Why do we love nonsense? Why do we love Lewis Carroll with his “‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were t… - Alan Watts

I well remember the first great hemp shop that was opened in San Francisco around 1976. It was essentially a long wooden bar with stools for the customers. On the bar itself were a few large crocks containing the basic and cheaper forms of the weed — Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, Indian Ganja, and Domestic Green. But against the wall behind the bar stood a long cabinet furnished with hundreds of small drawers that a local guitar maker had decorated with intricate ivory inlays in the Italian style. Each drawer carried a label indicating the precise field and year of the product, so that one could purchase all the different varieties from Mexico, Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, India, and Vietnam, as well as the carefully tended plants of devout cannabinologists here at home. Business was conducted with leisure and courtesy, and the salesmen offered small samples for testing at the bar, along with sensitive and expert discussion of their special effects. I might add that the stronger psychedelics, such as LSD, were coming to be used only rarely — for psychotherapy, for retreats in religious institutions, and in our special hospitals for the dying.

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see its like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that...Also watch the flow of music. The melody as its expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence...you wait till later to find out what the sentence means...The present is always changing the past.

Science and psychotherapy have also done much already to liberate us from the prison of isolation from nature in which we were supposed to renounce Eros, despise the physical organism, and rest all our hopes in a supernatural world [...].
This liberation is, in other words, a very partial affair even for the small minority which has fully understood and accepted it. It leaves us still as strangers in the cosmos-without the judgment of God but without his love, without the terrors of Hell but without the hope of Heaven, without many of the physical agonies of pre-scientific times but without the sense that human life has any meaning.