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    Insight Outlook
    Insight Outlook
    Insight Outlook
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Insight Outlook

    By Albert Hofmann

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    About this ebook

    Dr. Albert Hofmann, one of this century's greatest minds, offers a lifetime of insights, observations, and discussions. He leads us on an exploration of reality perception, where our newly discovered insights are drawn into intellectual meditation. Reality is approached as a combination of subjective and objective truths, which must be unified for ultimate awareness. This amazing book will expand your mind and lift you to a level where the material and spiritual aspects of your life exist in harmony.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGreenDragonBooks
    Release dateSep 18, 2014
    ISBN9780893345730
    Insight Outlook
    Author

    Albert Hofmann

    Albert Hofmann (1906-2008), the father of LSD, was a world-renowned scientist, member of the Nobel Prize Committee, Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, and member of the International Society of Plant Research and of the American Society of Pharmacognosy. He was a leader in pharmaceutical-chemical research and the author of several books, including LSD: My Problem Child.

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      Book preview

      Insight Outlook - Albert Hofmann

      INTRODUCTION

      The world is a rotating sphere moving through space while circling the sun. Every one knew this, but then it could be seen when space research programs supplied photographic images a few years ago: the planet earth, a blue sphere, floating free in space.

      Since then, I have been fond of evoking this picture in my inner eye before going to sleep. I imagine how I, lying here in my bed, am traveling along there on the surface of the sphere, where so much has happened since it has been quietly moving along the trajectory determined for it in primordial time.

      Only after billions of revolutions around the sun, after planet earth had greened and after many more millions of years, when animal life had developed, did the being appear that experiences the world and itself consciously. As one of these beings gifted with consciousness I now observe the blue sphere, on which the drama of mankind takes place, from space through the eye of a camera. The fate of nations, the personal histories that have been acted out there, now separated from today’s viewer by the curtain of time! But the images live on in the timelessness in which we all participate through our consciousness: fabulous cultures that flowered in China centuries ago, the world of Greek and Roman antiquity, Alexander the Great’s Persian War, the Aztec empire, the Crusades, the Gothic and Renaissance periods, two World Wars . . .

      Nothing of this shifting scenery could be seen on the surface of the earth from the cosmic perspective, and neither could be seen the generations of individual humans appearing and disappearing in it. The picture that presents itself from space today has always been the same—the blue sphere, illuminated by the sun, floating quietly through space, unperturbed by time and the fate of mankind.

      While this picture is etched on my inner eye with the clarity of a photographic image, I know that I am presently on the dark side of the surface of that sphere, that I am here in my house which sits in a field in the Swiss Jura, in the bedroom, with the window open, breathing the fresh night air mixed with the scent of hay. On the sphere my individual existence vanishes among the billions of humans inhabiting its surface at the moment for a cosmic second. In contrast, here I am, the center of the world, of my world, extending from my room across the countries of the earth to the moon, to the sun, into the infinity of space aglitter with stars.

      What then is true, what is real, am I here or there? Is it even possible to ask this question, the answer to which seems so obvious? I think so, for basically nothing is obvious. That so much, almost everything, appears to be obvious to us to is one of the most monumental errors in our mental attitude. Obviousness could be the ruin of the world.

      The answer to the above question, I am here in my room and there on that blue sphere is not obvious. It represents a higher truth only understood by someone who realizes that the world on which he stands is a sphere. The only thing true and real to a primitive man is what he can experience directly with his senses, in this case that he is here, on the world, that it is flat with the firmament stretched above it. He only knows a part of the truth.

      In the following work I would like to show what this example of nocturnal meditation demonstrates: that, depending on the standpoint of the observer, reality offers quite different perspectives that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather, they add up to an encompassing truth. They contain insights into the essence of our day-to-day reality that I have acquired through experiences in my own life. Thus, they are very personal observations on a central problem of reality that inevitably lead us into the realm of religion.

      Everyone is, in fact, his own philosopher, for every human experiences the world in a unique manner according to his own uniqueness and, correspondingly, devises his own personal image of it. Everyone has to make do in his special reality.

      The questions asked by children show that we are all already born as philosophers: Dad, where does the world stop?—When did God make the world?—Why does everyone have to die?—and the like. They are questions to which we still cannot find the answers in all of the many philosophical treatise, even though they are basic questions relating to our existence.

      I still clearly remember a childlike philosophical discussion from my youth that I had with a friend of mine when I was about ten years old. We were on our way to school and were just strolling toward the old city gate when my companion asked me, Do you still believe in God? Since I noticed that they cheated me with the Christ child (translator’s note: in the tradition of German speaking countries, the Christ child plays the role of Santa Claus as the bearer of gifts on Christmas Eve) and that St. Nicholas was none other than my Uncle Fritz, I no longer believe that he exists. I answered that it had to be different with God than with the Christ child and St. Nicholas. The world and people, that only God could have made, really did

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