of the mystical, yogic and philosophical literature of the twentieth century, and the idea of politically ‘raised’ consciousness which became so central to 1970s radicalism. Both of these ideas had older antecedents. The idea of raised political consciousness had its roots in the Marxist idea of ‘class consciousness’, whereby workers come to realize that their shared interests as workers are more significant than their private interests as individuals, or the cultural differences they may have with other workers. The mystical idea of ‘higher’ (‘elevated’, ‘universal’ or ‘cosmic’) consciousness has its roots in Hindu and Buddhist idea that the individual self is an illusion. Escape from that illusion – realization that the self is only an incidental element of a wider cosmos – is sometimes referred to as ‘enlightenment’, but the original Sanskrit and Pali terms might be better translated as ‘awoken’. Maybe it’s not an accident that ‘woke’ has become a popular radical slang term for raised political consciousness.”

“We may now with less astonishment learn through the ‘Comments on Landscapes’ (a work of which the first printed edition dates from the beginning of the Yuan period) that before taking up his brushes the painter must take off his clothes and sit cross legged. That means that ‘he must nourish in his heart gentleness and cheerfulness; his ideas must be quiet and harmonious; the heart should be quiet, honest and sincere to the utmost, then the various aspects of man’s gladness and sorrow and of every other thing, be it pointed, oblique, bent or inclined, will appear naturally in his mind and be spontaneously brought out of his brush.

The painter, then, voluntarily undergoes an initiation test. He seeks to discover the secret of the laws which seem to him to govern the forces of the universe. He has to climb high, to leave behind the running waters, the mountains, the clouds. He must soar above the beau motif, dominate the subject of his composition. By meditation he can discover the secret spring which plucks off the dead leaves, lets loose the avalanche, drives on the vagabond.”