Thus the one important result of any really serious attempt at self-renunciation or self-acceptance is the humiliating discovery that it is impossibl… - Alan Watts

Whatever villainies the British may have committed in India, their Christian consciences balked at the practice of sati, which required a widow to commit suicide at her husband’s funeral. Truly civilized people are — we feel — not faces on the sky but fully enclosed heads containing souls, each one of infinite value in the sight of God.

Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.