Source: LSD : My Problem Child (1980), Ch. 1 : How LSD Originated
Context: I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying? Was this the transition? At times I believed myself to be outside my body, and then perceived clearly, as an outside observer, the complete tragedy of my situation. I had not even taken leave of my family (my wife, with our three children had traveled that day to visit her parents, in Lucerne). Would they ever understand that I had not experimented thoughtlessly, irresponsibly, but rather with the utmost caution, and that such a result was in no way foreseeable? My fear and despair intensified, not only because a young family should lose its father, but also because I dreaded leaving my chemical research work, which meant so much to me, unfinished in the midst of fruitful, promising development. Another reflection took shape, an idea full of bitter irony: if I was now forced to leave this world prematurely, it was because of this lysergic acid diethylamide that I myself had brought forth into the world.
“Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.”
Source: Think (1999), Chapter Two, Mind, p. 78
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Simon Blackburn 29
British academic philosopher 1944Related quotes
“Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the "world of energy."”
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