Creativity Quote by Ray Manzarek

Manzarek slips a sermon inside a disclaimer. He starts with a wink at real life: drugs do get used for fun. But he refuses to let that be the whole story, pivoting to a more mythic claim about psychedelics as instruments, not toys. The line reads like an attempt to rescue altered states from the cheapened image of party culture and place them back in the lineage of ritual, art-making, and revelation that hovered around the 1960s counterculture.

The phrasing matters. "Shouldn't" is moral but not legalistic; it’s the tone of a bandmate laying down house rules, not a cop. Then he upgrades the stakes with "ultimately", implying that even if you start in recreation, the real trajectory is supposed to bend toward meaning. "The powers of the universe" is deliberately big and slightly vague, the kind of cosmic language that can hold both mysticism and metaphor: God without the church, spirituality without the paperwork.

Context does a lot of work here. As the keyboardist of The Doors, Manzarek helped soundtrack a scene where psychedelics were tied to artistic exploration, spiritual hunger, and public panic in equal measure. By framing psychedelics as a conduit to the universe, he recasts the user as an explorer rather than an escapist. Subtext: the culture got distracted by spectacle and excess; the point, at least for him, was contact with something larger than the self - the kind of contact that justifies the risk, the chaos, and the whole strange American romance with transcendence.