Alan Watts "psychedelics and the religious experience"

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit---to the "conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. Alan Watts, Psychedelics and Religious Experience

Charles Bukowski "Bluebird"

Bluebird

There's a bluebird in my heart
that
wants to get outbut
I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there,
I'm not going
to let anybody seeyou.
There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
You want to screw up theworks?
You want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
Then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

William Blake's wonderful poem

Fragments from "Auguries of Innocence" by William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell through all its regions.
A Dog starved at his Master’s GatePredicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misused upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.
He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.
The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The Gnat that sings his Summer song
Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.
The poison of the Snake and Newt
Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro?the World we safely go.
Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.

This is taken from "Cleansing the Doors of Perception" by Huston Smith

The ultimate source of existence is the void, the suprasonic silence, the uncreated and absolutely ineffable supreme.
The first possible formulation of this source is Universal Mind. Here, too, words fail, for Universal Mind transcends the dichotomies, polarities and paradoxes that harass the relative world and our finite mind’s comprehension of it. In so far as description is attempted (the definition of) Infinite Existence, Infinite Intelligence, Infinite Bliss, is as serviceable as any. (The concept of the ultimate source of existence as) God is not limited to his foregoing “ abstract" modes. He can be encountered concretely, as the God of the Old and New Testaments, Buddha, Shiva, or in other modes.
These modes do not however wear the mantle of ultimacy or provide final answers.

The phenomenal worlds owe their existence to the Universal Mind, which mind itself does not become implicated in their categories. Man, together with the three dimensional world he experiences is but one of innumerable modes through which Mind experiences itself. The heavy physicality and seeming finality of man's material world, it’s space-time grid, and the laws of nature that offer themselves as if they were the sine qua nons of existence itself – all these are in fact highly provisional and relative. Under exceptional circumstances, people can rise to a level of consciousness at which they see that taken together they constitute but one of innumerable sets of limiting constructs that Universal Mind assumes. To saddle that Mind itself with those constructs would be as ridiculous as trying to understand the human mind through the rules of chess.
Created entities tend progressively to lose contact with their original source and the awareness of their pristine identify with it. In the initial stage of this falling away, those entities maintain contact with their source, and the separation is playful, relative, and obviously tentative. An image that illustrates this stage is that of a wave of the ocean. From a certain point of view the wave is a distinct entity – we can speak of it as large, fast moving, green and foamy. But it’s individuation doesn’t keep it from belonging to the ocean proper.
At the next stage, created entities assume a partial independence and we can observe the beginnings of cosmic screen work, the Absolute’s assumption of veils that are gossamer-like in the beginning but grow increasingly opaque. Here unity with the source can be temporarily forgotten in the way an actor can forget his own identity as he identifies with the character he depicts.
Eventually the veiling process reaches a point where individuation looks like the normal state of things and the original wholeness is perceived only intuitively and sporadically. This can be likened to the relationship between cells of a body and the body as whole. Cells are separate entities but function as their body’s parts. Individuation and participation are dialectically combined. Complex biochemical interactions bridge provisional boundaries to ensure the functioning of the organism as a whole.
In the final stage, the separation is practically complete. Liaison with the source is lost sight of and the original identity forgotten. The screen is now all but impermeable, and a radical change of consciousness is required to break through it. A snowflake can serve as a symbol. In outward appearance it doesn’t look like water; to understand that nevertheless it is water we have to get down to H20.
Human beings who manage to effect the requisite breakthrough find thereafter that life’s polarities paradoxically do and do not exist. This holds for such contraries as matter and spirit, good and evil, permenance and change, heaven and hell, beauty and ugliness, agony and ecstasy,. In the end there is no difference between subject and object, observer and observed, experiencer and experienced, creator and creation.

Stanislav Grof:
The idea that the “three dimensional world” is only one of many experiential worlds created by the Universal Mind (seems to be….)much more logical than the opposite alternative that is so frequently taken for granted, namely, that the material world has objective reality of its own and that the human consciousness and the concept of God are merely products of highly organised matter, the human brain. When closely analysed the latter concept presents at least as many incongruities, paradoxes and absurdities as the concept of the Universal Mind. Problems such as the finitude versus infinity of time and space; the enigma of the origin of matter, energy and space; and the mystery of the prime impulse appear to be so overwhelming and defeating that one seriously questions why this approach should be given priority on our thinking.