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11 |
| "The
bemushroomed person is the 5 senses disembodied, all of them keyed to
the height of sensitivity and awareness, all of them blending into one
another most strangely, until the person, utterly passive, becomes a pure
receptor, infinitely delicate, of sensations. As your body lies there
in its sleeping bag, your soul is free, loses all sense of time, living
eternity in a night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand. What you have
seen and heard is cut with a burin in your memory, never to be effaced.
At last you know what the ineffable is and what ecstasy means. Ecstasy!" There was a reference above about the Temple of Eleusis. This is related to the ancient Mysteries mentioned in the first quote from Wasson. All of this is something else that you won't find in the regular history books because this was about an ancient tradition of tripping. In the book, Acid Dreams, by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain, they mention a book about this and make a comment on page 66: "In Road to Eleusis authors Albert Hofmann, Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck present convincing evidence that the Eleusinian Mysteries, the oldest religion in the West, centered around a mass tripping ritual. For 2 millennia pilgrims journeyed from all over the world to take part in the Mysteries and drink the sacred kykeon. Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles were among those who participated in this secret ritual." The rest of this chapter will be devoted to quotes from people describing aspects of their trips. In most cases, these are not quotes from well known people like Leary, Huxley, Watts, Grof, etc. If you have never taken LSD, try to get a feel for what these people are saying. If you are familiar with LSD, the quotes should be uplifting. Sidney Cohen wrote a book, The Beyond Within. Cohen, himself, was quite negative about LSD, but some parts of the book were good, the parts where ordinary people tell of their experiences. Here are 3 quotes from nameless, ordinary people, the first from page 7, the next from page 126 and the last from page 169: "The world looked to me like it must to a little child, all big and beautiful. And I was experiencing it without the imposed controls that we have to slap on the world in order to become adults. I think I was afraid that my hold on the difference between the child's and the adult's world wasn't too firm and all those sights were just too overwhelming. As I was walking I was literally, experiencing the world as a child would and I loved it." "It was as if all the warm, sunny wonderful days of my childhood had been rolled into one and this was the day. I felt like a child looking out of the window at the beautiful, beautiful world. Never in all my life have I seen anything that looked as beautiful as this particular day." "We walked around the garden together. It was like walking in Paradise. Everything was composed and harmonized. I felt I had never really seen this garden before. I was enchanted with each plant, leaf, flower, tree trunk and the earth itself. Each blade of grass stood up separate and distinct, edged with light. Each was supremely important. The subtle colors of the loose earth and dead leaves were rich and wonderful. The vistas through the shrubbery were magically intriguing. Strangely enough I preferred the subtle colors to the bright flowers. They seemed more mysteriously beautiful." The next 2 quotes are from Masters and Houston's, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. These quotes are from a businessman in his late twenties, on pages 94-95: "The city, which had seemed from the window cold, grimy and slightly sinister, now was transformed into the wonderful world I had experienced when hearing fables as a child. The rich colors and textures of fantasy, more real than real, were pure enchantment. Walls of buildings had an added dimension to their surfaces. I felt I was walking in a waking dream. It was an all-consuming pleasure, just to see, touch, feel and smell." |