1.
[Now, some people may think that I am not as religious as I used to be, and it’s true that on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I might be an agnostic, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays a primitive animist, while partying down on Saturdays and sometimes sitting zazen on Sunday. There are, however, two things that I have to say. One is, if you’ve never seen your head in more than one mode, you don’t really know who you are at all. The other is, at no time do I subscribe to any brand-name religions. 2005] MNC12
2.
[I love the ethical teachings of almost all the religions, and I love the psychedelic testimony of their saints. But I do not believe in any of their dogmas. 2005 ]MNC12
3.
[I think each one of us has a nonshirkable obligation to figure out the world on our own as best we can. The way we behave as a result of that investigation is our real and practiced religion. 2005 ] MNC18
4
[I am a believer in free will. I am not a believer in predestination. I think a belief in prophecy robs us of our free will. If you insist in wanting to know that everything will all come out all right, I think you give up your freedom to affect the outcome. 2005 ] MNC12
5.
All those things they have in the Catholic Church had reasons for them. The only thing wrong with them is that they got made into a ritual and then they forgot why they do that. MNC95
6.
Confession is like copping. A priest is a cat you can cop to, who won’t put his ego on you about it. The Catholic Church said, “Okay, we can’t keep such good track of the priests, so we’ll make a special confessional booth, and it has two little seats and a screen between them you can’t see through, so that way the cat can’t even see you while you’re copping to him. He can’t get ego-involved with you.” And then they still could, so they said, “Okay, we’ll give the cat a little book and tell him how much to lay it on because there’s only a few things that people can do wrong.” As my mother said, “Sin ain’t that original,” So they gave the cat a little book so he could scale it accurately, and he said, “Yeah, man, that’s pretty bad. We’ll have to give you 17 pater nosters for that one” and they can always figure it out. … But that piece of structure was really real when it was new and when it was fresh because it served a function. MNC95–96
7.
There are a lot of people who come here who are into white magic and want to know where white magic is at. Well, where white magic is at is Catholic High Mass. That’s ceremonial white magic that was figured out over a couple thousand years to be the most white magic ceremony they could put together. They have the highest incense like frankincense and myrrh, they build a beautiful building, there are precious metals on the altar, the music is uplifting, the concepts are spiritual, the artwork reminds you of spiritual things. The way a Mass itself gets put together has a structure that has to be followed in order to be sure that everything is right. Then the rules are that everybody who comes in cops to something bigger than them and that’s a piece of the structure, too. Then they have to devote their attention to something on a very high and spiritual plane. Then they have a priest who is a vibes director like the cat at the summer camp. Hup-two-three-four.
Then the idea is to generate enough juice among them to get one of them on. The one that’s on checks and says, “Yeah, it’s still there, man!” Then the inertia of all that structure helps move all those people, and all the ones who almost could get it on get it on like that. The ones who couldn’t quite yet get it on would get it on a little bit more than they were before, and say, “Yeah, it’s still worth trying.” That’s the function of white ceremonial magic.
MNC96–97
8.
It’s like Christian freedom — if you’re going down Market Street, and you come right down to the end of the tunnel, there by Castro, and you’re all the way over in the left-hand lane, and you’re right up to the entrance to the tunnel, and as it says, “Left Lane Must Turn Left.” Well, if you’re in that lane and you want to turn left, and you must turn left, that’s Christian freedom.MNC151
9.
Being uptight or angry or things like that causes you to become disconnected from your soul, the electrical field surrounding your body being a result of your emotions, thoughts … your electro-chemical trip. If you make your material self pure you purify and extend your soul. Now the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the principles in the Catholic Church for the shriving of the dead man, or Extreme Unction for a man who is dying, are all precautionary measures that people may die in a sane, meditative state in order that they don’t mess up their electrical field too bad. C8NOV70
10.
I’m somebody who was born in this country, had this country’s kind of a religious upbringing, which is sort of half-assed. didn’t have any God to turn to, or from, or on with, and found all that. And I’m trying to communicate to you that religion, as a system of helping people be together, is superior to politics, because politics is ego confrontation and a power trip, and a power trip means that everybody is going to lose a little bit. Now when I say religion I mean any religion that says that all of us are necessary. I can’t cop to a religion or a political system that says everything’s cool as soon as we croak these folks here. I can’t buy any of that, because I ain’t met anybody yet that I thought needed that. C12NOV70
11.
I do a great deal of balancing between Christianity and Buddhism…. Whenever it’s time that you care a great deal and it’s really intense, you be a Christian, and when it’s time that the way you’re supposed to make it is to be a little bit indifferent and just cool on out, then it’s time to be a Buddhist. C16NOV70
12.
Christianity is an either-or flip-of-a-coin kind of a religion. You’re either going to go to Heaven or hell for all of eternity on one chance on the wheel. That’s a very heavy trip, and because of that Christianity has an outrageous Christ-and-devil structure strung way out apart from each other. C16NOV70
13.
Now the thing I like about Christ is compassion and the refusal to be dragged away from the people. That’s what Christ has that’s really fine. Buddha has that too. Christ was born a carpenter and stayed cool with the carpenters, you know. But Buddha was born a prince and became cool with everybody. C16NOV70
14.
Now the thing they have in Christianity that’s heavy is morality, and this country really needs morality. This is an immoral country, man. I know I sound like those dudes in the Old Testament, but this is an immoral country, and I don’t mean just like Vietnam. That’s outrageous immoral, that’s criminal. But I mean the country itself is immoral. People don’t have a positive value on the idea of being honest with your fellow monkeys. Well, what makes a civilization function is that the monkeys agree to be honest with one another, and if that ain’t the agreement then, man, you’ve got to sleep with your pistol under your head, because you don’t know who’ll come rip you off. C16NOV70
15.
So Christianity has moral structure and that’s what this country could really get from Christianity, but I just can’t hack Christian psychology. Christian psychology makes a picture of the psyche that makes it too hard to handle or too scary. C16NOV70
16.
But Buddhist psychology is outrageous— the cleanest, most beautiful look at the mind that I think mankind has taken. Buddhist psychology makes American psychology look like it’s in kindergarten. It’s amazing, and it’s an ancient, ancient psychology; it’s been around a long time. Western culture comes on like Freud discovered the unconscious. He didn’t. It’s been the working tool of every priest, road chief, shaman, medicine man, what have you, as long as we were this kind of monkeys. C16NOV70
17.
I think that’s one of the heaviest things that could be said at a college like this. It’s to get hip to the two-valuedness of the culture and that you’ve got to do what you can to get out of the two-valuedness of the culture, because it’s like a gear-ratio trip. If the system by which you apprehend the universe is too clumsy, it makes you get a clumsy universe back. And if you apprehend the universe more subtly, you get a more subtle universe back. C16NOV70
18.
Zen seems the cleanest thing I’ve seen. Zen is so clean and so precise and pretty and just holy and compassionate. I really enjoy it a lot that way. C16NOV70
19.
At first I thought that I was going to invent new systems about how to get it together because we needed to get it together and I seemed to have come on here with all this juice. So I started off thinking about what I was going to do, and as my calculations grew, I had to start including factors such as that people who lived a long time ago were just as smart as people who live right now. We didn’t suddenly just become smart last week. The minds of the philosophers and teachers of thousands of years ago were just as alert, just as sharp, just as attuned to the subtleties of the universe as any scientist or philosopher that lives today … at least. C17NOV70
20.
When you come on stoned the first thing you see is that if morality had been abstract to you previously, it suddenly becomes right there in front of you, because it’s your bread of life. If you be wrong your energy does down, and you can be wrong till your energy goes down so far that you can terminate your contract. C17NOV70
21.
So I started thinking of all the things you’d have to do to set up something that would be really straight, that every monkey could trust. I thought that a real religion would have to affirm the essential oneness of all of them. I found that later expressed in Mahayana Buddhism and the infinite love of Jesus Christ. C17NOV70
22.
I didn’t always have such pure high religious ideals. In fact I didn’t used to have any at all. I got into religion in the early days of the hip thing in San Francisco, and I had experiences that convinced me that religion was real and that what I had thought was an empty morality structure was a description of how the universe works: as you sow so you shall reap. C17NOV70
23.
This religious revival that’s happening in the country now is the scales falling off people’s eyes, people beginning to see that real live human monkey values, nonconceptual, compassionate and real, are more important than social standing, money, and all of that. C17NOV70
24.
[Can intellectual processes capture the laws and culture of religion?] You don’t do it through intellectual processes. What you do is you telepathically tap in to the one great world religion, which is only one, which has no name, and all of the other religions are merely maps of that. C3DEC70