PERSONAL POINTERS

1. [To deal with paranoia in your own head,] the first thing to do is cop that it’s possible that you’re being paranoid. The trouble with paranoia is, when you’re doing it, you don’t think you’re doing it. One way to know for sure that you’re having an attack of paranoia: You’re probably future-tripping. You probably have plans or anxieties about things that may or may not happen in the future, and you’re worrying about them. When you’re out in the future, the probabilities are thinner. It’s like a squirrel running out on the branches, and when the branches get thinner, it gets shakier. That shakiness can cause paranoia on its own – merely the probabilities getting shaky can make you paranoid. What you have to do is recognize that paranoia is not a real emotion – that it’s a nonsurvival trip, and you have to just let go of it. MNC51 …. more

Personal Pointers

TRIPPING

1. [I am quite concerned about the lack of good contemporary tripping instructions in this renaissance of consciousness expansion. The greater medical establishment is still quite likely to label teenagers with temporary psychedelic psychosis as “bipolar paranoid schizophrenic” load the poor kids up on Haldol or Thorazine, until they twitch and drool, and mark them for life with a label they will never live down. You would think that they would know by now that most LSD-stoned people get it back together over a period of time and don’t need heroic measures as much as they need support and love while they recover from their visionary experiences and re-enter ordinary life. 2005] MNC13 …. more

Tripping

TELEPATHY

1. If you admit to making one telepathic communication, if you say one signal goes between two human beings, from that one signal, even if it’s only a feeling, you can derive the entire rest of religion and metaphysics. If a human being has an electromagnetic field, and another human being has an electromagnetic field, and if you can send one thought between them, then you are stuck, whether you like it or not, at that point with a group field, a vector-resultant field, composed of these two people’s fields …. more

Telepathy

CONSCIOUSNESS

1. Contemplation is where you’ve already listened to your subconscious so long that the stuff that’s coming up out of it is pretty cool now. You’re not sitting there trying not to freak out at the contents of your subconscious anymore. You’ve got a reasonably clean head, and you can point it at whatever you want to point it at. You can let your mind go there, and go into a psychedelic state. MNC37 …. more

Consciousness

ATTENTION AND ENERGY

1. If somebody’s messing around in the astral plane, which is fast and subtle and telepathic, you have to watch what’s happening very closely. Some people do subtle plane cruelty to each other. If that’s happening, it will manifest somewhere on the material plane. MNC31 2. So you watch very closely, and sooner or later, you’ll see it manifest on the material plane. Then you say, “Look at that!” Preferably try to get everybody’s attention at the same time so that a lot of people will look at it while it’s still there …. more

Attention and Energy

GETTING PLANETARY

1. What I mean by “become planetary” is reaching the point where you know that you’re also partly responsible sometimes [with the emphasis on “sometimes” 2005] for the welfare of mankind, and that in itself is heavy enough for you that it makes you want to straighten up. I think that’s what the real flash is. MNC21 …. more

Getting Planetary

TRUTH AND LYING

1. Everything you say is true, on some level. You only think you can lie, but you can’t really. If you tell a lie on the material plane, your astral will cop on you. MNC21 2. If there’s anybody paying attention, you can’t lie. You can only lie to people who don’t feel vibes. But to anybody who feels vibes, when someone’s telling a lie, it makes a certain vibration. MNC21 …. more

Truth and Lying

GOD AND THE DEVIL

1. I think God is trying to communicate with him/her/itself, and there are, on this planet, about three and a half billion transceivers walking around [in 1968], babbling to each other constantly, trying to carry the circuit load for the incredible conversation of God talking to God. MNC18 …. more

God and the Devil

LANGUAGE

1. That’s a funny idea, that talking doesn’t matter. Matter is that hard stuff like the floor there. Well, things that you say do matter, at the most basic possible level. MNC20 2. That’s a nice thing that the General Semanticists got into. They called it the semantic reaction, and it’s about how, when you speak to someone, you can speak words to them that won’t change them much, or you can speak words to them that will change them a great deal. It has to do with the amount of energy and the amount of information that are in the words, as well as the condition of the listener. MNC20 …. more

Language

RELIGION

1. Now, some people may think that I am not as religious as I used to be, and it’s true that on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I might be an agnostic, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays a primitive animist, while partying down on Saturdays and sometimes sitting zazen on Sunday. There are, however, two things that I have to say …. more

Religion

HIPPIES

1. [Stephen was S.I. Hayakawa’s teaching assistant at San Francisco State College, and his students told him that in order to be taken more seriously, he needed to go watch A Hard Day’s Night.] Just as they had planned, I fell in love with John Lennon, recognized the power of youth as represented by the hippies, and started out on my own hippy path. MNC8 …. more

Hippies