From Here to Alternity and Beyond:
"At Catholic school I learned about tough boys and beautiful girls. I fell in love with Margaret Vance, never told her, though, and it was incredible. I didn't understand about sex so I visualized exchanging urine with her. My father had one of these exercise machines with a belt worn around your belly or rump and a powerful electric motor to make the belt vibrate. I was on this machine and all the vibration stimulated my erogenous zones. Suddenly my body fell apart and my whole being was enraptured. It was incredible.
I went to confession the following morning and the priest said, "Do you jack off!." I didn't know what he meant, then suddenly I did and I said, "No." He called it a mortal sin. I left the church thinking, "If they're going to call a gift from God a mortal sin, then to hell with them. That isn't my God, they're just trying to control people."...
RMN: What about people who have developed a powerful physical and mental addiction, for example, to crack and cocaine, in some cases: even killing or stealing in order to fulfill their craving for the drugs.
JOHN: They'll kill and steal without the drugs, they live that way. The drug just gives them an excuse to do it. Read Freud on cocaine. He really knew what cocaine did but he was never able to say it in the presence of the psychoanalytic people. Psychoanalysis is all based on his cocaine experiences, every bit of it.
DJB: What do you think about this whole "War on Drugs" thing?
JOHN: We've been subject to the delusion that we should suppress drugs ever since Anslinger put marijuana on the narcotics list ill 1937. He was enforcing the laws on alcohol and that was repealed, so he looked around for something new and found marijuana. In an interview with Anslinger the interviewer asked him, "What if you were to smoke a joint?" And he said, "I would kill three people that I know." What a belief system! And he put all that in the law, you see. It's that insanity of certain people who don't understand what's going on.
...Objectivity and subjectivity were traps that people fell into. I prefer the terms "insanity" and "outsanity." Insanity is your life inside yourself. It's very private and you don't allow anybody in there because it's so crazy. Every so often I find somebody that I can talk to about it. When you go into the isolation tank outsanity is gone. Now, outsanity is what we're doing now, it's exchanging thoughts and so on. I'm not talking about my insanity and you're not talking about yours. Now, if our insanities overlap then we can be friends...
...All we do is construct simulations. I construct the simulation of you, for instance, and I turn this into words. But that simulation is nowhere near who you really are. Then I tell you what my simulation of you is and you correct it, and on and on. You cannot substitute words for the action of the brain, the action of thought or the action of mind. When I say mind I'm talking about the whole universe of stuff, see? It's not that simple...
RMN: Do you think that aggression is inherent in the human psyche?
JOHN: No. I once wrote a chapter called, "Where do Armies Come From?" Do you know where: they come from? Tradition. Kids learn that history is war, so they're all pre-programmed. If you read some of the history books, it's all about war, it's incredible! In my Latin class I learned about the wars of Caesar, when I took French I learned about the wars of Napoleon and on and on and on. What did we learn from Caesar? That you don't divide Gaul into three parts. What did we learn from Cleopatra? The you may have to kill yourself with an asp. If you start reading Italian history and you come across Leonardo Da Vinci or Galileo then the whole thing falls apart. They're individuals doing their thing and it's magnificent. And that's the only part of history that's interesting...
JOHN: When people start talking about "higher" states of consciousness I say, "In outer space there's no up or down."
DJB: It all becomes relative.
JOHN: No, it isn't even relative.
DJB: It isn't even relative?
JOHN: It isn't anything you can describe.
DJB: Now I'm thoroughly confused.
JOHN: If you stay around me long enough you're going to get a whole new language. Some people stay around me for a while and run away. I can't keep a woman here. They all get frightened sooner or later. I'm crazier than hell...
...They keep saying, "You've got to teach, you've got to learn what it is to be a human." So, I'm spending all my time now trying to learn this. You know, it just gets to be fun. I realized that certain humans have a lot of fun. On some day I said, "What is it to be human?" And they said, "To laugh more.""
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