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We have too long supposed that the Unknown mysterium tremendum et fascinosum of religion was outside us, when in fact that Unknown, although ego-alien or unconscious, was all the while within us: the alleged “supernatural” is the human “subconscious.”

— Weston La Barre Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)

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Religion

More quotes by Weston La Barre

A religion is a kind of group dream—the subjective poetry in which, supporting one another’s faith or need to believe, we strive desperately to believe.

Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)

A religion is a kind of group dream.

Like the paranoid schizophrenic, the vatic personality pretends to be talking about the grandiose outside cosmic world, but he is really talking grandiosely in symbolic ways only about his narcissistic self and his inner world. The mystic pretends to discard his sensory self in order to meld with the cosmic Self; but in discarding his senses he abjures his only connection with the cosmos and re-encounters only himself. The realities he expounds are inside him.

Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)

The subjective self emerges most purely in states of sensory deprivation, when the blank screen of consciousness has projected upon it only the individual hallucinatory subjective self, without sensory correction or editing, without reality testing or any such objective “noise.”

Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972)

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Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features.

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The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.

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The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

Thomas Babington Macaulay History of England (1849)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Weston La Barre (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.