Part of the joy is the religious experience of remembering one's unity and identity with God and Ultimate Reality and another part of the joy is this new feeling that one's full identity, the Ultimate Reality, God or the Brain, is good, not bad. There is an ultimate goodness about the whole thing and one knows that, ultimately, everything is all right in the universe and will be all right. Aldous Huxley referred to it as being able to relate to or identify with or feel the ultimate "All-Rightness of the Universe". The full identity is not only the ultimate in goodness, but there is also a playful character to it. It's not dull and serious. It's fun and alive. It is the ego that's so dull and serious. All of this is heaven and paradise and the combination of all possible intellectual, psychological, philosophical, religious and metaphysical insights. It is liberating, enlightening and the person knows that there is no state of mind beyond this one. This is it, the Ultimate. It is also self-validating in that the person Knows that this is the Truth.

When you are getting all of these revelations and insights and feeling the joy that goes with it, everything that you see, whether the eyes are open or closed, takes on ultimate beauty and significance. You just can't believe what's happening. It's too great to be true, but it is true. The person who is getting awakened with this experience will say that if everyone did this, they would go wild with joy and the world would become a real world that means something rather than the sick farce that it is.

If someone says that they are alive for the first time, it could be said that they have had a death-rebirth experience. It was the death of the ego and the old way of thinking and the person was reborn, with a new perspective, a new outlook and a new life, all of it for the better. In a sense, the person's brain is becoming reprogrammed. It has been called reimprinting. This can happen later in the trip, after the peak hours, when the person is thinking about all that has happened and what it means to them. They have seen through the ego and all of the social games and now know that there is a whole lot more to life. The person is in a state that is very open to suggestion from others, the way a youth can be called impressionable and this is one of many reasons that the other people around can be very helpful or very destructive, depending on who they are, what they know about LSD and how they behave.

In this reprogramming or reimprinting process, the person is taking a new picture of themselves and the world around them. The old identity was based solely on the ego and all of the social games it's involved with. The new identity, made possible by LSD, sees far beyond the ego and is no longer dominated and controlled by it. The ego is seen for what it is and the person is no longer taken in and deceived by it. With the ego put in its place and in its proper perspective, which means out of the way, it's a brand new life for the person, who is now free of the ego and all the restrictions, inhibitions, tension, conflict and anxiety that go with the limited ego reality. In this way, LSD can be the most effective psychological tool for positive personality change and growth. It can be a great help in the further development of "normal" people and if only the psychiatrists and psychologists knew what LSD was, they would be much more effective in their efforts to help their patients.

I hate to get into the one possible negative, but it is must done. As indicated earlier, the ego will not go down without a fight. If the ego is the only basis of reality that the person has and if the person is not adequately prepared for the LSD experience, then it's possible that the ego's fight for survival can lead to terror. Again, it's confusing the death of the ego with the death of the person. Even if the person has been warned and is ready for it, the possibility still exists that the person will panic when their entire concept of reality is disappearing. This is the one potentially dangerous aspect of LSD and the other people become very important influences on what happens next.