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Entheogens are not to be lightly trifled with... However, if taken with the right attitude and in the proper setting, psychoactive drugs may produce religious experiences. ...it is far less clear that they can produce religious lives.

Huston Smith

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Huston Smith
Age: 97 †
Born: 1919
Born: May 31
Died: 2016
Died: December 30
Philosopher
Professor
Soochow
Huston Cummings Smith
Settings
Attitude
Proper
Taken
Drugs
Clear
Setting
Religious
Experiences
Less
Psychoactive
Lives
Drug
Trifled
May
However
Lightly
Right
Produce

More quotes by Huston Smith

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The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.
Huston Smith
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Walnuts have a shell, and they have a kernel. Religions are the same. They have an essence, but then they have a protective coating. This is not the only way to put it. But it's my way. So the kernels are the same. However, the shells are different.
Huston Smith
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Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.
Huston Smith
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The crisis that the world finds itself in as it swings on the hinge of a new millennium is located in something deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies.
Huston Smith
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Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.
Huston Smith
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What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past infinite service to all things present infinite responsibility to all things future.
Huston Smith
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The first koan do not have rational answers. They are techniques devised over the millennia for triggering an actual experience.
Huston Smith
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First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.
Huston Smith
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Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to speak. Or better, we continue and extend it.
Huston Smith
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In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.
Huston Smith
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Imagine a man besottedly in love: he won't waste time speculating whether other women equally merit his affection.
Huston Smith
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I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist. I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.
Huston Smith
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...like a magnetic compass turning north, I always tried to head in the direction of the better, which is the direction to God. ...the directions that appeared to lead away from Christianity led me deeper into it.
Huston Smith
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God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
Huston Smith
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What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put them both aside and go forward.
Huston Smith
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It has been estimated that one third of our Western civilization bears the mark of its Jewish ancestry.
Huston Smith
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So always, if we look back, concern for face-to-face morality, and its modern emphasis on justice as well, have historically evolved as religious issues.
Huston Smith
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'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God' suggested to me a heavenly welfare program for the meek. Today that saying reveals an astute insight into egotism, about how those with swollen pride or vanity cannot see anything larger than themselves.
Huston Smith
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It would be good if we bore one another's burdens.
Huston Smith
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After his great awakening, the Buddha continued to meditate and to devote himself to others otherwise his vision would have receded into a pleasant memory.
Huston Smith