Music can also have a strong effect on your emotions and thoughts. No matter what the music is, it can sound holy, joyous, beautiful, exciting and magical. If can feel like the music is flowing right through you in a pleasurable, sensuous way that can make all of the other new physical feelings and sensations even better, just like the timeless, eternal feeling that the experience will go on forever makes it better. With LSD, it's as if everything makes everything else better. Even someone not interested in music can appreciate music in a new, different way. Music can bring on sudden mood changes for the better.

Here is an example of what music can do. A 40 year old professor of philosophy and father of 3 children tells this story. It's from pages 205-206 of Masters and Houston's, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience:

"During the playing of the record I felt myself being swept along by the movement of the words, as if the meaning were coming through directly to me and the meaning itself was a movement, a dynamic flow which carried me along as if on a journey. I did not interpret the words. I simply heard them and they reflected back their individual meaning like sparks...I simply gave myself to the movement and to the richness of the voice. All the while I felt my mind being stretched, as if my faculty of abstracting and conceptualizing was being left on the surface, still capable of operating, but not interested in doing so. All the while new dimensions of my mind were coming into being and I was carried along by the sheer movement and rhythm of the voice. I enjoyed the
experience of being swept along.

"At the end of the record, I felt that I had been on a long journey and that I had come to my destination. My guides came to me and welcomed me into this 'brave new world'. I felt that I had reached the psychedelic shore and enjoyed the wonderful things around me. I felt joyous and deeply related to everything, as if I were part of a whole. It was a feeling of solidity and yet fluidity, a sense of total relatedness and involvement, bringing with it a sense of joy, peace and wonder. This was the deepest and most sustaining experience of the entire session. It remained throughout, as if it were the base of all other experiences. In my estimation, it was the most valuable dimension of the entire session."

Stanislav Grof wrote a book called LSD Psychotherapy. From page 141, here is what he has to say about the value of music in psychedelic psychotherapy:

"Music seems to serve several important functions in the context of psychedelic psychotherapy. It tends to evoke a variety of powerful emotions and facilitates deeper involvement in the psychedelic process. It provides a meaningful structure for the experience and creates a continuous carrier wave that helps patients to overcome difficult parts of the sessions and move through impasses. LSD subjects frequently report that the flow of music helps them to let go of their psychological defenses and surrender fully to the experience. Another function of music is to provide a sense of continuity and connection in the course of various unusual states of consciousness. It is quite common that clients have difficulties with the periods when the music stops and the records and tapes are being changed; they complain that they feel suspended in midair and sense a painful gap in the experience. An additional function of the music deals more specifically with its content; it is often possible to facilitate the emergence of a certain emotional quality such as aggression, sexual feelings, "psychedelic breakthrough" or a transcendental experience, by a specific choice of music. (Music also has significance for the positive structuring of the reentry period.)"