Control

"The real danger of psychedelics is not so much neurological as political—that 'turned-on' people are not interested in serving the power games of the present rulers. Looking at the successful men, they see completely boring lives. In the Epilogue I shall make it clear that psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When 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. Furthermore, speaking quite strictly, mystical insight is no more in the chemical itself than biological knowledge is in the microscope. There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these drugs."—Allan Watts The Joyous Cosmology 1965 (link)

"Some people say brains can't understand brains. Very Zen-like. Whoo. It sounds good, but why? I mean, what's the point? It's just a bunch of cells. You understand your liver. It's got a lot of cells in it too, right? I don't think there's anything to that. Some people say "I don't feel like a bunch of cells, I'm conscious. I've got this experience, I'm in the world, you know. I can't just be a bunch of cells." Well people used to believe there was a life force to be living, and we now know that's not true at all. People just have a disbelief that cells can do what they do. And so some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism, and some really smart people, too. But we can reject all that. There's another reason we don't have a good brain theory, and it's because we have an intuitive, strongly-held, but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer. There's something we believe that's obvious but wrong. It turns out it's really hard to think of [theories], but once you've thought of them, it's easy to understand [phenomena]. The answer was there all along, but we ignored it because it was an intuitive, strongly-held belief that was wrong. […] We all intuitively know the Earth isn't moving. Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour? Of course not. And if someone said it was spinning around in space and it's so huge, they would lock you up, and that's what [we once did]."—Jeff Hawkins (7:15)

"Addiction, drug abuse, are the [diseases] that are the most stigmatized. They are diseases of the brain that produce a loss of your ability to exert control, or what we call "free will." Free will is not something that's spontaneous, it's a product of the biology of the brain, and there are certain circuits that enable you to do it. Drugs disrupt those specific circuits. As a result, even though you are aware that you shouldn't be taking drugs, you cannot stop it."—Nora Volkow (4:00)