“The feeling in talking to more and more young neuroscientists and people who are coaches is that microdosing is not going to be a problem in another 10 or 20 years.  The majority of scientists will reach the same common ground on the efficacy of microdosing. Jim says, ‘We have thousands of years of people using psychedelics as microdoses for improving hunting, improving sex, improving, basically, overall healing capacity. We also have thousands of years of people using high doses in rituals and ceremonies to get in touch with the divine. ‘”

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and the new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck, Ph.D., German theoretical physicist
whose discovery of energy quanta
won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918

“We live in a difficult time where we’re not listening to each other enough and where there’s a lot of darkness both in the political realm and in corporate America. This is happening around the world and not just in the United States. It is also happening in our personal relationships. The way we change this is by each of us engaging and working to be a positive force and light and having conversations, doing our own little bit to fight those human glitches to move the world forward.”

Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“My partner, Terry Tempest Williams, and I just spent two weeks at his home right before Christmas. I’ve always loved this poem but now I feel like I have a new understanding of it because of the idea of subject versus object, enchantment versus disenchantment. When he writes, ‘I want to tell you what the forests were like,’ he is talking about when the trees were full of spirits, when the forests were enchanted. That’s why he has to speak in a forgotten language and that’s the language that Justine and I talked about trying to rediscover today.”

I want to tell what the forests
were like

I will have to speak
in a forgotten language

Witness by W.S. Merwin
The Essential W. S. Merwin, 2017
The Rain in the Trees, 1987

“He wrote this not long before his death at the age of 93. It inspires me because I look forward to the time when I have a real letting go of my burdens and my expectations, when I can really look at my life, the whole of my past life, with absolute forgiveness and acceptance, and look forward to the future as a kind of unnamed grace that I don’t even know what it’s going to look like. I love the idea that the time will come when my neurotic strivings are all put to bed and there’s something about Milosz describing this wonderful experience one night that really gives me hope.”

Awakened

In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night, and experienced a feeling of happiness so intense and perfect that in all my life I had only felt its premonition. And there was no reason for it. It didn’t obliterate consciousness; the past which I carried was there, together with my grief. And it was suddenly included, was a necessary part of the whole. As if a voice were repeating: “You can stop worrying now; everything happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you, and you are not required anymore to think of what happened long ago.” The peace I felt was a closing of accounts and was connected with the thought of death. The happiness on this side was like an announcement of the other side. I realized that this was an undeserved gift and I could not grasp by what grace it was bestowed on me.

Poem by Czeslaw Milosz

“The reason that I picked this quote is because it is so counter cultural. All of our society really teaches us that everything meaningful that’s going to happen to us happens at a younger age. And everything that happens after midlife is an afterthought. I first read this quote when I was transitioning from midlife to older age and it blew my mind. It told me that the best and most meaningful parts of my life were going to be ahead of me. This was going to be the moment for which I was born. It resonated with me because I do believe in God, and I don’t believe God makes mistakes. Ultimately, you have to stand at a far enough distance to see that perspective. I’m beginning to understand I’ve made the sacrifices, I’ve gone through the fiery gates. I’ve done the hard work of growing older, and now that I’m old, I understand what Joan Chittister meant. I can tell you I am in the moment for which I was born.”

Now we are beyond the narcissism of youth, above the survival struggles of young adulthood, beyond the grind of middle age, and prepared to look beyond ourselves into the very heartbeat of life. We can do what our souls demand that fully human beings do. This is the moment for which we were born.

Joan Chittister, OSB is a Benedictine Sister of Erie, PA.
She is the author of over 50 books including
The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

“This quote is very important to me because when I was going through a very difficult experience in my life, I knew that I had to get through it. I knew that I had to get over it. This quote and the book informed me that sometimes what you’ve learned from the obstacle and what you go through from the obstacle is actually what leads you to the best thing yet on the other side of it.”

As it turns out, this is one thing all great men and women of history have in common. Like oxygen to a fire, obstacles became fuel for the blaze that was their ambition. Nothing could stop them; they were (and continue to be) impossible to discourage or contain. Every impediment only served to make the inferno within them burn with greater ferocity.

Ryan Holiday author of The Obstacle Is The Way

“Having these kinds of experiences of nature gives us a way to get outside of the self and our preoccupation with the self in a way that really is the path to kind of authentic wisdom. This really is like integrating these kinds of practices of learning to see the world around you anew with, like, an active effort to break through your own programming.”

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.

J.A. Baker, author of The Peregrine

“It is such a simple quote and it means so much because at the end of our lives or at the end of this experience, all that we really remember is the feeling of being together and anything else and everything else just collapses and falls down. Even just saying the words, “We were together, I forget the rest” makes my heart jump out of my chest. I think about my husband when we were together and I believe that millions of people identify with that quote. It’s so popular because of that feeling they get when the second part of the quote says ‘and I forget the rest’ because nothing else is important. Nothing else is more significant than the fact that we were together.”

We were together, I forget the rest.

Walt Whitman, Poet

“Resilience is our capacity to cope. It’s our capacity to respond to disappointments, difficulties, and disasters in our lives in flexible, adaptive, and skillful ways. Often, we have learned ways of responding to life events that are not so adaptive or skillful, but they’re part of our unconscious conditioned repertoire. We’ll do them automatically without thinking. Because the brain has neuroplasticity, because it’s quite capable of creating new neurons, creating new connections between the neurons, creating new circuits and new neural pathways, we can learn new behaviors, even create new habits of behaving well and installing those in our long-term memory so that we can be far more resilient going forward. We can be far more flexible and adaptive.”

“In New York, everybody is a wise guy. I was in New York during Hurricane Sandy. It was humor that kept us alive. We couldn’t eat much, we had to have breakfast for ten days in a row because the restaurants were closed. But everybody was joking. They were putting up seven families on their floor and they managed through humor.”