Reckon | The Whole World's a Stage

Albert Hofmann on Everyday Reality

Image by Federacion de asociaciones cannabicas via Flickr

“They have changed my life, insofar as they provided me with a new concept about what reality is. Reality became for me a problem after my experience with LSD. Before, I had believed there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. Just one true reality and the rest was imagination and was not real. But under the influence of LSD, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday. And I thought about the nature of reality and I got some deeper insights.

I analyzed the mechanisms involved in the production of the normal world view that we call the “everyday reality.” What are the factors that constitute it? What is inside and what is outside? What comes from the outside in and what is just inside? I use for this process the metaphor of the sender and the receiver. The productive sender is the outer world, the external reality including our own body. The receiver is our deep self, the conscious ego, which then transforms the outer stimuli into a psychological experience.

It was very helpful for me to see what is really, objectively, outside; something that you cannot change, something that is the same for everybody. And what is produced by me, homemade, what is myself, that which I can change. What is my spiritual inside that can be changed. This possibility to change reality, which exists in everyone, represents the real freedom of every human individual. He has an enormous possibility to change his world view. It helped me enormously in my life to realize what really exists on the outside and what is homemade by me.”

— Albert Hofmann

via theministryoftruth