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Artigos etiquetados “michael pollan”

Don’t Come From Nowhere

Publicado em 03/06/2022

It is all to easy to dismiss what unfolds in our minds during a psychedelic journey as simply a “drug experience,” and that is precisely what our culture encourages us to do. (…)
Yet even a moment’s reflection tells you that attributing the content of the psychedelic experience to “drugs” explains virtually nothing about it. The images and the narratives and the insights don’t come from nowhere, and they certainly don’t come from a chemical. They come from inside our minds, and at the very least have something to tell us about that. If dreams and fantasies and free associations are worth interpreting, then surely so is the more vivid and detailed material with which the psychedelic journey presents us. It opens a new door on one’s mind.

—Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, Allen Lane, 2018

Livros e Poesia

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Meaning

Publicado em 01/06/2022

Just because the psychedelic journey takes place entirely in one’s mind doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It is an experience and, for some of us, one of the most profound a person can have. As such, it takes its place as a feature in the landscape of a life. It can serve as a reference point, a guidepost, a wellspring, and, for some, a kind of spiritual sign or shrine. For me, the experiences have become landmarks to circle around and interrogate for meaning — meanings about myself, obviously, but also about the world.

—Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, Allen Lane, 2018

Livros e Poesia

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Self-reflection

Publicado em 31/05/2022

The achievement of an individual self, a being with a unique past and a trajectory into the future, is one of the glories of human evolution, but it is not without its drawbacks and potential disorders. The price of the sense of an individual identity is a sense of separation from others and nature. Self-reflection can lead to great intellectual and artistic achievement but also to destructive forms of self-regarded and many types of unhappiness. (In an often-cited paper titled “An Wondering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” psychologists identified a strong correlation between unhappiness and time spent in mind wandering, a principal activity of the default mode network.) But, accepting the good with the bad, most of us take this self as an unshakable given, as real as anything we know, and as the foundation of our life as conscious human beings. Or at least I always took it that way, until my psychedelic experiences led me to wonder.

—Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, Allen Lane, 2018

Livros e Poesia

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Notoriously Hard

Publicado em 29/05/2022

It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as born nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes the wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth.

—Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, Allen Lane, 2018

Livros e Poesia

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Acid

Publicado em 24/05/2022

Steve Jobs often told people that his experiments with LSD had been one of his two or three most important life experiences. He liked to taunt Bill Gates by suggesting, “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to ashram when he was younger.” (Gates has said he did in fact try LSD.)

—Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind, Allen Lane, 2018

Livros e Poesia

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