Part III – Chapter 1

Chapter 1 is all of the statements and partial sentences from all over Part II coming from
hundreds of different people talking in the past tense about what they saw, felt, thought,
realized, or discovered during their LSD experiences.

A cluster of remarkable trash cans by the curb hailed us “good morning.” Their metal
sides and their contents sparkled like diamonds and rubies.

A deep gratitude came for the privilege of seeing this divine part of myself and others.
I was immensely grateful that I was able to have this experience.

A full realization broke upon me in a new way not just apprehended as an idea but
experienced in my body.

A glance was as powerful and direct a message as the most privately and elaborate verbal
statement.

A godlike sublimity swallowed up my soul. I was overwhelmed but I leaned on God and
was immortal through all changes.

A major revelation was that of the spiritual nature of trees, the obedient benevolence of
trees.

A supreme feeling of confidence flowed through me, and all doubts and fears melted
away.

A vast reservoir of energy was somehow made available. Always it seems as if a new
form of potent energy is clearly involved.

Aldous was chuckling away very pleased with himself and I was rolling on the floor with
laughter. (That was Timothy Leary looking back at a trip he had with Aldous Huxley.)

After so many years of wandering, I had come home. I had received the most precious
gifts there are, the gifts of life and love.

All forms, all structure, manmade or organic, were seen clearly in their molecular and
particle nature.

All the processes that filter, screen and regulate perception seemed to have been
suspended. As Huxley put it, the mind’s “reducing valve” had been inactivated.

All the fine distinctions between logic, metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics seemed to be
such nonsense.

Almost an endless variety of exciting colors and textures swept one after another across
the sky.

Although there was thinking, talking going on, my mind was being used, yet there was no
ego.

An architect on LSD figured out the design for an arts and crafts shopping center. He
caught the essence of the image.

An endless sea of glorious golden light which was in truth God, stretched into infinity. As
I watched, an overpowering feeling of reverence settled into my very depths.

An endless variety of ecstatic experience spiraled out around me. I had taken the God-
step.

An incredible amount of light and energy was enveloping me and streaming in subtle
vibrations through my whole being.

Around me poured streams of gems of every color, in ever changing patterns like the play
within a kaleidoscope.

As I watched a wooded section I was surprised to find the branches of the trees flapping
as a bird does, only in harmonious slow motion.

As in Plato’s myth of the cave, what I was now seeing struck me with the force of the sun
in comparison with which normal experience was flickering shadows on the wall.

As the truth of the situation dawned on me, the word “father” resounded in this heaven of
light and I was taken up and absorbed by the unspeakable Godhead.-

At one point, everything appeared to be uproariously funny, especially the gestures and
actions of people going about their everyday business.

At these moments of ecstatic clarity, there was such a peace and rest and at the same
time, such exuberance and wildest joy.

Beautiful, soft colors emerged and exploded as climaxes of the tone (music) were
achieved.

Because I was part of God, I was joyous to be nothing but dust. (With LSD, dust is
divine, like anything else.)

Besides seeing objects in greater visual depth, I also saw them with greater clarity, as
though a great lens had brought everything into sharper focus for me.

Between the trees I could see the sun sending down rays of warming benediction upon
this Eden, this forest paradise.

Brilliantly colored objects in the images seemed to generate a light of their own, waves of
color. (eyes closed)

Celestial music of inexpressible beauty seemed to make the rhythm of the universe, of the
melody and of our movements one.

Certain pieces of music came across under LSD as so holy, it was almost as though God
was humming the tune.

Charlie was completely on his own trip. It looked like he was in a playpen. You could
look at him and see toys and stuffed animals.

Clock time and ordinary space no longer had any meaning. Everything was happening in
infinite dimension. My consciousness swelled.

Colors are typically very bright, penetrating and explosive; the light and color contrasts
are enhanced and deepened.

Colors seemed deeper and richer; and a soft, natural light seemed to reflect from all
things.

Each color seemed to carry its own feeling tone, oranges, reds and yellows expansive and
sexual, blues and greens, cool, serene and rational.

Each object had a proper place in this crystal space. The living essence of each seemed
ready to break through its clear-cut outline.

Emotionally, aesthetically and religiously, the experience was the most intense,
impressive and valuable day I have ever experienced.

Emotionally I experienced death and birth as similar events, two ends of the same
continuum and therefore to be similarly interpreted.

Emotions came in rip tides, thoughts poured out in torrents and my entire body moved
almost continuously, its actions prompted by the contents of the visions.

Eternity was manifested in the light of the day and something infinite behind everything
appeared.

Even when I returned to my usual state of consciousness, I had the feeling that this
experience would have a lasting effect.

Every acoustic perception became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound
generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent forms and color.

Every person possesses a tremendous fund of God-given talents. I lay thinking that when
talents remain unrecognized and unused, it was because of emotional blocks.

Every scene was realistic, but the colors were unusually vivid and all sparkled in brilliant
morning sunshine. (eyes closed)

Every surface of my skin could feel it. I felt like it was touching us in a physical way.
(He’s talking about music.)

Everything I could see seemed alive and immensely beautiful and meaningful. Trees,
rocks, cacti the entire landscape was radiating with relevance.

Everything looked so good. I could just look at the sea and feel it on my skin and in my
bones. Touching it was ecstasy. Sensations were exquisite.

Everything seemed to have a much greater—very much greater significance than
normally.

Everything that I ever believed in, everything that I did or pursued, everything that
seemed to give my life meaning, suddenly appeared utterly false. (That is a revelation.)

Everything that I had ever experienced and read about was bubble-dancing before me like
a 19th century vaudeville show (eyes closed).

Experiences from even the earliest childhood were vividly recalled. This does not involve
an ordinary recollection, but rather a true reliving.

Experiencing these emotions in all their intensity was both a way for me to discover that I
was capable of God feelings and for me to realize that they lay deep within me.

eyes closed—One of the fabulous aspects of this microfilm was the clarity of color and
form, from the facial expressions to the most minute details of the background.

eyes closed—The colors seemed to glow with an inner light. It seemed a glimpse of
something timeless and primordial, a sort of breakthrough into the realm of the absolute.

eyes closed—There surged upon me a succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery
of a striking reality and depth, alternating with a vivid kaleidoscopic play of colors.

Feelings and visions alike became cold and dead in the writing, a faint account giving a
prosaic one-hundred-thousandth of the experience itself.

Flowers, leaves, grass, trees were seen with tremendous vividness—“with the intensity
that Van Goth must have seen them” is an often-used description.

Following the ego death, individuals saw human existence in a much broader spiritual
framework.

For several hours I mostly hummed and sang, laughed and chuckled, as emotional
defense patterns dissolved in empathic acceptance.

For the first time, I was experiencing the universe for what it really is—an unfathomable
mystery, a divine play of energy.

For the first time, I was seeing colors and forms and things in themselves (seeing objects
as alive and meaningful).

For the first time in my life, I knew what the word “beauty” meant. Now I understand
that I had never even begun to penetrate what beauty was all about.

For the first time, the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time, it did not
mean someone else’s state of mind.

“God is love” was no mere Biblical quotation but an overwhelmingly intense burning
into every nerve of my body. The wonder of it caused me to soar with joy.

He became aware of a powerful message flowing through him, through nonverbal
channels that seemed to permeate his entire being.

He came to the realization of the Self which is the enlightenment of the darkness that is
ignorance and the deliverance from the mortal consequences of that ignorance.

He emphasized that his understanding is all experienced as simultaneous visual and felt
thinking.

He experienced a comprehensive familiarity with the complex network of his being such
as he had never known before.

He experienced a déjà vu of divine joy and understanding, as though stumbling upon a
golden trove of submerged knowledge.

He felt himself move into a totally different and deeper level of consciousness, a level
that was entirely new to him.

He felt his life had been “transfigured” by the “new being” which had emerged out of the
depths of his psyche.

He felt light, ecstatic, reborn and pulsing with exuberant life energy. His senses felt
cleansed and wide open.

He felt that for the first time in his life he was experiencing the universe for what it really
is—an unfathomable mystery, a divine play of energy.

He felt that he had “cleansed his lenses,” the world looked different, like washing a
muddy car. A heightened sensory awareness stayed with him after this session.

He felt that if he could die right them, he could keep the tremendous beauty and rich
emotions for himself throughout eternity.

He felt the experience was unbelievably beautiful; he had never experienced anything
like that in his whole life.

He felt the walls of consciousness opened by an enormous thrust and he was cast out of
time.

He found it difficult to read while eating because the taste of food obscured the meaning
of the words.

He found the whole experience exhilarating for having given him insights into his psyche
and the nature of existence that he hadn’t thought himself capable of achieving.

He had a profound experience of God which he describes as the most joyous moment of
his life.

He had broken through the boundaries of his everyday consciousness to enter a world that
he had previously not even imagined could exist.

He looked around him as if seeing the world for the first time. The world was beautiful,
strange and mysterious.

He reported a “continual stream of penetrating insights and deepened philosophical
understanding.”

He said the session had been the most important, profound and intense experience of his
life.

He saw eternal cycles of life and death unfolding in front of his eyes. Nothing really got
destroyed; everything was in eternal flux and transformation.

He saw objects in a new light; they disclosed their inherent deep, timeless existence,
which remains hidden from everyday sight.

He trusted his experience of having entered into a state of more, not less reality, of
hypersanity, not subsanity.

He was convinced that this consciousness was the Creator of the entire physical universe.
(That’s not ego consciousness.)

He was fascinated by the dimensions of the experience and by the richness of insights
that it entailed.

He was not remembering back reflectively, but instead he was directly perceiving the
experience and the meaning of the experience.

He was seeing life as an endless sequence of cycles in which becoming, being, and
perishing were just chapters in the same great book.

Her smile, her whole face was beautiful beyond description and I wondered if I would be
able to see her like this when the drug experience had ended.

Here we could travel into our own minds to remote and hitherto inaccessible realms
within.

His consciousness was providing him with amazingly detailed, complex and concrete
information that he had never dreamed possible.

His eyes were microscopes registering the jewel-like beauty and precision of the
sidewalks and lamp posts.

His features showed an unusual mixture of infantile bliss and mystical rapture. (This
“infantile bliss” is positive and mature.)

His laughter grew louder and louder and when he tried to stop he could not close his
mouth. It stretched wider and wider.

Hoffman noticed that everything was gleaming with an extraordinary vitality the next day
and felt reborn, his senses vibrating, attuned.

How I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in 4 chair legs and the
Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!

Huxley had taken mescaline in a garden and shucked off the mind and awakened to
eternity.

I advanced toward the table. With every step its distance increased. The lights, the faces,
the furniture receded.

I again experienced that expansion of feeling, a new mental amplitude difficult to
describe but quite intense.

I anticipated a remarkable experience, but was in no way prepared for the mind-
staggering voyage into distant dimensions that was my first acid trip.

I awakened into a brilliant, overwhelmingly glorious light. It was very brief but I’d never
experienced anything like it in my life. It had quite an impact.

I became a great variety of winged creatures, each with feelings so intense that it seemed
impossible for their small bodies to contain such emotions.

I became aware of a brilliant sun rising from the center of my being, a new dawn and a
ripening of my soul.

I became increasingly cognizant of the sacredness of the experience I was undergoing
and felt an expansion of consciousness beyond the confines of my head and my body.

I became vividly aware of the fact that what I call shapes, colors and textures in the
outside world are also states of my nervous system, that is, of me.

I began to fall in love with her as my hand warmed to hers. Warm hand, warm mind,
warm world, after an Eskimo existence.

I belonged within peace and unity and wild joy, within something greater than my own
life or the Life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.

I broke into a full joyous laughter at the mystery and the beauty of it all. How little we
know about the soul’s journey.

I closed my eyes and almost instantaneously, I went out of body to a place of power and
shamanic possibility.

I closed my eyes and brilliantly colored geometrical patterns of fantastic beauty collided,
exploded, raced by.

I closed my eyes and experienced a vision that unfolded in vivid colors and accompanied
by voices that were audible only inside my head.

I could find no possible relation between anything Freud had talked about and this
experience with its exalted spirituality.

I could hear voices in the street many floors below. Perhaps in some way the sensing
entity has become separated from the physical body.

I could see beauty in hundreds of commonplace things I had not thought of as being even
attractive before.

I could see God and life and everybody and myself in its reality and true proportion. It is
wonderful and full of meaning after all.

I didn’t know there could be such joy and freedom in rhythm and movement (or such joy
and freedom in general).

I didn’t know what I was seeking, but I felt its immanence, and it seemed an answer to
every hunger I had ever known.

I discovered emotionally that the essence of reality is self-awareness, selfhood, not
egohood.

I distinctly had the sensation of having been with God in the energy center of the
universe.

I don’t think I shall ever again experience anything more radiant than my visions that
afternoon.

I emerged from this experience touched to the core and immeasurably impressed by its
power.

I existed “in” these dimensions of being, as I had transcended not only my ego, but also
the dichotomy between subject and object.

I experienced a sense of initiation and participation in a great mystery, everything became
knowing and known.

I experienced a variety of processes that had nothing to do with ordinary human
experience.

I experienced reality from a location that lies somewhere beyond the force of gravity or
time.

I expressed gratitude that paradise had been shown me and that somewhere deep within
myself, there had hidden this heaven now being revealed.

I felt a certain reunion with thoughts and sensations that were pure, as if they were being
experienced for the first time.

I felt a great, inexplicable joy, so powerful that I could not restrain it, a fit of mysterious
and overwhelming delight.

I felt a warm oneness with all that live, a marvelous unity and harmony with the very
universe itself.

I felt as if I was beyond seconds, minutes and hours and also beyond past, present and
future.

I felt as though I was remembering something I had known before I was born, but had
forgotten by identifying with the physical and mental world as total reality.

I felt as though the “essence” of me was being liberated to join the “essence” of
everything else about me.

I felt as though the fullest floods of the energies of the universal Mother were flowing
through me.

I felt endowed with all the time in the world, free to look about me as if I were living
eternity without a single problem to be solved.

I felt flooded with lights and indescribable joy and connected in a new way to the world
and the flow of life.

I felt I was ascending and passing into a new dimension, that I was expanding upward as
well as outward into an astral plane, a higher sphere of creation.

I felt I was no longer with my neck under the guillotine. This was the very feeling I have
been living under all my life.

I felt I was there with God on the day of Creation. Everything was so fresh and new.
Every plant and tree and fern and bush had its own particular holiness.

I felt in me an unshakable conviction that there is indeed a universal and God-created
energy which expresses itself as rhythm in all things.

I felt my filaments infiltrating the tangled web of their essence bodies. I surrendered to
the ancient process and felt the embracing union.

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.

I felt myself in a universal place or space where I knew that the whole universe was in
each of us.

I felt one could not get closer to heaven. (That means being in heaven, not close and
unable to get closer.

I felt so blessed to have seen what I felt was this energy of creation at its purest and
highest vibration.

I felt that I was being transported to some mysterious place where the secrets of life and
the universe were revealed.

I felt that I was going down, down, down, down and down to the infinite point of depth
within me.

I felt that somehow every person must be made to recognize the divine within himself
and that such a recognition would influence his every action throughout life.

I felt that something of utmost relevance had happened to me on this session day and that
I would never be the same.

I felt waves of joy and an overpowering conviction that “all shall be well and all manner
of thing shall be well.”

I found myself in the middle of a cosmic drama of unimaginable proportions. (eyes
closed)

I gazed and was humbled forever as I saw the unsheathed face of the Being cleared of all
his veils.

I glowed like a new-born soul. The well-known landscape lost all of its familiarity and I
was setting out upon a journey of years through heavenly territories.

I had a strong physical sensation that I was cold, but on the other hand, I seemed to be
without a body at all which suggested that the coldness had nothing to do with the body.

I had a thousand ears, each one with a different headset on, each earphone bringing in a
different music.

I had been liberated tremendously by this experience and by finding that the pain in my
life wasn’t necessary.

I had broken through the walls of ordinary consciousness, and what I glimpsed dwarfed
the world I had previously known.

I had had a glimpse of eternity and beside it, the daily concerns that had once
preoccupied me dwindled.

I had never before seen, touched, tasted, heard, smelled and felt so profound a personal
unity and involvement with the concrete material world.

I had never heard music played like that before. I suddenly understood the very essence
of music, the secret of its magic.

I had never talked so openly about myself before in my life. And it was easy. I didn’t feel
like hiding anything about myself.

I had no desire, in fact, had a definite antipathy to disciplined thought of any kind. I
simply wanted to be and flow with the tide.

I had no questions. I was too happy, too relaxed, too joyous to have questions of any
kind.

I had reached a state of “wakefulness” when the brilliance of light on a window sill or the
color of blue in the sky would be so important it could make me cry.

I had the keenest feeling of being out of my body, floating in the field of energy. It was
incredibly exhilarating.

I had the notion that “this is it,” “this is the moment of truth,” “I know that everything
leads to this,” “this is complete harmony and ecstasy”.

I had watched the passing of the millions of years and had arrived at paradise. (eyes
closed)

I have seen the greater consciousness, shining like the sun on the other shore beyond the
darkness.

I knew every tree, every bush; but it was transformed, transfigured into the perfection of
a world newly created.

I knew myself to be this single, encompassing Consciousness. I knew that its Identity was
my true identity.

I knew that my Self outlasts physical death and that my essence, the me that is eternal,
exists without form.

I knew that the experience was not the result of a psychosis brought on by the drug but a
glimpse into a world beyond ordinary reality.

I knew that the Golden Age was all about me and it was we who had been blind to it, but
that it had never passed away from the world.

I knew what was important in my life and what was less important more clearly than ever
before.

I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite
beauty of every little grain of it.

I looked at the faces of those around me and they seemed to be suffused with an inner
radiance.

I looked at the infinity of space and let my soul drift as it would. Carnivals were staged
between the stars.

I looked down at the stairs: the depth was fathomless; it was a journey of years to reach
the bottom!

I looked out the window and the earth seemed to vibrate with life. It’s alive. It’s a
wonderful world. I don’t have to run anymore.

I looked down at the leaves and discovered a cavernous intricacy, pulsing with
undecipherable mystery.

I lost the boundaries of my physical body. I felt that I was standing in the center of the
cosmos. I had never known this world. I was never created. I was the cosmos.

I lost the limitations of my normal consciousness. I felt free, without the faintest trace of
conflict anywhere at all.

I never felt so clean inside in all my life. All the trash seemed to be washed out of my
mind. It seemed as if I were born all over again.

I now knew what the shamans meant when they said, “the mushroom takes you there to
the place where God is.”

I perceived patterns, molecular structures connecting everything, which went through
everything, transcended everything, went beyond everything.

I ran madly out of the cottage and across galaxies and over time-warps and through the
seas of space, searching frantically for the green planet earth among the infinite suns.

I ran out to the lawn, snow, trees, starlight. It had never been more beautiful. Etched,
sharp, magnified.

I realized how a normally, constricted perceptual framework permits one to see only a
fraction of reality.

I realized that I was dead and that I was in the place which is the aboriginal base of all
existence.

I realized that the mind and the senses that provide inputs to the mind were all grossly
underutilized faculties in the study of the world around us.

I realized that the seed of life is consciousness and that, as such, life essentially never
ends.

I realized that under the proper circumstances, psychedelic experiences are truly, a “royal
road to the unconscious.”

I realized the many wonderful emotions I had experienced were so rare in the lives of
most people and gratitude that such ecstasy had been mine.

I remember falling upward towards a mass of designs and all different colors or lights. It
may sound nutty, but I was there. (You read that right. It says “falling upward.”)

I remembered detail that under ordinary conditions I could not possibly have
remembered.

I sank into a delicious lethargy almost mystical in essence where my personal problems
seemed absurdly unimportant.

I saw a gleaming, blinding light with a brilliance. I knew that I was looking at God. (eyes
closed)

I saw all the little shades of white in the sugar. What blindness I had to color
differentiation all my life.

I saw an old lady gradually get younger all the way back to being a baby and then grow
back to the old lady.

I saw deep parallels between various mathematical concepts and altered states of
consciousness.

I saw for the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous, beyond any words of mine to
describe, is the whole of life.

I saw people as gross distortions of themselves. The personality and intentions seemed to
be boldly written on his features and reflected in his mannerisms.

I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is on the contrary, a living
Presence. I became conscious in myself of eternal life.

I saw the grasses bend in prayer, the flowers dance in the breeze and the trees lift their
arms to God.

I saw the most beatific visions, the most beautiful women, angelic in their mental and
physical configurations. (eyes closed)

I saw then that there were dimensions to life and harmonies and deeps which had been for
me unseen, unheard and untapped.

I saw this moment as an archetypal crossroads in time, ripe with revelatory meanings and
building up to something supremely special.

I sensed that my identity was shifting from being the manifestation of this Energy to
being the Energy itself.

I sensed the cosmic quality of the energies and experiences involved in the world of
living forms.

I sensed the presence of something that I could not name, but it filled me with joy and
serenity.

I shouted for joy, I praised God with my whole heart. Everything looked new to me, the
people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world.

I started experiencing a strange excitement that was dissimilar to anything I have ever felt
in my life.

I started the process of throwing things out of my mind, junking mental furniture that had
been clogging up my brain.

I started walking into the woods and amazingly, the trees opened up before me and they
closed behind me.

I stepped forth into some strange land which can only be grasped in terms of
astonishment and mystery, an ecstatic nirvana.

I suddenly saw the color of the wall waxing and waning, ebbing and flowing. The
extraordinary character of light and color is unbelievable.

I suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution
that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.

I thought how trivial and absurd the things were that tied me to my conventional
existence. I had such great insight into the nature of things.

I thought that I was near death; when suddenly, my soul became aware of God, in an
intense present reality. I felt him. I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt.

I understood how my normal perception of the world was constricted by many
prohibitions I had somehow accepted.

I usually dance only with my feet, but then I was dancing with all my bones, even my
shoulders.

I wanted to feel the color of a purple glass and I seemed to be one with the soft glowing
purple.

I wanted to shout and sing of the miraculous new life and sense and form, of the joyous
beauty and the whole mad ecstasy of lovliness.

I was alone and adrift in infinities—lost in the universe of myself, vast and teeming, and
in no thing different from the one we call outside. There is no outside.

I was at the beginning of my life. I had just been born. I was alive! Thank God I was
finally alive!

I was aware of a gentle, deep connection with a new spirituality, an unfamiliar source
inside one that was expansive, joyful and peaceful.

I was aware that my thinking processes were working more rapidly and clearly than ever
before.

I was carried away by this Light to an Ecstasy beyond ecstasy and suddenly I was no
longer I, but a part of the Divine Workings.

I was dazzled. Layers of iridescent silk cascaded from a waist-band; the subtle shading of
its colors

I was dead and yet I was never more joyously alive; thus I knew that after death, the soul
is more alive than we can ever be while living (without LSD).

I was definitely aware of several levels of consciousness going on among the people
present.

I was getting insights as to why the child’s psyche is so fascinated and captivated by
various mythic stories and their characters.

I was having the best time of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a feeling of joy
that great.

I was in a daze, stunned by what had happened, trying to figure out what to do with these
revelations, what to do with life.

I was keenly aware that every little sparrow that flew had a beautiful song to sing that
meant something.

I was learning that all things are one, and all things are a part, an essential part, of my
being.

I was looking at a painting and projected images into it, all seen in vivid photographic
reality.

I was looking at what Adam had seen on the morning of his Creation, the miracle,
moment by moment of naked existence (what Huxley saw while looking at a flower).

I was now discovering dimensions of the cosmos that are usually hidden to our senses
and intellects.

I was overcome by a warmth and sense of comfort that I’ve never experienced before or
since.

I was overcome with reverence. And gratitude. To be allowed this glimpse, this
participation in the Holy company, in the venerable dance.

I was overjoyed—filled with wonder and delight. I knew the reasons behind existence,
time, space, goodness, pain—and I rejoiced.

I was struck by the magnificence and intensity of the colors. Everything was
resplendently rich. I never imagined such beauty.

I was struck with a new sense of possibility, that I could be awakened to dozens of
wondrous phenomena.

I was wholly unconscious of what my body was resting on or what was under my feet. I
didn’t know whether the wind was riding on me or I on the wind.

I was wondering at one point if I was living or was this heaven that I had heard so much
about?

I went back into my childhood, back to my conception and back before the creation of the
earth. (eyes closed)

I wept without restraint, knowing that within my heart, love and beauty and God had
become one.

I wondered if I would ever return to normal consciousness. Mostly I hoped I wouldn’t.
God-consciousness seemed preferable.

I would just laugh and laugh. I understood stuff that tickled me so much that it made me
roll around and laugh until the tears would roll down my face.

I would look at an object hard and suddenly it would burst open into a beautiful terrain, a
playground of movement, color, light, warmth.

In a flash, the Door in the Wall would slide open and wherever you were, in a room,
lying on the grass, walking on the beach, would be magically transformed.

In one great crystal instant, I realized that I was immortal. (That doesn’t mean that the
ego is immortal.)

In that illuminated state, I felt completely boundless and free, surrounded and filled with
brilliant light and washed by an enormous sense of peace.

In the garden, everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh light. The world was as if
newly created.

In the woods and by the river, it seemed that my love was so great, it evoked a response
from the animals, plants and even things.

Individual experience became lost and the experience became one of joining, entering
into God.

It became a tactile experience of a kind that overshadowed any love-making I had known
before.

It became clear that these extraordinary phenomena were normal and natural
manifestations of the deeper domains of the human psyche. (eyes closed)

It became clear to me that what I was experiencing was the merging with and absorption
into the Universal Self.

It became unmistakably obvious to me that my workaday mind was only the tip of the
consciousness iceberg.

It began to dawn on me that the origins of some philosophical and religious ideas might
be better understood by a scholar who had ingested and experienced the psychedelics.

It created vast openings of the mind that led to an understanding of spiritual realities and
it was very valuable.

It did not matter what music it was. It was not music as such but rhythmic sounds around
which I wove the fabric of my experience.

It expanded and dignified the soul with a sudden access of glories such as no earthly
kingship could give.

It occurred to me how strange it would be if some inkling of this state drives one mad as
if the mad person knows this state exists and not being in it drives him mad.

It occurred to me that the importance of music was, like art, its power to convey
emotions.

It removed the limitations of my conscious mind, thus permitting me to know the
unlimited force of my underconsciousness.

It seemed ages since the day and the world had looked so beautiful, innocent and
undismayed.

It seemed as if several hours or possible days or even a year or more had gone by and it
was only 15 minutes.

It seemed more real than ordinary consciousness and all of it seemed “revisited,”
something one had known once.

It seemed that everything there is between heaven and earth had been revealed to him,
what Jung called the “absolute knowledge of the unconscious.”

It seemed that I had got an understanding of things which I’d been trying to understand
for a long time, problems of good and evil and so on.

It seemed to me that what I had experienced was essentially and with few exceptions, the
usual content of experience but that, of everything, there was MORE.

It seemed that my senses had been given a kaleidoscopic character which made the whole
world entrancingly complicated, as if I were involved in a multidimensional arabesque.

It seemed to him that the walls of consciousness were opened by an enormous force and
the force thrust him out of time.

It was a day of drenching happiness, a great-day-in-the-morning kind of day, a day of
good cheer, one of extraordinary cosmic blessedness.

It was a fantastically joyous occasion. The magic of love filled the room, and we have
never known such joy.

It was a feeling that was deeper, more profound, more moving, more meaningful, than
any feeling I have ever had.

It was a process that unveiled some of the deepest mysteries of life, mysteries which I
never dreamed could be revealed.

“It was,” according to Huxley “without question the most extraordinary and significant
experience this side of the Beatific Vision.”

It was all perfectly new again, mysterious and of great promise; everything that had once
been could be revived.

It was as if a veil fell from my eyes. The shapes and colors in the room stood out more
brightly and clearly, and everything seemed imbued with life.

It was as if everything were backlit or lit from underneath and not just from the sun
above.

It was like being at the very center of the energy source. It was like being in God—not
just in God’s presence, but IN God and participating in God.

It was like escaping from a refrigerator into the sunshine. I could feel myself coming
alive in that light of hers, that radiating warmth.

It was like looking at the world for the very very first time and thinking how beautiful,
how sensuous!

It was much more real than what you call reality. More real than what you’re thinking
and feeling at this moment. More real than the world before your eyes.

It was not that I had attained anything; it was as if I had just remembered something that I
always had.

It was something magical, something out of another world, which was thrown into this
world.

It was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the
Bill of Rights. (Tell that to the crooked, moronic politicians.)

It was the work of an unearthly builder, and my soul stood before it in a trance of ecstasy.
(eyes closed)

It was time for the old mind to die, so that a new one, with expanded sensibilities, could
be born.

It was very evident to her that there was a Spirit, an entity higher than herself and that
was part of her. She finds that love is communication with God.

It was with this insight that I was born into a new world. A new form of consciousness
had taken over.

It would modulate from beauty and the intense presence of life to love on all levels, the
human as well as the mystical.

Layer upon layer of illusion dropped away and crumbled into nothing. The Final Reality
began to dawn.

Like a blind man newly healed and confronted for the first time by the mystery of light
and color, he stared in uncomprehending astonishment.

Like the flowers, the books glowed when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a
profound significance.

Listening to music with closed eyes, I beheld the most fascinating patterns of dancing
jewelry, mosaic, tracery and abstract images.

Looking up, I saw the stars colored with the same reds, greens and blues that one sees in
iridescent glass.

LSD just blew the frame right out of the picture. It gave you a sense of infinite
possibility. LSD gave us the idea it could be different. It was tremendously inspiring.

Mannikins in the windows were smiling. Liz Taylor on a poster several times gestured
for me to come to her.

Margaret said she felt like a monkey. Not only did she feel like one, she was a male
monkey, and she had an erection, and she felt it and she knows what it feels like.

Music seemed to awaken a depth in me that I never knew existed. With each note, I
seemed to soar to higher heights.

music—The whole body shimmered with the chords. The chords were multi-colored,
vaulting like rockets across his consciousness.

My body was both swimming and flying. I felt gay and at ease and playful. There was
perfect connection between my body and everything that was happening.

My consciousness was taking everything in on an elemental, prelingual basis. There was
no distraction.

My experience was so deep, so moving, so meaningful. What I really discovered under
LSD is love. Some call it God.

My garden embraced me. The trees, the flowers, the shadowed mosses were alive with
tenderness.

My gratitude for the moment when the veil parted and I knew that “I” am so much more
than I thought was so immense that I often discovered myself sobbing with joy.

My hearing was very sharp. I could listen to any one instrument in an orchestra if I
wanted, or hear any one singer in a choral group.

My heart was filled with a joy that was overwhelming, just a beauty and peace that I have
never known.

My little ego seemed removed and I felt that I saw clearly and purely for the first time in
my life.

My life suddenly seemed to me infinitely precious and I cried out with joy at the thought
that I was now living so much in so short a span of time.

My muscles, nerves and bones seemed to relax, almost relent, in a way that was infinitely
right and to be desired.

My pelvis was vibrating as enormous amounts of energy were being released in ecstatic
jolts.

My sensations began to be terrific from the tremendous mystery of all around me and
within me.

My sense of touch became very intensified, the blanket covering me came alive and I
touched my face and felt every particle of my skin.

My senses became extremely acute. I could see an ant upon a tree at a great distance
away. I could hear the whispering far off from me.

My senses were multiplied as if I had a hundred eyes, a hundred ears, a hundred
fingertips.

My sensitivity to beauty was significantly increased and I perceived aesthetic qualities in
most all of the objects that surrounded me, even in the walls of the room itself.

My spirit cried out, or seemed to cry out, “Let me tell everyone this wonderful thing I
know, this secret that explains everything and will bring such rejoicing and happiness!”

My spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object of the
universe.

My state of consciousness underwent a process of purification and became absolutely
pristine and radiant.

My visual field was glowing with a spectrum of colors that had an awesome and
numinous quality.

Never have colors had the glowing, fascinating, delighting intensity that they had for me
at the time.

No saint ever saw more glorious or joyously beautiful visions or experienced a more
blissful state of transcendence.

Not a single color had been like anything produced by man. Every scene had color plus
light plus jewels of such indescribable beauty. (eyes closed)

Now that he was aware of “countless realities”, routine existence had been revealed to
him as “illusory.”

Now that this breakthrough of consciousness had occurred, a new level of harmony and
love was available.

Objects in the images seemed to generate a light of their own and cast off glowing and
pulsating or rippling waves of color. (eyes closed)

Objects were apprehended as “presenting themselves more forcefully” as being less
opaque, more easily yielding up meanings”.

Objects were seen not only with a greater clarity but also seemed to be “more
meaningful.”

Once the God self was recognized and appreciated, all need for arrogance and egotism
was gone.

Once they had eaten the apple of expanded consciousness, there was no going back. The
umbilical cord that tied them to the world of the mundane was irretrievably sundered.

One could only align oneself in the streaming torrent or the turbulence became
overwhelming.

One felt perfect communication going on, a kind of direct interchange. It was like an
intense and overwhelming orgasmic immersion.

Outdoors the world was wondrous, new, alive. Everything breathed and throbbed with
vitality.

Outside at night, the world was transformed. The full moon shone so brightly, it seemed
like a sun.

Peace and joy engulfed me and I knew that the kingdom of heaven was truly within and
that LSD had made this day the most important one in my life.

“Peeling the onion” of my conditioning revealed much that I had unthinkingly accepted
as “the way things are”.

Polished to a visionary glow, the rosy shafts proclaimed their manifest kinship with the
Other World.

Pressure on the eyeball produced alterations of visual perception. (If your eyes are closed
and a light is put just in front of the closed eyes, that will influence visions.)

Random details of my surroundings suddenly stood out strongly and somehow appeared
to be “meaningful”.

red lawn chair—This red color was just about the most beautiful thing I had ever seen,
the way it combined with the shadow and the light.

Scenes involving human forms and architecture began to emerge accompanied by play of
light and color, a “technicolor” of the mind’s eye (eyes closed).

Something told me that if there was any microphone I could use to ask God a question, it
was peyote.

She felt enormous gratitude for her experience and the cosmic insights; she saw them as a
special grace and privilege.

She got in touch with what she felt was pure being and realized that it cannot be
comprehended and does not need any justification.

She was now able to experience herself and the world in a way completely different than
ever before. She had zest for life.

Some torn fragments of party decoration were scattered on the floor and they sparkled,
dazzling black shiny ebony jewels.

Sound was a current that flowed through me and vibrated intensely through the bone
structure.

Spacial relationships had ceased to matter very much and my mind was perceiving the
world in terms of other than categories.

Status and classification appeared as mere superficial differentiation, in the light of the
harmony I saw among all beings.

Strangely enough. I preferred the subtle colors to the bright flowers. They seemed more
mysteriously beautiful.

Suddenly I felt the presence of a strong energy field, as though I were at the center of a
vortex of sacred energy.

Suddenly there was white light and the shimmering beauty of unity. There was light
everywhere, white light with a clarity beyond description.

The alcoholic had experienced vivid scenes from his past life and these had markedly
helped him in seeing the problems that led him to his catastrophic drinking.

The awareness that God was in every nook and cranny of the universe was now so
tremendously increased and so richly fulfilling that a great reverence enfolded me.

The beauty I saw so clearly was not even noticed by anyone else, much less appreciated. I
realized this beauty was God.

The beauty of the trees simply gave itself away. Creation was good and it was an open
secret.

The chair Van Goth had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen.
(That was Aldous Huxley.)

The chair was warm, breathing, alive against my back. The chair and I were breathing as
one.

The Christmas decorations, along with the streets glittered with exaggerated beauty and
the lighted trees in the windows of homes had a fairytale quality.

The city was transformed into the wonderful world I had experienced when hearing
fables as a child.

The colors had become not only more luminous and brilliant, but different in quality from
any color previously seen; they were located outside the normally visible spectrum.

The colors of the sky and sea and mountains were marvelously beautiful in a sort of
shining air.

The colors were not only more luminous and phosphorescent, they were different in
quality from any color previously seen.

The delight and pleasure I received from that orange, the sheer sensuality of it, was
absolutely overwhelming, and intoxicating and…joyous!

The effects on my vision were spectacular. Pigment stuck out of the paintings forming
valleys and mountains of raw, furrowed, gleaming color.

The expansion of all visible things had been growing toward its height; it now revealed it
and to the fullest extent I apprehended what is meant by the infinity of space.

The experience had deeper levels that were mythical and mystical and these dimensions
were intertwined with the physical aspects of Nature.

The experience opened into a world of millions of colors and eventually into images of
swirling galaxies. (eyes closed)

The experience was as big as I thought it was. Others had seen it. The shared wow—the
sacred wow.

The exquisite beauty of this tree was like a window in which you could see the existence
of this Other World.

The feeling was: I was home. That’s really the feeling of it…It was a bliss state. Of a kind
I never experienced before.

The glitter of metal and gems were intensified to the highest pitch of what may be called
intrinsic significance.

The green trees transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made
my heart leap, almost mad with ecstasy.

The hill, half a mile from me, soon came to be perceived as the boundary of the continent
itself.

The house was a stone raft floating in a sea of vegetation. It was Eden. Each plant was
dancing, laughing, a quiet network of high intensity conversation.

The important point was that the tree of my emotions was being vigorously shaken and
liberated of some withered leaves which had hung on it too long.

The journey to the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was
the union of all times.

The knowledge that was suddenly revealed to me under LSD seemed to be remembered
rather than learned.

The light reflections became important, meaningful and mysterious. It had some secret
message.

The light was changing color kaleidoscopically with a different pitch of musical sounds
(Color changes as sounds change.)

The mind was concerned not with space, measures and locations, but with living and
meaning.

The movie I thought was life turned out to be merely the cartoon. (Yes, there is much,
much more.)

The music contributed not a little to my understanding of what had happened to me. (To
be clear, the music contributed a lot.)

The music had an intensity of beauty, a depth of intrinsic meaning incomparably greater
than anything he had ever found in the same music.

The music seemed to lift me with infinite tenderness into the air where I floated bodiless
and weightless, moving gently in rhythm (with the music).

The only way I could describe this state of ultimate cosmic ecstasy was to refer to it as
“diamond consciousness”.

The outside appeared clear, serene and beautiful. I saw things I have never seen on the
road. The trees, grass, colors, sky—all were a real delight to behold.

The precious stones and jewels appeared to have a much deeper meaning than being just
things of beauty. The green light emanating from them was of a spiritual nature.

The radiant colors flooded the room, folding over the top of one another in rhythm with
the music. Suddenly, I was aware that the colors were the music. (the colored music)

The revelation had come. The veil had been pulled back. The classic vision. The
fullblown conversion experience. The prophetic call. The works. God had spoken.

The rigidity of the normal mind was so different from the complete openness of the
psychedelic situation.

The room expanded and contracted in the most extraordinary manner, like an accordion
played slowly.

The scenes were nature in exaggerated excellence, vividly clear, aglitter and lovely. (eyes
closed)

The sky descended and the earth was rising from below and he was soaring toward the
center.

The subject felt that he had been able to recapture a view of his wife that he had at the
time of their marriage and that he understood her better.

The subject had what he regarded as an intensely interesting and remarkable session,
“probably the most interesting 10 hours” of his life.

The sum total of all these emotions, feelings of ecstasy, aliveness, reverence and love,
seemed to blend into the music.

The truly significant aspects of the sessions were entirely nonverbal and nonconceptual,
and slipped through our category nets like water through a fishnet.

The unfathomable beauty and joy was right there, all around, everywhere, just waiting to
be seen and appreciated.

The visible world was wholly real and in no way a deception, but it nevertheless had this
underlying structure which glowed and pulsed like a living force.

The walls moved in and out rhythmically, contracting and expanding in a pulsating
motion.

The waves of the Dance of Creation pulsed all around me and I could no longer refuse to
join the dance.

The whole field of vision of the entire inside of the room would just jolt a little bit and
vibrate a little bit and settle back into still again.

The whole of my being and the world’s existence and history had suddenly made
complete sense to me.

The women changed toward ideal pictures or representatives of the sensuous temptress or
the Madonna.

There came a knowing beyond all doubting, convictions unshakable in their strength, as
if LSD had pulled back a curtain and allowed the light of wisdom to shine through.

There came, suddenly, a living, flesh-and-blood, twinkling face with eyes looking at me
out of each of the little diamonds in the bark on the tree. The tree was like a Tree of Life.

There came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or
immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe.

There was a beatific smile on the faces. You knew that they were transported into some
inner heaven.

There was a sense of having shared something with him in some unremembered time, a
most profound experience.

There was a sea of possibilities out there (in there?), other realities, an infinite array of
programs for other futures.

There was a surging sensation of appropriateness and “rightness” about everything that
went on.

There was an overwhelming and continuous, vibrating, sensuous, erotic-orgasmic feeling
and expression of ecstasy.

There was awareness of unutterable bliss coupled with the conviction that this was the
only real and eternal state of being.

There was full conscious awareness of biochemical processes, cellular divisions and
tissue growth.

There were many dimensions that were far beyond anything that one could produce in
fantasy in a usual state of mind.

There were some unfamiliar faces that manifested, but they were presences I trusted and
somehow, intrinsically knew. (eyes closed)

These drugs tremendously intensified bodily sensations— taste, smell, touch, colors,
sounds, motion, breathing.

These living gems, glowing with internal radiance, encrusted the buildings, mountains,
banks of rivers, trees (eyes closed).

They apprehended real truths, common to all our humanity, and needing but some
instrument of intense insight to bring them forth.

They enjoyed the feelings of supreme happiness and well-being that explain the age-old
power these “sacred mushrooms” exercise.

They had transcendent experiences that have made them aware of previously hidden
areas of existence.

Things the least suspected of having a significance beyond their material agency were
perceived to be the most startling illustrations and incarnations of spiritual facts.

This feeling made me realize as never before that the need for spirituality was a universal
need of every individual who loves.

This is what I realized on LSD. This is our playground and we are here to laugh and
dance and sing in the sunshine.

This moment now is it, eternity. The acid was acting as a cleansing agent, dissolving all
the wholly stuff that got in the way of my direct perception of the here and now.

This new knowledge did not frighten me. It excited me. There was “something very great
about it.”

This was a vision of the hidden life forces, a manifestation of the life within that was
commonly only talked about or read about.

This was color like you’ll never see in your life. It was the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever
seen.

This was interesting, how dimension and color and other things all were mixed up in that
they were all part of the whole pulsating ebb and flow.

This was the most interesting and thought-provoking thing I have ever experienced in my
life.

Thousands of Christmas lights came into view—different shapes and forms and designs
of colors that was of tremendous brilliance and elegance.

Through the richness of her experience, she discovered that the dimensions of her being
were greater than she thought.

Time distortion enabled him to compress a great deal of learning into a short period of
time.

Tingling, vibrating feelings overwhelmed my nervous system and I felt myself lifted
upwards.

To my surprise, all my emotions from that period of my life emerged from the deep
unconscious and became real and vivid once again.

To touch a fabric with one’s fingertip was to simultaneously know more about both one’s
fingertip and the fabric than one had ever known about either.

Under the protection of their evening shadows, the farther water lay like a divine child
asleep, watched by an eternal nurse.

Waves of ineffable happiness flowed through my body. I had experienced the grace of
God.

We all felt that we have achieved the state of ultimate fulfillment; we have reached the
source and the final destination, as close to Heaven as I could imagine.

We climbed the mountain. We drank the nectar of the gods and became one of the elite.
We danced the shaman’s dance together.

We danced in the golden light of space, seemingly into eternity, in a state of bliss
understood only by those who have experienced euphoria.

We gave up using words and were just using gestures and movement and laughing our
heads off. (That was a Hassidic rabbi tripping with Timothy Leary.)

We were changed forever, because we were experiencing these inspiring truths. And we
could laugh at ourselves as well, as we saw through our various ego-trips and guises.

What I experienced was the usual content of experience but that of everything, there was
MORE.

When I closed my eyes, fantastically beautiful and intricate geometric depth patterns
were interweaving behind my eyelids, washing, colliding, streaming by at great speed.

When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on on the
inside of my eyelids.

When I closed my eyes, there was an endless flow of dancing geometrical forms in the
most magnificent combinations of color.

When I was strongly under the influence of the drug were the most important hours of my
life.

When the ego-personality was ripped away completely, what was left was “purest love”
and a sense of oneness with all living creatures.

Whenever I’d taken LSD, I’d always sought a revelation of the sacred. Now I was in the
midst of one. It was a great honor, a blessing, and I felt very humble.

Where had the universe gone? There was no world anymore. The person is not even sure
that he exists.

Wherever a pencil of light fell, between rocks or trees, it seemed a prismatic pathway
between earth and heaven.

With the aid of LSD, I had recognized that God was the whole of this paradise which lay
deep within each person.

With the aid of these drugs, I was exposing myself to the most intense emotions available
to the human nervous system.

Within the domains of visionary travel, I’d now gone all the way toward the beginning, to
my conception, and all the way toward the end, to my death.

Without exception, every object was aglitter and asparkle, like diamonds dancing. All
colors took on the quality of gems, without causing a loss of realism.

wood beautifully grained. I was projecting figures into the grain patterns. One could look
right through the social real grain to a higher order of pattern.

Words came out of their wrappers and said “look at me” and I would look at each word
and I would see things in that word that I never saw before.

You finally get rid of that heartbreak feeling that we carry from childhood. That was the
feeling. I was rid of my heartbreak. My heart was no longer broken.

A dandelion I glanced down at grew two feet high. Everything was magnified. As I
strolled, my attention was wholly grasped by a small dewdrop on the grass. It was utterly
captivating.

A different quality of consciousness came with a rush. The room was suddenly
transfigured. All objects stood out in space in an amazing way and seemed luminous. I
was aware of the space between objects, which was pure vibrating crystal.

A merging. I couldn’t tell which of us was which. I was in her body and she in mine. It
was incredible and when I finally came, it was like no orgasm I ever had before. It was
my whole body.

A professional engineer-physicist who was skeptical about the enhancement of creativity
through LSD was surprised by the “intensity of concentration, the forcefulness and
exuberance” with which he could work.

A sensation of well-being and renewed life flowed through me. The world was as if
newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which
persisted for the entire day.

All identity with self dissolved. There was no sense of time-space, only an awareness of
Being. At no time was there a sense of the individualized self. I never knew when “I”
entered the stream, only the emergence out of it.

As barriers dissolved, it became apparent that we are and always have been part of an
infinite family in an interdependent universal order—a complex web of interconnected
and interpenetrating relationships.

As each design was born and arranged itself, it dissolved and the next one followed
without confusion. These designs were preparatory sketches for entire Oriental cities.
(eyes closed)

As I looked around the room, I saw great bands of moving streams of energy particles
traversing the space, passing through and between myself and the other people. We all
seemed to be part of these moving, everchanging bands of energy.

As I wept with joy, feelings of love became so intense that I knew they could only be of
divine origin and that this feeling was actually God residing within myself and in all
other persons.

As my body was rocked with wave after wave, I lost contact with my feet and my legs. I
began to experience a total identification with nature, as though my body were merging
with the earth, like a tree with roots in the ground.

At last, it came to me that one could never find God by intellectual probing and that
spiritual wealth could be gained only by allowing rich emotions to live within one’s
heart.

At the gas station, the men smiled at me with twinkles in their eyes, and I felt very good,
I saw smiling men’s faces in the sky and the stars twinkling in their eyes. I felt better than
I ever had in my life.

Awareness was not referred to as ego; it was so to speak on its own. For the moment, that
interfering neurotic who, in waking hours tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the
way. (That was Aldous Huxley referring to his first trip, free of the ego.)

Blake saw visionary landscapes “articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing
nature can produce” and “infinitely more perfect and minutely organized than anything
seen by the mortal eye.”

By my calculation, the state lasted about 300 years, for the sensations which followed one
another were so numerous and pressing that any real appreciation of time was impossible.
The rapture passed…I saw that it had lasted just a quarter of an hour.

Completely unrelated events became intrinsically connected in my mind. (Those “events”
were never “completely unrelated” and were always “intrinsically connected” regardless
of whether a person is ever consciously aware of that.)

Cosmic laughter was different from any way of laughing I had known. It came out of me
as though propelled by a force much larger than the person laughing. It came right up
from the center of my being.

Death, instead of being the ultimate end of everything, suddenly appeared as a transition
into a different type of existence; the idea of the possible continuity of consciousness
beyond physical death seemed to be much more plausible than the opposite.

Deep emotions can be understood only after they have been felt. I knew that it was
impossible to communicate them. They must forever remain mysterious, an unsolved
mystery to all who had not had such feelings.

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.

Every atom of my body and soul had seen and felt God. The world was warmth and
goodness. There was no time, no place, no me. There was only cosmic harmony. With
every fiber of my body I knew it was so.

Every human being moving across that porch, every sparrow that flew, every branch
tossing in the wind, was caught in and was part of the whole mad ecstasy of lovliness, of
joy, of importance, of intoxication of life.

eyes open—The colors had become not only more luminous and brilliant, but different in
quality from any color previously seen; they were located outside the normally visible
spectrum.

For what seemed an immensely long time, I dazed without knowing, even without
wishing to know what it was that confronted me. I was so absorbed in looking, so
thunderstruck by what I actually saw.

God, Who had always been so vague and remote before, was now real and near and I
knew that He would never again be invisible to me. Thus, I was given another rich and
lasting reward.

Having experienced the great power within me, having gone back over my life, and
having recognized the oneness of all things, I was ready for the greatest of all
experiences, the oneness with God.

He fell into an inward ecstasy and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the
principles and deepest foundation of things. He gazed into the very heart of things and
nature harmonized with what he had inwardly seen.

He had a twinkle in his eye and a wise, cool way of looking at you that told you he was a
man who had seen a lot and suffered a lot and was still looking for the funniest and wisest
part of everyone he came in contact with.

He remarked upon a gathering emotional intensity, expressing his surprise that such an
emotionally charged psychical environment also could be experienced as “a state where all
that is happening is good and supremely in one’s best interest.”

He was taken back through the evolutionary process right down to single-cell life and
then back up through the layers and strata of oceanic, amphibian, and terrestrial
evolution.

His emotional state was one of “tranquility, a quiet kind of happiness and a security
coming from the knowledge of having accomplished something enormously worthwhile,
of having made some very great advances.”

How easy, I kept saying, to turn whatever one looked at, even a human face, into a pure
object, an object of the most magical beauty, strangeness, intensity of thereness, of pure
existence.

I believed the time would come when each person would be in continuous contact with
the beauty, the great capacity for love, the musical and artistic talents, the spiritual
richness and all the other wealth which now lay untapped deep within himself.

I could feel each muscle in my shoulders and legs swelling, pulsing with power, feel the
hair growing on my limbs, the unspeakable delight of movement, fiber excitement, fierce
ecstatic mammalian memories, delightful tissue recollections.

I don’t know if I can say anything more about this experience. I realized at the time that I
had made it perfectly clear in my books and was only amazed that I didn’t always
understand what I was saying. (That was Alan Watts.)

I felt I had now experienced the grace of God. Truly I had been given a gift of infinite
worth. I could understand why human beings throughout history have relentlessly
pursued truth and sought enlightenment.

I felt that two people who really love can never be separated, not by space or time or
eternity. The line in the marriage ceremony “till death us to part” seemed utterly
ridiculous. (I thought the line is “till death due us part.”)

I felt totally new, as though I’d just been born. Having had so much ego burned away had
cleared and refreshed my spirit. It was a grace that profoundly changed my life by giving
me a reason to override my scientific skepticism and accept the reality of the spirit.

I felt within me the same glorious rhythm I had experienced all day. Now I knew this
joyous rhythm to be no less than the rhythm of the universe itself. I knew that at last I
was beginning to find God.

I found myself discussing who I was, what I was doing, what I wanted from life, what life
meant to me, and a series of questions that I hadn’t been concerned with since I was a
teenager.

I found myself wishing that every living person might be given LSD and see beauty equal
to that which I had witnessed, have the same feelings, know the blessed nearness of God
and that these feelings might stay uppermost in all of us at all times.

I had the feeling that I knew what the purpose and the reason for life was. The feelings
that I had at the time could not be very well described in psychiatric terms but best
described in either religious or poetic ones.

I had traveled through all that immeasurable chain of dreams in 30 seconds. “My God!” I
cried, “I am in eternity.” In the presence of that first sublime revelation of the soul’s own
time, and her capacity for an infinite life, I stood trembling with breathless awe.

I had the most profound experience of my life. From this single experience, the whole
scope, depth and direction of my life have changed miraculously. Indeed a miracle has
happened to me.

I had not realized before to what extent such feelings as rapture, ecstasy and euphoria or
awe, devotion, reverence and holiness or any other positive emotion could reach, its
intensity.

I learned a different way to be. I learned what awe, delight, blessedness, and serenity
were, and recognized them as more than platitudes. I felt as if the good news was being
whispered to me. I was in on a big secret. I was beginning to see what it was all about.

I learned that the brain is an underutilized computer, that normal consciousness is one
drop in an ocean of intelligence, that consciousness and intelligence can be systematically
expanded, that the brain can be reprogrammed.

I looked around the room. Ramakrishna’s statue breathed and his eyes twinkled the
message. Vivekananda’s brown face beamed and winked. Christ grinned to be joined
again with his celestial brothers.

I looked into her mind and I had my eyes closed. Margaret came inside my mind and we
were together there, inside my mind. Suddenly, she manifested herself inside my mind
with a cat face and smiled at me with a cat mouth. I knew I’d always be with her.

I realized that it was not up to us to dictate what the human psyche should be like in order
to fit our scientific beliefs and worldview. Rather, it is important to discover and accept
the true nature of the psyche and find out how we can best cooperate with it.

I saw my world shrink to a micro-speck floating in the eternity of the cosmos and I
smelled enlightenment and was promised answers to the questions I didn’t even know
how to ask.

I saw that we were part of an enormous sinewy archetype, a monstrous rooted and
branching phenomenon, the primordial life force. I could see the buds opening constantly
to new existences and whole colorful worlds.

I spent a long time watching the play of life around me, listening to the gossip of trees,
insects and animals, discovering that there is one biological intelligence that expresses
herself through the various living forms.

I was convinced that if we were to know peace within ourselves, the need for spiritual
development must be recognized, appreciated and stressed far more than it now is in our
culture.

I was deeply enmeshed in an abstract world of whirling geometrical forms and exuberant
colors that were brighter and more radiant than anything I have ever seen in my life. I
was fascinated and mesmerized by this incredible kaleidoscopic show. (eyes closed)

I was lifted entirely out of the world of hitherto conceivable being and invested with the
power of beholding forms and modes of existence which on earth are impossible to be
expressed.

I was no longer as I knew myself to be, a small point of awareness confined in a body,
but instead was a vast circle of consciousness in which the body was but a point, bathed
in light and in a state of exultation and happiness impossible to describe.

I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his Creation, the miracle, moment
by moment of naked existence. (That’s what Huxley saw while looking at a flower
arrangement.)

I went someplace overwhelmingly different that night, and to a large extent, stayed there
for the rest of my life. My transformation didn’t go through phrases. I was simply
somebody different after that.

In several staggered flashes of insight, like flashbulbs popping around a celebrity, I
understood the Cartesian mind/body split. I also understood Beauty and Truth and
Ultimate Reality. Unfortunately, I lacked the words to explain it.

It seemed as if I could distinguish every leaf, every blade of grass. It was like walking
through a fairyland, a tranquil, dreamlike landscape unassociated with anything I had
previously known.

It seemed that there was beauty, in all of nature, animate and inanimate alike and that the
eyes of the entire human race must somehow be opened to this magnificence and thus to
God.

It seemed to me that the feelings of joy, rhythm, appreciation of music and the many
other emotions I had experienced were all part of an intrinsic spiritual power which
pervades the universe, each of them different aspects of God.

It was as though for all of your normal waking life you have been caught in a still
photograph, in an awkward, stereotyped posture. Suddenly, the show comes alive,
balloons out to several dimensions and becomes irradiated with color and energy.

It was the understanding beyond words. It was the place beyond intellect. It is always
there, awaiting our presence, yearning for us to enter the new dimension and cast off our
chains.

It was very evident to her that there was a Spirit, an entity higher than herself that was
part of her. She has found the psychedelic sessions helped her to cut through the layers of
unconsciousness that keep her from realizing her true nature.

Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and
then closing on themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains,
rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. (eyes closed)

“Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” were the words that seemed best to
capture the nature of my experience. I felt free to be exactly who I was, free of fear and
social constraints, and filled with love and compassion for all beings.

LSD had flipped consciousness out beyond life into the whirling dance of pure energy,
where nothing existed except whirring vibrations and each illusory form was simply a
different frequency.

My comrades appeared to me disfigured, part men, part plants. So strange did they seem
that I writhed with laughter and overcome by the absurdity of the spectacle, flung my
cushions in the air.

My consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole
universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they
might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty.

My emotionally heightened awareness saw through the static, one-dimensional, ego-
contracted false front which is the consciousness-contracted reality of the everyday
world.

My exponentially heightened awareness saw through the static, one-dimensional ego-
constricted false front which is the consciousness-contracted reality of the everyday
world.

My identity and awareness seemed to spread throughout the room and even beyond into
the forest outside. This meant when somebody came into the room, as they did, it was as
if they were walking into “me.”

My own personal drama was no more significant than light playing on a movie screen.
Even feelings of joy, ecstasy, and liberation in letting go of attachments were less
important than the insight and sense of knowing, or remembering, inexpressible truth.

My senses were sharpened, sounds were more intense and I could see with greater clarity,
everything seemed very clear to me. Even my sense of taste seemed more acute. Things
began to fall together and make sense.

Never has greater beauty immersed me in its flood. I was so lost in its waves, so
separated from myself, so disembarrassed of my ego, that odious appendage that
accompanies us everywhere.

Old things have passed away, all things have become new. It was like entering another
world, a new state of existence. Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so
clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe.

Perfectly harmonious, luminously alive, the rose was looking at Aldous and Aldous was
looking at the rose. There was perfect communication between the two—and complete
silence.

Seemingly, some element of my former personality had died, but some other part that
was far more vital had been reborn. Whatever it was that wanted to come to life was
important, but I didn’t yet know how or why.

She had merged with and had become the consciousness of the Earth. She experienced
herself as the Earth, as a living, breathing organism. (Yes, the Earth is alive and so is
everything else in the universe, including the universe itself.)

She was all women, all woman, the essence of female, eyes smiling, quizzically,
resignedly, devilishly, always inviting: “See me, hear me, join me, merge with me, keep
the dance going.”

She was deep in a world where color became magnificent music and music became
beautiful colors and designs, a symphony of radiance and sound, a world in which
nothing inharmonious could enter.

Suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in heaven—an inward state of peace and joy
and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm
glow of light.

The ancient days were restored before my eyes and to my ears, and I exulted in the
perception with such conviction of reality that I ascribed it to no power of my own, but
knew it as an exterior and universal fact.

The body sensations were distinctly oceanic. The rushes were like waves and it seemed to
make self-evident the principle that everything in the universe was comprised of waves of
energy at varying frequencies.

The city was transformed into the wonderful world I had experienced when hearing
fables as a child. The rich colors and textures, more real than real, were pure
enchantment. Walls of buildings had an added dimension to their surfaces.

The creak of an armchair, a word pronounced with a deep voice vibrated and rumbled
about me like the reverberations of thunder. My own voice seemed so loud that I dared
not speak for fear of shattering the walls with a bomblike explosion.

The culminating experience was one of transcendental peace, with visions of supernatural
beauty and the sound of celestial music:…Ecstatic feelings of timelessness,
weightlessness, serenity and tranquility.

The experience was highly significant. He comprehended “the essential All-Rightness of
the universe.” (Ultimately, the universe is good and right no matter how bad things seem
to get.)

The flower’s incredibly exquisite petals opened on the room, spraying indescribable
colors in every direction. I felt the colors and heard them as they played across my body,
cool and warm, reedlike and tinkling.

The following day, he was in the calmest, most joyful and most balanced emotional
condition he had experienced in his entire life. After the session, his psychotic symptoms
never reappeared.

The intensity of the love feelings caused sexual hungers and reactions to be markedly
heightened. Intercourse took on such depth of meaning as to have a religious
significance.

The legs of that chair, how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished
smoothness. I spent several minutes— or was it several centuries?–not merely gazing at
those bamboo legs, but actually being them—or rather being myself in them.

The LSD voyage goes out far beyond one’s small private history. My trip was back
through the cycle of being, which, if Jung’s collective unconscious really exists, as I
could now swear that it does, is the recurring history of you and me, all of us.

The mechanistic Newtonian model of the universe was steadily giving way to an
Einsteinian continuum. Everything in the universe, from galaxies to quarks, was seen to
be alive, evolving, sending out decipherable signals.

The part of the mind given to trivial things surely had no immortality and the ego, which
continuously pushed us about trying to satisfy its selfish wants, would be dissolved and
good riddance.

The possibility of transcending boundaries between self and other, the illusory nature of
ego, the interdependence of opposites, the relative nature of dualism and the resolution of
paradox in transcendence became clear.

The screening or selective apparatus of our normal interpretative evaluation of experience
had been partially suspended, with the result that I was presumably projecting the
sensation of meaning or significance upon just about everything.

The sensation was reminiscent of the times I had inhaled nitrous oxide at the dentist’s
office. But that had been like standing at a door. This time, I was going in. It also felt like
going home.

The thought occurred to me that since every minute of our lives was ruled by our
feelings, it was tragic we had so little contact with this part of ourselves where forgotten
feelings lay hidden.

The trees, shrubs and flowers seemed to be living jewelry, inwardly luminous like
intricate structures of jade, alabaster or corel and yet breathing and flowing with the same
life that was in me.

The very heavens seemed to pour open and pour down rays of light and glory. Not for a
moment only, but all day and night, floods of light and glory seemed to pour through my
soul and oh, how I was changed and everything became new.

The walls were vibrating and the air was becoming three-dimensional with psychedelic
trails and energy patterns moving through it. Everything was coming alive with
psychedelic energy.

There was a huge opening in the sky, I saw God. I had a tremendously mystical
experience. I was deeply moved, deeply in love. And when I say love, it’s not like the
level we know from analysis. It was the absence of all anger, the absence of all conflict.

There was more than music: the entire room was saturated with sounds that were also
feelings—sweet, delicious, sensual—that seemed to be coming from somewhere deep
down inside me. I became mingled with the music, gliding along with the chords.

There was only the music and then bright colors that turned out to be musical notes. The
notes danced along a silver staff of music that stretched out from one eternity to another,
beyond the planets and stars and space itself.

There were brilliantly colored geometric patterns flashing across. I could not identify any
one of the patterns. They were varied in shape and size and color and they flashed all
around, everywhere. (eyes closed)

They discovered within themselves that universal river of ecstasy from which flowed the
energy, power and refreshment to revive religious bodies tired out by too much
intellectualism, moralism and institutionalism.

This revelation was more primordial than an encounter with Freudian guilt or Original
Sin. It was as though I’d come face to face with a timeless version of my aboriginal and
innately moral self.

This was a primal surge of unnamed energy, without direction or structure, amazing in its
power. One could only align oneself in the streaming torrent or the turbulence became
overwhelming. (If the ego fights this, it will have a very very hard time.)

This was the chamber of the unconscious where lay recorded all our past experiences and
feelings, race history, universal wisdom, such power and strength and the depths and
mysteries of life itself.

To travel further into the interior would have required a heroism of the martyr or the
suicide. (That was written in 1857 by Fitz Hugh Ludlow. He didn’t have a guide to help
him.)

We felt ourselves get smarter, and looked into each other’s eyes and loved each other for
sharing the understanding that was making us both have these good vibes and this good
smart thing happening together. It was very strong, very high.

We had entered the cosmic state. It was divine. It was expansive and harmonious and
beatific and one. I was alive! For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be
truly alive.

When I closed my eyes there was an endless flow of geometrical forms in the most
magnificent combinations of color. I could not help thinking at this time how a man in
advertising might make his fortune were he able to capture just a bit of this.

With all my being transfixed in the moment that answered the quest of my life, I
shuddered in my soul and with new velocities of divining sight, I saw our universe
sphering on its destiny.

With great emotion, he announced that “this is of vital importance to me” and that he
“absolutely must get to the bottom” of what he felt was being disclosed to him about his
own nature.

A feeling of great peace and contentment seemed to flow through my entire body. All
sound ceased and I seemed to be floating in a great, very very still void or hemisphere. It
is impossible to describe the overpowering feeling of peace, contentment and being a part
of goodness itself that I felt.

Acid taught me a different mode of experience. I learned how to see: how to give
something my attention, to be drawn into it, to concentrate, to see worlds within worlds.
Through psychedelic drugs, then, a few extra layers of perspective were added to my
view of things.

As I stood on the lawn, I noticed that the rough patches where the grass was thin or
mottled with weeds no longer seemed to be blemishes. Scattered at random as they were,
they appeared to constitute an ordered design, giving the whole area the texture of velvet
damask.

During this long journey I saw recurrent images of mandala-like forms. Eventually I saw
life arise on this planet, and humans evolve, and civilization develop to a point where a
person with my Name/Address personality sat in a room and took some LSD and saw the
evolution of the universe.

Every object in the room was a radiant structure of atomic-God-particles. Radiating.
Matter did not exist. There was just this million-matrix lattice web of energies.
Shimmering. Alive. Interconnected in space-time. Everything hooked up in a cosmic
dance.

Everything was beautiful. Everything was right. Each smallest thing was uniquely
important, yet fitted perfectly into the whole. My little ego seemed removed and I felt I
saw clearly and purely for the first time in my life. I wept with relief and joy. I felt
unworthy of such blessedness.

He had an experience of overwhelming cosmic ecstasy; the universe seemed to be
illuminated by radiant light emanating from an unidentifiable supernatural source. The
entire world was filled with serenity, love and peace; the atmosphere was that of
“absolute victory, final liberation and freedom in the soul.”

He started experiencing dramatic scenes that seemed to be happening in another century
and in a foreign country. They involved powerful emotions and physical feelings and
seemed to have some deep and intimate connection to his life; yet none of them made any
sense in terms of his personal biography. (eyes closed)

I became conscious in myself of eternal life…I saw that all men are immortal: that the
cosmic order is such that all things work together for the good of each and all; that the
foundation principle of the world…is what we call love and that the happiness of each and
all is in the long run absolutely certain.

I cannot recall whether the revelation came suddenly or gradually; I only remember
finding myself in the very midst of those wonderful moments, beholding life for the first
time in all its young intoxication of loveliness, in its unspeakable joy, beauty and
importance.

I cannot say exactly what the mysterious change was. I saw no new thing, but I saw all
the usual things in a miraculous new light, in what I believe is their true light. I saw for
the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous, beyond any words of mine to describe, is
the whole of life.

I could feel deeply about other people. We felt connected. The side which had been
suppressing emotions did not seem to be the real one. I was in a higher and higher state of
exhilaration and awareness. Things people said had hidden meaning. They said things
that applied to life. Everything that was real seemed to make sense.

I experienced a thunderbolt of ecstasy and my body dissolved into the flow of matter or
energy of which the universe is made. I was swept into the core of existence from which
all things arise and into which all things converge. Here there is no distinction between
subject and object, space and time, or anything else….

I felt entirely in harmony with myself and the whole world… for a few seconds of such
bliss one would gladly give up ten years of one’s life, if not one’s whole life. (One who
has not taken LSD will find that hard to believe. One who has taken LSD and cannot
relate to that did not have the real LSD experience.)

I felt that I was part of some intricate, unified network that was all-inclusive and eternal
and I felt that in that place I would continue to exist in some form forever. My belief in
the finality of death was undermined by an event that was so real it could not be denied
and I could no longer believe that death was the end of everything.

I gave way to delight, as mystics have for centuries when they peeked through the
curtains and discovered that this world, so manifestly real, was actually a tiny stage set
constructed by the mind, There was a sea of possibilities out there (in there?), other
realities, an infinite array of programs for other futures.

I had a great awareness of life, truth, and God. I went to church and suddenly all parts of
the service made sense. My senses were sharpened. I became fascinated by the little
insignificant things around me. There was an additional awareness of the world that
would do artists, architects, and painters good.

I had come to the conclusion, with all the feelings that I had at the time, that I was
more—more than I had always imagined myself, not just existing now, but I had existed
since the very beginning, from the lowest form of life to the present time, and that that
was the sum of my real experiences.

I had, on that day, entered William Blake’s Palace of Wisdom. He had been there, too.
And, I was to learn later, so had many others. And so can you. It’s our birthright. We are
all supposed to dwell in the mansion at the top of the hill. It’s our ultimate destiny. It’s
cosmic consciousness. Nirvana. Satori.

I learned that I am more—so much more than this body that walks the earth. I learned
that I’m still me, even without a name, a family, an identity, or a body. I almost think that
the body is a prison that holds my consciousness inside narrow limits, to make it possible
to function on earth. Once I was out of it, the limitless was my home.

I looked down below as if from a very high place and saw a rough square of pavement
which had laid out all of Manhattan in miniature, including people. The proportions, the
infinite detail were perfect. The city within the city. We could have swooped down like
gods and lifted up the Empire State Building.

I looked in Paul’s eyes, and every edge, every line, every detail became electric and alive
with threads of color running through it, until the entire environment was neon
psychedelically pulsing crawlingly alive and lit. He looked into my eyes and smiled
inscrutably, as he lit up the environment.

I looked on fields, and waters, and sky, and read in them a most startling meaning. I
wondered how I had ever regarded them in the light of dead matter. They were now
grand symbols of the sublimest spiritual truths—truths never before even feebly grasped,
and utterly unsuspected.

I now felt I had had some direct experience of the ineffable realms of union with God,
and I discovered that my dissatisfaction with conventional religion was not due to the
death of God, as some theologians proclaimed, but rather to the impoverished concepts of
God, currently in vogue.

I never suspected that the ancient spiritual systems had actually charted, with amazing
accuracy, different levels and types of experiences that occur in non-ordinary states of
consciousness. I was astonished by their emotional power, authenticity, and potential for
transforming people’s views of their lives.

I suddenly became aware of the creaking of frogs and then of the chirping of crickets.
The former came from a stream about a block or so away from the house but sounded
very close and I fancied that the frogs had come down to stand before the door and
serenade me.

I suddenly felt that everything was so much more real than it had been before. The grass
was greener, the sun was shining brighter, and people were more alive, I could see them
clearer. I could see the bad things and the good things and all that. I was much more
aware.

I took my wife’s hand and it seemed to me a great force of love flowed through my hand
into hers and also from her hand into mine and that then this love was diffused
throughout our bodies. Her smile, he whole face was beautiful beyond description and I
wondered if I would be able to see her like this when the drug experience had ended.

I understood, at that moment, what the concept of being born again was all about. Jesus
the Christ says in the Christian bible, “you must be born again.” And I knew what he
meant. You must go into yourself…all the way into yourself…to your beginning, your
origin. Into the waters of your unconscious. Into the core of you.

I understood that the essence of my being was identical with the timeless essence of
every living thing, that formlessness was the essence of form, that the whole universe was
reflected in every psyche, and that my separateness was only a illusion, a dream from
which I had, in this moment, fully awakened.

I was amazed and intrigued. I’d learned first-hand how limited our everyday notions of
consciousness are. I knew that the experience had touched something very deep in me. I
recognized a level of reality in the experience that could not be ignored. I wanted to know
more and was willing to take the risk.

I was experiencing an ever-increasing state of ecstasy. This was accompanied by a
clearing and brightening of my perceptual field. It was as if multiple layers of thick, dirty
cobwebs were being magically torn and dissolved, or a poor-quality movie projection or
television broadcast were being focused and rectified by an invisible cosmic technician.

I was not I any more but a consciousness that encompassed a vastly broader spectrum of
reality than “I” had ever dreamed. I was changed, and the new vision so attracted me that
I stopped paying attention to the segment of reality that had formerly held my complete
attention, mainly, the physical plane.

I was not I any more but a consciousness that encompassed a vastly broader spectrum
than I ever dreamed of. It doesn’t last, but once you have known it, you can never forget
that it exists. When the experience becomes integrated into your life, the fear of death
disappears— and we can only truly begin to live when we no longer fear death.

I’d given up even trying to talk. I just smiled at everything that was said to me, and
nodded my head up and down as the words went by. I felt beautiful and saw nothing but
beauty. I was a little child being led and protected by two wise saints. On the perfect path
to all-the-way-up now. Awake, finally, and headed for truth.

In a letter to Humphrey Osmond, Aldous Huxley described a mescaline experience,
during which he came to the conclusion that “I didn’t think I should mind dying, for
dying must be like this, a passage from the known, constituted by lifelong habits of
subject-object-existence, to the unknown cosmic fact.”

In sheer delight, I began to dance on this enchanted carpet (really a lawn) and through the
thin soles of my moccasins I could feel the ground becoming alive under my feet,
connecting me with the earth and the trees and the sky in such a way that I seemed to
become one body with my whole surroundings.

It dawned on me that all the building blocks of the social structure were really nothing
but an imposing veneer that kept you from being godlike, and that as soon as we knew
the true potential of our own energy frequencies to overcome or pass through the artificial
walls, the human spirit could be liberated.

It seemed as though the refreshing breath of some kind goddess of wisdom were being
gently blown against the surface of my brain…So delicate, so crisp and exhilarating was it
that words fail me in my attempt to describe it. Few, if any, experiences can be more
delightful…For me, this experience was liberation.

It seemed that my senses had been given a kaleidoscopic character which made the whole
world entrancingly complicated, as if I were involved in a multidimensional arabesque.
Colors became so vivid that flowers, leaves and fabrics seemed to be illuminated from
inside.

It was a beautiful feeling, a verification of what I hoped would be the ultimate truth and a
hopeful view of creation: Don’t worry about your body or about dying. That’s an illusion.
Consciousness cannot die. To me, this was mind-shattering, the ultimate revelation in my
life.

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.

My consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole
universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they
might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or
two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory.

My understanding of mystical teachings, both Eastern and Western, Hindu, Buddhist,
Christian, and Sufi alike, took on a quantum leap. I became aware of the transcendental
unity at the core of all great religions, and understood for the first time the meaning of
esoteric states.

One could “feel” his “parental heritage” and their contributions to his “cellular structure.”
I knew what in my body came from my mother and what came from my father. I could
feel my mother and father in my body. I felt I knew how my mother’s body feels like to
her and what my father’s body feels like to my father.

Physical distance was not experienced as such. A glance or visual impression felt like a
reaching out and amoeba-like engulfment. One lived in one’s glance, one extended
oneself in one’s visual projection, one lived and traveled with one’s eyes and view. (Eye
contact is very communicative.)

Scenes involving human forms and architecture began to emerge accompanied by play of
light and color, a “technicolor” of the mind’s eye. As the visions grew more interesting, I
could still convey my experiences to the guide, although my engrossment in the
sensations was such that I did not wish to interrupt them for long. (eyes closed)

Science states that all things are in motion; that there are no solids; that everything is in a
gaseous state. The molecules of matter are always in motion. This was what I was
actually seeing. The constant motion of the molecules made everything seem alive The
wall, the table, everything had the same sort of aliveness that the human being has.

She saw the session as a very important event in her life. She felt as if she had begun a
completely new chapter: “I have been EXISTING all these years; I started to LIVE this
past Friday. I honestly feel that I am a new person, with a completely new mind.
Even my body feels different; I am pain free.”

Slowly, I felt the physical and energetic resistance between us give way. There was still a
solid form, but it was now somewhat fluid, like mercury. Then I felt the boundary
between what was me and what was him dissipate, and I merged totally into him. I felt a
complete oneness with him and his spirit, as though I’d gone right into his body.

Somebody brought back sherbet. It was Haagen Dasz and I took one mouthful. It was
absolutely delicious. I thought it was the best thing I had ever tasted in my life. I could
taste every nuance of the flavor and also felt, really felt, the texture as I never had before
in my life.

The essence of what I received that night was a recognition that reality, in its totality, is
something much larger and more complex than will ever fit through the tiny keyhole of
human perception. Technological amplification we might invent, will never begin to
encompass it.

The following morning I felt as though the conduits of my consciousness had been
thoroughly cleansed. Stepping outside was like witnessing the dawn of creation. Every
leaf and flower was polished to a brilliant sheen, the sea sparkled and the air was dewy
fresh.

The landscapes and the architectures in which they live are highly organized, they are
articulated beyond anything which the mortal and perishing sight could possibly imagine,
that they were in some sense super-real, they were more real than ordinary reality (eyes
closed).

The “mechanism” by which we screen our sense-data and select only some of them as
significant had been partially suspended. Consequently, I felt that the particular feeling
which we associate with “the meaningful” was projected indiscriminately upon
everything.

The most extraordinary event happened. Quite suddenly the room, a dingy office in an
old college building, resembled a cathedral of enormous size and beauty. The colors of
the furnishings were incredibly beautiful, full of deep texture and hues I had never seem
before. Small objects around the office were magnificent works of art.

There was simply a pattern of action, of process and this was at one and the same time
the universe and myself with nothing outside it either to trust or mistrust and there
seemed to be no meaning in the idea of its trusting or mistrusting itself, just as there is no
possibility of a finger’s touching its own tip.

There was unity and life and the exquisite love that filled my being was unbounded. My
awareness was acute and complete. I saw God and all the saints and I knew the truth. I
felt myself flowing into the cosmos, levitated beyond all restraint, liberated to swim in
the blissful radiance of the heavenly visions.

This clear-light experience, as Leary termed it, was a true communion of the soul. I felt
as if my consciousness and entire being had broken up with the brittleness of linear ego
thought, while the person that filled the vacuum bore the same body of experience with a
totally new vitality and an understanding of life’s true value.

“This is an experience of life itself, of existence,” I fairly shouted with unintelligible joy
at my state. It was one of exultation, wonder and awe, amazement over Being. I laughed
until tears came to my eyes. “This is fantastic! Beyond words!” That it was—and is—and
ever shall be.

To my great surprise, various interesting scenes started unfolding in front of my eyes.
The persons participating in these scenes were highly stylized and slightly puppet-like.
The general atmosphere was rather amusing and comical, but with a definite undertone of
secrecy and mystery. (eyes closed)

Was I going mad? Did the psychedelics rob me of my senses? No. They brought me to
my senses. The world around me—people, scents, colors, sounds—all was intensified. I
never knew how keen my senses were! And that other sense—the sense of oneness with
all creation!

We were just leafing through the Catalog, and we came across some monkeys, and we
realized that we were monkeys, too. We looked at each other and had a strong realization
of our common ancestry. We could see that the little bits of hair we had sticking around
on us were left over from when we used to have hair all over us.

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.

Without rational thought, the experience had been the solution to my problem of trying to
find God. I could see that when intellectual development is overemphasized, the
subjective part of one’s self, in which religious experiences occur, is usually
undervalued; thus, the feeling of God is hindered by the worship of the intellect.

A curtain was lifted and I saw the magnitude of life and was totally absorbed by it. The
moment lasted just a minute or two, but it embraced a lifetime. I suddenly understood the
cliché of oneness, that everything in the world is connected and part of a Whole, and that
that interlinkage is a truer characterization of the relationship of things than that of me
and my body being separate from all other men and their bodies.

A most beautiful sunset was dying in the west, the river was tinged by it, the very zenith
clouds were bathed in it, and the world beneath seemed floating in a dream of rosy
tranquility. My awakened perceptions drank in this beauty until all sense of fear was
banished, and every vein ran flooded with the very wine of delight. Mystery enwrapped
me still, but it was the mystery of one who walks in Paradise for the first time.

All at once, everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light. Was this something I had
simply failed to notice before? Was I suddenly discovering the spring forest as it actually
looked? It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it
wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of
joy, oneness, and blissful security.

All of a sudden I found myself in a completely new and magical world. The little green
strands of the shag rug were undulating in a most delightful way. The lights reflecting off
the glass coffee table top sparkled with a kind of moist luminescence. The furniture, the
walls, the floor, were all pulsing and undulating in slow waves as if the whole room was
breathing. The rate of the waving motion seemed to be coordinated with my breathing.

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 sense
of total relatedness and involvement, bringing with it a sense of joy, peace and wonder.

Every plant became a kind of musical utterance, a play of variations on a theme repeated
from the main branches, through the stalks and twigs, to the leaves, the veins in the
leaves and to the fine capillary network between the veins. Each new bursting of growth
from a center repeated or amplified the basic design with increasing complexity and
delight, finally exulting in a flower.

Feeling not that I was drugged but that I was in an unusual degree open to reality, I tried
to discern the meaning, the inner character of the dancing patterns which constituted
myself and the gardens and the whole dome of the night with its colored stars. All at
once, it became obvious that the whole thing was love-play. This single source was not
just love as we ordinarily understand it. It was also intelligence.

For the first time, I understood the meaning of “ineffable.” There seemed to be no
possibility of conveying in words the subjective truth of my experience. A veil had been
lifted from my inner vision, and I felt able to see, not just images or forms, but the nature
of truth itself. The doors of perception were so cleansed, they seemed to vanish
altogether, and there was only infinite being.

Glasses started rolling on the table, the bookcase was full of swimming books, the door
bulged like a balloon. The dial on the telephone was a huge pearl-studded wheel. The
shapes and colors of objects got more and more intense, the outlines etched with
luminous clarity and depth. Anything with a polished metal surface turned into gleaming
gold or silver…The faces of other people became clear and beautiful and open.

He had the feeling that his experience and analysis of it were valid and cast serious
doubts on many of his previous philosophical certainties. His doubt deepened as he began
to suspect that the experience which at first he had interpreted as a regressive preverbal
one also could be seen, because of its complexity, as a kind of evolutionary preview into
future post-verbal modes of communication.

I could see that the intricate organization both of the plants and of my own nervous
system, alike symphonies of branching complexity, were not just manifestations of
intelligence, as if things like intelligence and love were in themselves substances or
formless forces. It was rather that the pattern itself is intelligence and is love and this
somehow in spite of all its outwardly stupid and cruel distortions.

I experienced a wave of extraordinary bliss, like a full-body orgasm, and the sense I was
in the presence of something absolutely awesome. Sex is nothing compared to the ecstasy
I felt at that moment. I had no awareness of my body or ego or time, only a profound
sensation of illumination and the feeling I was in the presence of ALL That Is, eternity,
God, whatever you might call something all-encompassing.

I felt welcomed, as though I were becoming a part of the forest, as though it were
enclosing and caressing me as I moved deeper and deeper into it—like I was arriving at a
family reunion and being embraced by the whole brood. There were mythic and fairy-tale
overtones along the lines of Alice and Wonderland or Frodo in The Bobbit arriving at the
Court of the Elf King.

I had the feeling of going deep within myself to the self stripped bare of all pretense and
falseness. It was the point where a man could stand firm with absolute integrity—
something more important than mere physical life. The white light experience was of
supreme importance—absolutely self-validating and something worth staking your life
on and putting your trust in.

I kept getting visions of the “golden dawning” of consciousness in man which would
enable us to get things whole, to see life’s miracles, to know that indeed all is in
everything from blade of grass to man and woman. It was a vision of some ideal
existence in which there was only the sense of wonder and all fear gone, of a certain state
of being that was there not to be judged, but simply to be.

I realized, “My God, every single second is really eternity.” I felt I’d dipped into eternity
and was experiencing a glimpse of it along with a hint of its vastness. I was blown away
by the enormity of these revelations. By now, I was flying so high, I felt I was in an
exalted state, that I was having a mystical experience of the highest order, something I
always dreamed of.

I remember being particularly struck by the joy of hearing music as I never had heard it
before. I could laugh at my old self-image, which included “not being musical.” I was
deeply moved by each piece of music that was played. As I listened without distraction,
each one evoked a different aspect of my psyche, and at the center of each was the perfect
still point of pure being where one could experience union with God.

I “saw”, though that is not quite the word, the evolution of the universe. I felt the various
stages of cosmic evolution, inventoried a thousand planets, participated in the molecular
dance of life. Subjectively, I lived and experienced 10 billion years, feeling it second by
second. My Name/Address personality played no part in the pure consciousness with
which I observed everything. (eyes closed)

I thought about the things I had studied in religion, and about how much more of it
seemed to make sense now. I had somehow touched what Jesus, Buddha, and others had
been talking about. Formerly confusing phrases out of various scriptures came to me and
each seemed perfectly beautifully clear. I became aware of a harmony and wholeness to
life that had previously eluded me. Disconnectedness was very clearly illusory….

I was amused to see the brick walls of a house tirelessly undulating. Fascinated, I drew
near the trees whose trunks heaved and whose bark flowed and pulsated in a manner
suggesting organic growth. Close observation of the bark was astounding. I reminded
myself of the mental patient one sees in films, on the lawn of the institution, drawn next
to the inanimate in watchfulness.

I was experiencing how consciousness manifests itself in separate forms while remaining
unified. I knew that fundamentally there was only One Consciousness in the universe.
From this perspective my individual identity and everybody else’s appeared temporary
and almost trivial. To experience my true identity filled me with a profound sense of
numinous encounter.

I was looking at the furniture as the pure aesthetic whose concern is only with forms and
their relationships with the field of vision or the picture space. But, as I looked, this
purely aesthetic, Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the
sacramental vision of reality. I was in a world where everything shone with the Inner
Light and was infinite in its significance.

I was struck by the thought that since I’d first seen Julia, I’d felt that I’d known her for a
long time. That sounds trite, but what can I say? How else do you describe that feeling? I
simply felt that I’d known her for a long time. I told her so. “You HAVE known me for a
long time,” she replied. “But it was a long time ago.” “In school?” trying to remember.
She laughed and put her cheek against my arm. “In a kind of school,” she said softly.

In some instances, individuals enmeshed in elements of a certain culture felt a strong
need to dance. Without any previous training or specific exposure to these cultures, they
were able to perform complicated dance forms. (The person gets the vision of the
different culture, sees the people dancing in the vision and then he does the dance. Before
taking LSD, the person knew nothing of that culture or its dances.)

It hit, the waves of sensation rippling down the body. The walls and ceilings glowed
phosphorescent yellow, electric vibrating color. The floor was shimmering like lemon
jell-o. Some torn fragments of party decorations were scattered on the floor and they
sparkled, dazzling, black shiny ebony jewels. Orange gems. Walking around the kitchen
joking about the fortune in jewels on the floor.

It was all perfectly new again, mysterious and of great promise. Everything that had once
been could be revived and much that was new besides. It seemed ages since the day and
the world had looked so beautiful, innocent and undismayed. The joy of freedom and
independence flowed through his veins like a strong potion and he recalled how long it
was since he had felt this precious sensation.

It was as though a veil had been stripped away and certain things had become suddenly
self-evident. I realized that there was just one force in the universe. There is only one
energy and that is consciousness. And there is only one consciousness, one mind, and we
are, in fact, one with this, which means we are all one. I felt this was a revelation of the
true nature of reality.

Large trees known for their longevity, such as sequoias and redwoods, were experienced
in the sessions as representing timeless and centered consciousness uninfluenced by the
turmoils and upheavals in the external world. Other insights associated with similar
experiences were related to the mystical consciousness and deep religious significance of
certain plants.

Most of the scenes were oriental—brilliantly illuminated landscapes, strange towers,
pagodas and temples, furnishing the background to exquisite lovely dancers. (That’s with
closed eyes. To be clear, the scenes will not at all necessarily be oriental. They probably
will not be, but can be as in this person’s case and this person might never see oriental
scenes again.)

My familiar reality had cracked; a vast new reality that promised liberation from death
and meaninglessness lay before me. I believed that if everybody saw what I now saw
there would be peace on earth. The demons of hate, violence, illness and war would be
banished back into Pandora’s box. The scales would fall from humanity’s eyes and we
would recognize that we are one, and that we are eternal.

My soul, I learned, is most “into” joy and beauty, i.e., experiences of joy and beauty most
occupied me on acid. Joy and beauty do not dominate my awareness in general—and
never with a comparable intensity—so I treasure these experiences on the grounds of
their rarity alone. They were also profoundly educational. I think I understand the human
race a little better

Now I could hear, as if for the first time, the depth of the wisdom in their teachings and in
the mystical doctrines of all ages and all cultures. As I sought for words to express my
own ineffable experience I gained a new appreciation for those individuals who had
attempted to communicate their own insights in writing or art. I also became interested in
understanding intuitive ways of knowing.

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time and my impression of its truth has
ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational
consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,
parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness
entirely different.

She lay down on the grass in a field beneath a bright sun and soon was living out an epic
of creation in which she identified with “the Great Goddess-Mother Earth”. Her
experience of this identification began when she first became aware that “for some time”
her body had “no longer existed in its usual limited form” and that now she was “one
with the Earth.”

Subjects repeatedly reported that they experienced consciousness of the ocean. On other
occasions, they have identified with what they felt to be the consciousness of fire. Many
LSD subjects also stated that they experienced consciousness of a particular material or
even the microworld of the atoms. (You can experience and/or identify with the
consciousness of anything.)

Suddenly I burst into a vast, indescribably wonderful universe. Although I am writing
this over a year later, the thrill of the surprise and amazement, the awesomeness of the
revelation, the engulfment in an overwhelming feeling-wave of gratitude and blessed
wonderment, are as fresh, and the memory of the experience is as vivid, as if it had
happened 5 minutes ago.

The acid took me directly to my lucid, “higher self.” It was as though I’d arrived at my
true nature: sincere, clean of purpose, and more useful and wonderful than I’d ever felt in
my life. I can’t fathom what it was that made me feel so “perfect” and “enlightened” or
what specific obstacle the chemical had overcome to enable me to feel so wholesomely
fabulous. I felt a sweeping reassurance that everything was all right after all.

The city was bathed in the first pink rays of the morning sun and was truly breath-taking
to behold. The soft greens of the trees and grass of Central Park were beyond belief. The
buildings and streets had a certain warmth and charm hitherto reserved for memories of
bygone days…That evening I was back in my old familiar world but with an awareness
of and appreciation for colors, hues and textures that I never had before.

The dimensions of the room were changing, now sliding into a fluttering diamond shape,
then straining into an oval shape as if someone were pumping air into the room,
expanding it to the bursting point. I was having trouble focusing on objects. They would
melt into fuzzy masses of nothing or sail off into space, self-propelled, slow-motions trips
that were of acute interest to me.

The feelings I experienced could best be described as cosmic tenderness, infinite love,
penetrating peace, eternal blessing and unconditional acceptance on one hand and on the
other as unspeakable awe, overflowing joy, primeval humility, inexpressible gratitude
and boundless devotion. Yet all of these words are hopelessly inadequate and can do little
more than meekly point toward the genuine, inexpressible feelings actually experienced.

The night was all joyous discoveries, many of which brought me almost to the point of
tears, to laughter and astonished wows regularly. Whole new horizons. I felt humbled and
honored to be in a room with and listening to such enlighted powers. I felt in flash after
flash that I’d never been so high before, never so aware and never—at least not since a
long, long half-remembered time ago—so hopeful and happy.

The ordinary world was erased, it was expanded, enlivened and made infinitely more
interesting. For example, I became totally engrossed in contemplating the fascinating
edges of weaving around edges and radiating out from them. The telephone was a
veritable marvel of diamond studded, gem-encrusted, crystalline sculpture, yet itself also
moving, breathing, changing, as if it were alive.

The process I was witnessing in others and experiencing myself had a deep similarity
with shamanic initiations, rites of passage of various cultures, and the ancient mysteries
of death and rebirth. Western scientists had ridiculed and rejected these sophisticated
procedures, believing that they had successfully replaced them with rational and
scientifically sound approaches.

The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and
colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had seen with my
own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing clearly, whereas ordinary vision gives us an
imperfect view. I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the
imperfect images of everyday life.

The world slowly formed…life evolved…the world aged…man evolved…man
aged…thought pulled itself together…slowly…slowly…no way to hurry it along…slowly it
got around to me, sprawled on my back, staring open-eyed into the sun, on a beach at Big
Sur, and them…wham…and I slid right out of existence again, back to the beginning…for
eternities, until I fell into time again and saw the illusion of ocean-sky-sand.

To my utter astonishment, I relived my own conception and various stages of my
embryological development. While I was experiencing all the complexities of the
embryogenesis, with details that surpassed the best medical handbooks, I was flashing
back to an even more remote past, visualizing some phylogenetic vestiges from the life of
my animal ancestors.

What saved me from despair of my encounter with the Nothingness that lies at the heart
of All was the realization that what I had witnessed was the destruction of matter, not of
spirit. Modern physics tells us that matter is composed of atoms that stick together for a
time to form an object—a table, a wall, a human body. Matter is energy; I saw it re-
transformed.

When I realized that I was being born again, that life goes on and on and on, the feeling
was overwhelming. I was filled with confidence that it was okay to die, because the
consciousness that inhabits the flesh has a higher destiny. It never began and it won’t end.
It just keeps going. Then I was struck with wave after wave of value wisdom, as though
the forms behind human spirituality were hitting me for the first time.

While looking at a candle flame, tiny fragments of light began to sputter off the top like a
fountain of fireworks, filling the room with sparkles of resplendent light. It was the first
time on psychedelics that I cried for joy. Beholding such beauty, I felt I was being
welcomed to an ineffable mystery, as I’d finally come into contact with a spiritual
dimension that gave hope to humanity.

With my eyes closed, colorful, ever-changing fantastic images invaded my mind
continuously. It was especially remarkable how all sounds—for instance, the noise of a
passing car—were transported into visual sensations, so that with each tone and noise, a
corresponding colored image, changing in form and color like a kaleidoscope, was
produced.

Aldous had given me a bowl of vegetable soup, beautiful and delicious. When I finished
it, Aldous made a move to take the bowl and wash it. I held on to it as though he were
taking my most precious possession. “Please don’t, Aldous.” The round, white bowl with
little pieces of vegetable was to me the cosmos, round and infinite, punctuated by light
exuding planets and stars of fiery orange and translucent green. Aldous smiled; he knew
what one can see in a dirty dish when the doors of perception are cleansed.

Crying and laughing are branches of the same tree—the tree of emotions. Not two of the
leaves are the same, yet all have the same roots: the capacity to feel and the need to
express those feelings. Whether I was crying or laughing was really not too important,
except on the conventional level. The important point was that the tree of my emotions
was being vigorously shaken and liberated of some withered leaves which had hung on it
too long.

During the experience, I felt I understood what mystics throughout the ages have claimed
to be the universal truth of existence. I had an academic background in philosophy and
comparative religion, but I realized that mystical teachings had now taken on an added
dimension. My perception seemed to have shifted from a flat, two-dimensional
intellectual understanding of the literature, to a three-dimensional sense of immersion in
the mystical reality.

Everything in this universe appeared to be conscious. After having had to accept the
possibility of fetal consciousness, I was confronted with an even more startling
discovery: consciousness might actually pervade all existence. My scientific mind was
heavily tested by this possibility until I realized that although many of these experiences
were incompatible with our common sense, they were not necessarily out of the realm of
science.

He re-experienced his own embryological development, from the fusion of the sperm and
egg through millions of cell divisions and processes of differentiation to a whole
individual. This was accompanied by an enormous release of energy and radiant light.
The sequences of embryonal development were intermingled with phylogenetic
flashbacks showing the transformation of animal species during the historical evolution
of life. (eyes closed)

I discovered within myself a complex inner world, rich in sensibility, symbol, feeling,
and metaphor, not only for accessible recollections of my life and those more deeply
stored in my unconscious, but also for those that transcended my own direct experience.
It was as if the events of my life the lives of my forebears and unknown people from
earlier periods of history and diverse cultures were passing through me. I was both actor
and audience in this drama.

I sensed a complete connectedness of everything. It was obvious to me that all of the
separateness I ordinarily perceived was, in fact, an artifact of cultural conditioning, and
was indeed less “real” that what I was supposedly hallucinating. At that moment, I knew
that I was, for the first time, experiencing things as they are, utterly continuous. There is
no discontinuity. There is not one thing and another thing. It is all the same thing, the
Holy Thing.

That first experience with psilocybin had an immeasurable effect on my life. It was
radically and totally different, yet during the course of the experience I felt closer to my
true self than I had ever been and more aware of my innermost feelings and thoughts. I
had also been fully and intensely aware of people and things around me and did not lose
the reality perceptions that govern our ordinary world. Rather, ordinary perception was
enriched and enlivened beyond comparison.

The perennial philosophy and the esoteric teachings of all time suddenly made sense. I
understood why spiritual seekers were instructed to look within, and the unconscious was
revealed to be not just a useful concept, but an infinite reservoir of creative potential. I
felt I had been afforded a glimpse into the nature of reality and the human potential
within that reality, together with a direct experience of being myself, free of illusory
identifications and constrictions of consciousness.

Thoughts spun around in my head and everything—objects, sound, events—took on a
special meaning for me. I felt like I was putting the pieces of a puzzle together.
Childhood feelings began to come back, as symbols and bits from past conversations
went through my head. The word religious and other words from other past conversations
came back to me and seemed to take on a new significance. I increasingly began to feel
that I was experiencing something like mystical revelations.

A deep “cosmic confidence” pervaded my being. I felt liberated and wholly secure.
A deep gratitude came for the privilege of seeing this divine part of myself and others.
A divine calm swept through my soul.
A door had been opened in my mind and senses that would never close completely.
A feeling of great antiquity filled the room.
A larger and more comprehensive self emerged.
A mellow glory transfused me.
A minute was now longer than his “whole life up to that point.”
A myriad of multicolored telephone wires hummed as they wiggled like serpents.
A new capacity for human relationships was formed.
A new life began for me.
A piece of bark on the tree was magically smooth.
A tremendous, peaceful and soothing joy pervaded every cell in my body.
A vision of celestial glory burst upon me. (eyes closed)
Acid awakened something in me like a waiting genius that I knew was there.
Afterward, I felt I had gone through a powerful experience.
Aldous was looking at my hair and seeing in it the very mystery and wonder of life.
All colors glowed and pulsated.
All colors took on a quality of gems.
All infinity seemed filled with an endless ocean of golden light. Then I saw Him!
All life seemed so infinitely precious that I cried aloud.
All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity.
All of a sudden came a vision that totally clarified everything for me.
All phenomena were greatly enhanced.
All reality was totally present, including the past and future.
All seemed indescribably lovely and significant to me.
All the colors I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these.
All was just color on the finest kind of texture.
All was serenity, ecstasy, revelation.
An atmosphere of fathomless and soul-satisfying serenity surrounded and transfused me.
An increasing feeling of liberation came over me.
As I looked at the rose, it began to glow and suddenly I felt that I understood the rose.
At last, I comprehended fully that the joy which possessed me was God.
Barriers had dissolved.
Beginning with the inmost central part in my organism, the whole universe fell into place.
Being dead was not a problem. I was happy to spend eternity in this state.
Beyond me the view stretched endlessly away.
Beyond time, beyond past, present and future, in religious language, I was in eternity.
books—All of them glowed with living light, jeweled books.
Book jackets gleamed with godliness.
Celestial chords were trembling up into their sublime fullness.
Centuries were lived, yet the minute hand of the watch hardly moved.
Closing my eyes, an increase in the intensity of the peaceful feeling would occur.
Color visions began to evolve into immense vistas of enchanting beauty. (eyes closed)
Colored forms swayed to the music.
Colors became more vivid.
Colors were alive and clear.
Colors were fresh and clear.
Could I hurl myself into the chaos with nothing but my trust in the energy?
Deep within was the thirst for a greater knowing of the ancient Wisdom.
Delightful electrical forces surged through his body, the ecstatic flow.
Depth perception was increased far beyond normal standards.
Differentiation between interior and exterior experience seemed to cease.
Doors to my psyche opened.
Duality seemed to merge into bliss.
Each and every object in sight began to breathe in its own distinct rhythm.
Ecstatic energies pulsated up my arms and rocketed into my brain.
ecstatic vision—For the first time in my life I literally saw “the world in a grain of sand.”
Emotions intensified, changed with lightning quickness.
Entirely new realms of possibility opened up.
Eternity had burst in. Eternity had flooded the gates of time.
Even inanimate objects sent signals, took on meaning.
Even ordinary space was extraordinarily transformed.
Even slight and subtle shifts of facial expression were meaningful.
Even the downtown smog seemed to sparkle.
Evening at last closes a day that seemed to have been going on since the world began.
Every line and color was constantly breathing and mutating.
Every object in the room became a living, mobile breathing world.
Every sense was preternaturally awakened.
Everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.
Everything had a shining quality of newness and eternity.
Everything had vision. (Objects are alive and can see.)
Everything has worlds and worlds of meaning.
Everything I perceived seemed much more beautiful, brighter, alive, warmer.
Everything seemed extremely real and it was nature at her extreme excellence.
Everything seemed fresh and sparkling, exploding into brilliant colors.
Everything seemed new and in a way strange.
Everything seemed so clear and beautiful.
Everything seemed so rich and intense.
Everything shone dazzlingly clean.
Everything shone with the Inner Light and was infinite in its significance.
Everything that I saw and the color of them seemed to be more intense.
Everything was alive, pulsing, everything connected.
Everything was clear and bright.
Everything was crystal clear and exquisite.
Everything was experienced as completely real.
Everything was given a glowing life.
Everything was gorgeous.
Everything was holy.
Everything was quivering with life, even inanimate objects.
Everything was suddenly magnified, extraordinarily marvelous.
Everything was supernaturally clear.
Everything was touched with eternity. Time was no longer.
Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful.
Everything you looked at was pulsing and glowing with divine radiance.
Extraordinary joy overcame me, a strong, a beautiful feeling of eternity and infinity.
Faces became mysterious, stylized, angelic, transfixed, idealized.
Feelings were those of absolute awe, reverence, and sacredness.
Flowers began to flare up and send out flashes.
For hours every sound had its color and form as truly as scenery could have them.
For the first time, his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed.
For the first time, I understood not on a verbal level.
For us, the planet was without Original Sin.
From horizon to horizon there flashed a glory.
From within emerged an archetypal nobility.
Grapes and bananas tasted most delicious in a very rich and sensuous way.
He began to stomp the floor as if obeying some strange internal rhythm.
He exploded into cosmic laughter.
He felt “At that instant, I had contacted the universe.”
He felt certain that something extremely important had happened to him.
He felt clean and marvelously refreshed.
He felt during the experience that he “knew” the other as he had never known her before.
He felt that he was achieving both openness and self-awareness.
He felt the evolutionary process in his body.
He felt there was “a classic quality” in some of the shapes which he saw.
He gave the impression of speaking from within some deep recess of himself.
He had honestly seen the Big Eternity.
He had transcended time and space and experienced “Heaven.”
He had very rich and enjoyable interior visions for many hours.
He has been blissfully united with the ground of the universe.
He hungered and thirsted for the spiritual.
He mentioned a slight tremor experienced as running through his whole body.
He moved into a world that existed in the deepest recesses of his consciousness.
He raved about the beauty. He laughed with joy. He saw it all.
He realized that he wasn’t the writer so much as the messenger.
He said he never felt better or enjoyed food more.
He saw “miracle,” heard “holy music.”
He seemed to be speaking from far away, or from deep inside of himself.
He seemed to experience directly his brotherhood with all of mankind.
He underwent an intense mystical episode.
He voyaged to uncharted realms of his own neurology.
He was far and deep into experience and sensation.
He was going through something very intense, of great importance.
He was graceful to trip with.
He was in total rapture and later considered this vision a grace.
Heard said, “I ascended to the top of the universe.”
Heaven was on the other side.
Her eyes danced when she saw me.
Her face was that of all women, wise, beautiful, eternal. Her eyes were all female eyes.
Her face was transfigured by a kind of supernatural beauty, her body glowed with life.
Her inner conflicts were resolved and “the whole universe fell into place.”
Her inner world was very rich and dramatic.
Her powerful image-energy machine flooded mine and I spun into her head.
His art was inspired by the visions he saw on LSD.
His ego dissolved and he became all of existence.
His eyes expressed great wisdom.
His eyes had a far-away look.
His eyes twinkled as if he had seen the Ultimate Joke.
His eyes were pure mirrors of the soul.
His features showed an unusual mixture of infantile bliss and mystical rapture.
His “trip” to another level of consciousness was “a pure delight”
His visions were vivid in color, always harmonious.
Hofmann observed wild colors in a world without stability or form.
I achieved transcendent sexual fulfillment.
I bathed in the glow of liberation.
I became alert to all sorts of signals previously invisible.
I became aware of almost electrical surroundings.
I became aware that life for me had acquired an added zest.
I became Cleopatra, sensuous, beautiful, experiencing orgasmic ecstasy. (eyes closed)
I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it.
I began to become aware of a growing euphoria; I was flooded with feelings of goodwill.
I began to discover new possibilities within myself.
I bit into a pear and it felt like a storm inside my mouth.
I cast off all restraint, leaped into the air, clapped my hands, and shouted for joy.
I ceased to exist, but could have “looked back on my ego” and answered questions.
I could feel objects in the room without touching them.
I could feel the depth of my love for life itself.
I could no longer feel my body.
I could reach the stars.
I could see a new world, a world I had missed before.
I could see a waterfall which sparkled like a brilliant rainbow. (eyes closed)
I could see an ant upon a tree at a great distance away.
I could see colored shadows across the sky.
I could see the patterns in their psyches.
I could sense energies coming in from outer space and going out from the earth.
I crawled to the chair which seemed so high off the floor.
I danced weightlessly in midair while before me appeared a hundred or more visions.
I discovered trees.
I do not have to have faith that what I saw was true. I KNOW that it was.
I don’t really fear death because I feel like I experienced it.
I dwelt in an inner communion with heaven.
I emerged from this experience moved to the core.
I entered a realm deep in the spirit world.
I experienced an ever greater sense of an eternal dimension to life.
I experienced dimensions of being usually inaccessible to consciousness.
I experienced the euphoric effects of LSD, a celestial transformation of reality.
I fell headlong through my own inner space.
I felt a deep union with God.
I felt a great heart-rending yearning rising from the depths of my soul.
I felt a great peace.
I felt a new connection with myself and with the world around me.
I felt a strong presence of a good spirit.
I felt a vast peace all through me and a sense of secret knowledge.
I felt a whole new dimension of love and compassion.
I felt a wonderful new optimism and a sense of peace and harmony and letting be.
I felt an amazing array of emotions with an intensity I did not know was possible.
I felt as if I could penetrate directly to everybody’s soul.
I felt as if my soul had just been spread all over the universe.
I felt as if ten tons had fallen from my shoulders.
I felt blessed and exalted.
I felt both serene and exhilarated as never before in my life.
I felt buoyed up to a higher spiritual level by some intense mystical force.
I felt clean and strong and peaceful.
I felt ecstatic, saturated with delight, security, joy and especially a marvelous energy.
I felt energized, pure and glorified.
I felt freer than I had ever felt before.
I felt healed, as though I were suddenly touched by God.
I felt His presence. It was so overwhelming.
I felt how lucky I was to be living surrounded by simplicity and beauty.
I felt I could capture the secret of life.
I felt I was home or in true Reality.
I felt I’d tapped into the rhythm all around us.
I felt in touch with a sense of divinity within.
I felt like a surfer riding with great joy the wave of life.
I felt like I love everybody.
I felt like I might come to heaven if I die…I was there.
I felt like I’d arrived at my true self.
I “felt my body” in a completely new way.
I felt my perceptions were being sorted in terms of new and different categories.
I felt myself lifted up and carried off on a current that held the very essence of the future.
I felt overwhelmingly tuned in to the “true nature of things.”
I felt part of an awesome primal hum.
I felt profound empathy with life, strong ecological awareness.
I felt reborn in a transcendent fountain of All Energy.
I felt so great, so free and relieved.
I felt that I had made a great discovery or as if another personality had been born.
I felt that I had uncovered a truth.
I felt that in a second I had lived through a century.
I felt that my energy was somehow merged with the universe.
I felt the bell of truth ring in me.
I felt the blood moving through my veins.
I felt the great oneness of all things.
I felt the life in the earth.
I felt the tingling in my fingertips (often the first sign of getting off).
I felt the warmth radiate from him.
I felt there was a fundamental validity and reality to the experience.
I felt us uniting at the roots.
I felt very good in the deep and profound knowledge of my eternalness.
I felt whole and full of wonder in nature as I remember feeling as a child.
I find it hopeless to describe in language the beauty and splendor of what I saw.
I float down the torrential stream of timelessness, one with it.
I flowed in ecstasy.
I floated through a tremendous heaven.
I floated to the door.
I found a wealth which satisfied all wishes.
I found myself giggling about philosophical concepts of reality.
I found myself hovering over a sort of Alice in Wonderland landscape.
I gazed heavenward, as one fascinated by mystical eyes.
I got deeper and deeper into this state of realization.
I got my deepest and clearest understanding of religion.
I had a feeling of colored musical notes floating around.
I had a funny feeling that I wanted to run across the lawn and play.
I had a major revelation that changed my whole life perspective.
I had a palpable intuitive sense of life after death.
I had a powerful experience of mystical rapture.
I had a sense of discovery, creative excitement and intense, at times mystical inspiration.
I had a sudden awakening to the innermost divinity of all things.
I had a vivid spiritual self that had been there all the time, waiting for me to discover it.
I had an amazing mixture of feelings.
I had awakened from a long ontological sleep.
I had been permitted a glimpse into beautitude.
I had been struck by lively dissonance of its colors.
I had clearly arrived at the pinnacle of spiritual evolution.
I had experienced enough to realize there was much remaining to be explored.
I had experienced unexpected, impressive things.
I had ideas and experienced feelings entirely new to me.
I had known the living spirit of nature.
I had my acid glasses on.
I had never dreamed that such heavenly beauty was available to mankind.
I had never felt as close to nature before.
I had never felt myself to be so liberated.
I had never felt this wonderful before.
I had never heard music in this manner before.
I had never known what awe was.
I had never seen it so clearly before.
I had not known that one could love with such intensity.
I had seen the enameled meads of Paradise.
I had the feeling that I had reached infinity.
I had uncovered forgotten emotions and experiences of unbelievable reality.
I had very clear images with my eyes closed.
I hadn’t felt so at home in the world since I was a little child.
I have never seen such color before.
I heard, saw, felt, smelled and tasted more than ever before.
I kept getting these wonderful feelings, all through my body.
I knew beyond the shadow of any doubt that there was a divine spirit behind all creation.
I knew that the rich emotions I had experienced held some deeper meaning.
I knew the meaning of things I never comprehended before.
I knew that this was the truth.
I laughed internally.
I laughed so hard that I wound up crying.
I laughed with intense pleasure.
I lay in the grass, felt its wondrous texture.
I lay on my back stunned, amazed and euphoric.
I leaped into the unconscious and began the exploration of my subterranean landscape.
I looked at my watch and forgot what time was.
I looked at the trees for the first time, really looked at them.
I looked deep into her eyes.
I looked into endless depth and felt the powerful pull of eternity.
I looked speechlessly into heaven.
I moved into an undiscovered country.
I moved through a world that was beautiful and intensely interesting.
I never experienced anything quite so overwhelming in my whole life.
I noticed color and beauty where I had never seen it before.
I opened my eyes. I was in heaven.
I passed through the levels of reality between the material world and pure energy.
I penetrated into the true nature.
I perceived much more clearly than ever before.
I realized that the old occult traditions really must have a basis in reality after all.
I rediscovered love.
I rolled around the floor trying to avoid going downstream.
I sat there a part of Einstein’s equation, seeing it all.
I saw a city of light.
I saw a gleaming, blinding light with a brilliance. I knew that I was looking at God.
I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
I saw colors I never experienced before.
I saw Eternity.
I saw images coming out from a shiny spot on the wall.
I saw light in the form of a river blazing with radiance.
I saw others distorted, as if I was focusing on the dominant quality of each.
I saw temples in all the colors of precious stones illuminated from within. (eyes closed)
I saw that I didn’t need any answer to the mystery of life because there is no question.
I saw that I, like everyone, was linked to this one mind and that it was beautiful.
I saw the design of the universe, the blueprint of evolution.
I saw the sun so close I could touch it.
I saw the universe through new eyes.
I saw what “a perfectly wonderful world” it all was and that there was a “central being.”
I seemed to take off my body and sit in my soul.
I slept as I have not slept since childhood.
I slipped back into forever where I didn’t exist.
I started noticing that the objects around me were endowed with awesome energy.
I started to experience a most fantastic happiness.
I stood overwhelmed by the vision.
I surrendered to the ancient process and felt the embracing union.
I swam into the kitchen.
I thought, “This is the truth behind all religions.”
I wanted not to speak, only to experience it silently.
I wanted to bring myself closer to the higher sources of life.
I wanted to get back to the world where heaven was real.
I was able to detect which note came from one violin and which from the other.
I was an angel ascending to heaven.
I was astonished by the emotional power, authenticity and transformative potential.
I was aware of a higher sphere.
I was awed by the vast range of consciousness.
I was back at the beginning of creation. I experienced what the myths of creation tell us
I was beyond the hold and protection of a body.
I was conscious of immense joy, incredible bliss.
I was conscious of my brain as alive, cells incredibly active.
I was convinced that I’d seen the answer.
I was deeply touched.
I was elevated to a higher level of existence.
I was enjoying a new feeling of love.
I was entering into another dimension of existence.
I was eternally in trip time.
I was ever aware that beauty was God.
I was experiencing a state of inner peace and serenity.
I was filled with a genuine sense of profound hilarity.
I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.
I was finding a wonderful new sense of completely trusting someone else.
I was free from all traces of suffering.
I was godly and eternal.
I was having the ride of my life.
I was immensely grateful that I was able to have this experience.
I was literally experiencing the world as a child would and I loved it.
I was melting into that iridescent current of divine love.
I was more alive than I’ve ever been in my life.
I was more aware of the exuberance of nature.
I was moving and living in another time dimension.
I was not…listening to a recording, but…was the music itself.
I was now all consciousness.
I was now opening up like a tender flower.
I was overcome by the remarkable brilliance of the colors.
I was overwhelmed by the sheer bliss.
I was overwhelmed to find myself still in existence.
I was ready. But not for what I experienced! It was awesome!
I was relaxed within, my senses unguardedly open to their surroundings.
I was so exalted by life that I felt I was not touching the ground.
I was suddenly confronted with something so much greater than oneself.
I was suffused with feelings of excitement and pleasure.
I was swept away by every conceivable variety of pleasant emotion.
I was taken to another world, another time.
I was transcended to a magical realm.
I was undergoing radical transformations.
I watched in rapture, thinking there had never been such beauty.
I went for a walk and literally discovered the world.
I wondered whether I would be able to unbutton my pants.
I wondered why I had not comprehended meanings which now seemed so obvious.
I would just feel that vibe wash through me and light up all my electricity.
I’d recovered the sort of Nutcracker Suite universe of the four year old.
I’d turned into the cosmic harmony.
In a photograph, the oranges and yellows of the leaves were vibrant and luminous.
In an instant he now saw all.
In religious language, I was in eternity, beyond time.
In their enthusiasm, they returned from the Other World with a childlike energy.
Incredible amounts of energy seemed to be flowing through his entire body.
Insights came to me like comets flashing across the dome of my consciousness.
Instead of just my ears hearing the music, all my senses seemed to encompass the sound.
Instead of looking at a painting, I was climbing into it, almost through it.
It cleaned me like a bath in my mind. I felt clean and good.
It danced and sparkled. (This can refer to anything seen.)
It deepened my sense of reality. In fact, it blew it out of the water.
It did indeed induce a flight, but instead of fleeing from reality, I flew more deeply into it.
It had been a real epiphany, a revelation of God.
It had to be seen and felt to be believed, to be understood.
It looks like the ceiling opens up and God looks in.
It opened for me a cheering sky of hope.
It opened the Pandora’s box of the unconscious.
It opened up a gate that has been closed for a long time.
It revealed to me new and uncharted areas of the human unconscious.
It seemed as though the bottom had fallen out of the universe.
It seemed that I had no boundaries and was reaching into infinity.
It seemed to me that each object had somehow been touched by God’s sublime Presence.
It seems I fused with the music and was transported on it.
It snowed a pristine blanket of renewal.
It taxed my spirit to the limit.
It was a great warm and glowing feeling.
It was a profoundly moving, real and deeply meaningful experience.
It was a very deep, emotional trip.
It was a world where miracles were possible, acceptable and understandable.
It was all perfectly new again, mysterious and of great promise.
It was all so clear. So startlingly, so simply clear!
It was all so real and new.
It was an adventure in entirely new audio-visual sensations.
It was an experience of self-recognition which opened my eyes.
It was another world: magnificent, vibrant, joyous, dynamic.
It was as if parts of my brain “awoke,” which had been dormant.
It was as if we witnessed the essence of creation. It was extraordinarily beautiful.
It was as though an ancient truth had been revealed to me.
It was as though he had just put on his first pair of glasses.
It was breathtakingly beautiful.
It was dramatic.
It was extraordinarily therapeutic.
It was good. A new kind of good.
It was inexpressibly wonderful.
It was like my mind was a searchlight that reached out into space for thousands of miles.
It was like walking into some enchanted, magical forest kingdom.
It was magic, far-out beautiful magic.
It was not only bliss, it was also understanding.
It was now given to see in their own light, the truths.
It was possible to look out and see and participate in the entire cosmic drama.
It was straight telepathic communication. I was in his mind, he was in my mind.
It was the classic visionary voyage and I came back a changed man.
It was the most satisfying experience of my life.
It was the richest event of my life.
It was total experience, with all the senses opened wide.
It was tremendously erotic.
It was truly the most beautiful and fulfilling day of my life.
It’s an experience of great beauty. I cried for joy.
It’s like seeing things for the first time. It’s like a renaissance, a rebirth of the mind.
Joy overflowed the mind and invaded the body.
LSD gave a sense of bliss and oneness with life.
LSD magnified the environment.
LSD opened exciting new perspectives and interesting possibilities.
LSD opened up paths of thinking that I never knew existed.
Legends came to my consciousness.
Looking at the cards, the shadings suddenly became very meaningful.
Looking from behind the ego, it was a big joke seeing how seriously the ego takes it all.
Love glowed from his face.
Magnificent galaxies tempted me with their majestic silence and staggering beauty.
Magnificent, I never really saw color before
Meaning after meaning became strikingly clear.
Mr. C. was a Leyden-jar of laughter, charged to the limit.
More and more luxuriant grew the sunset as we breathed the air of the open country.
music—The sound flowed through every fiber of my body.
My aesthetic sensibilities were profoundly enhanced.
My awareness had moved far beyond our ordinary so-called real world.
My body felt elastic and full of energy.
My book-learning expectations had been replaced by the real thing.
My breathing and train of thought had a strong correlation with the music.
My consciousness expanded and reached cosmic dimensions.
My consciousness seemed to explode into cosmic dimensions.
My consciousness seemed to rise into a wonderful limitless space.
My consciousness was overwhelmed by a kind of primordial power.
My cosmic odyssey went on and on.
My emotions became so overwhelming that they cannot be put into words.
My essence transcended my physical being.
My experience seemed to acquire incredible depth and breadth.
My eyes penetrated farther and farther into the immensity.
My field of vision fluctuated.
My field of vision swayed before me.
My fingertips discharged a pringling, vibrating current.
My husband’s red plaid shirt was glowing with a peculiar intensity.
My intellect was seriously tweaked. I learned how much I didn’t know.
My interest in altered states had been awakened.
My lungs were bursting with the joyful song of being.
My mind penetrated into some of its own kingdom.
My mind was floating blissfully.
My new freedom was intoxicating. It was as if heavy chains had fallen from me.
My old foundation had been eaten away by acid.
My soaring consciousness expanded.
My thoughts became crystal clear.
My visual environment was progressively clearer and clearer.
My visual field showed a glow and I had a sense of peace, tranquility and eternity.
My watch, I knew was in another universe.
My whole body was pulsing with new energy. I relaxed into this orgasmic vitality.
Never was the sky so blue.
New circuits of the brain were open.
New dimensions of my mind were coming into being.
No spectacle had ever affected him with such a magic spell.
Nothing material was mingled with this ecstasy; no terrestrial desire marred its purity.
Now I know why the fairy tales are full of jewels.
Now I saw with an inside view.
One could not only see the beauty of the natural landscape but also feel it.
One felt one’s body to be super charged with energy.
One moment of clock time can be an eternity of ecstasy.
One pot was so well endowed with divinity that I wouldn’t come closer than 4 or 5 feet.
Ordinary remarks seemed to reverberate with double and quadruple meanings.
Our eyes met and engaged in an eternal, nonverbal exchange.
Our lovemaking had a new depth of meaning.
Overwhelming sensations were seemingly continuous.
Peace filled my world, a peace which had seemed to evade me since childhood.
People looked familiar, even those I didn’t know.
People who walked into the room were really walking around in my mind.
Perceptions changed from moment to moment with intensive decidedness.
Perfect beauty abounded.
Play was played eternally.
Reading, the words ran into one another and changed shapes.
Red-violet roses were of unknown luminosity and radiated in portentous brightness.
Revelation upon revelation came.
Rich and extraordinary imagery appeared. (eyes closed)
Sensations were acute. I heard, saw, felt, smelled and tasted more fully than ever before.
Shapes and colors intensified.
Shapes glistened and sparkled with such diamonds as to be unimaginable in splendor.
Shapes were shifting and layers were coming off of things.
She experienced a beautiful, warm, nourishing, golden glow.
She experienced the stages of species evolution.
She felt a new emotional freedom.
She felt like she was being carried upward and held by the music.
She gained emotional freedom.
She had a beautiful aura.
She had experienced the unity of all existence.
She had mysterious, dancing eyes and she was a turn-on and very sexy.
She looked ineffably beautiful.
She looked mythic.
She radiated energy.
She relived with intense emotion past events.
She saw that everyone is connected to Spirit.
She saw the whole universe laid out before her.
She smiled a mystic smile.
She underwent a profound spiritual transformation.
She was experiencing ecstasy and transcendental bliss.
She was tapping genuine levels of cosmic wisdom.
Slowly, the music seemed to absorb all my consciousness.
Somewhere, time was passing.
Soul-shaking emotions took over, each seeming more intense than the previous one.
Sounds were translated into vivid colored images.
Sounds were transposed into visual sensations.
Space expanded.
Space was converted into flowing process.
Space was irregular, a space that expanded and contracted.
Space was perceived in a totally new and almost intriguing perspective.
Staring out the window, Ginsberg found himself staring into the depths of the universe.
Stars in the sky seemed to have special significance.
Suddenly, his whole psychic field of consciousness erupted.
Suddenly, I felt my entire spirit come up out of the inside of me.
Sweeping across the heavens came the gold of love and God, rich beyond imagining.
Temples and gardens, fountains and vistas stretched continually. (eyes closed)
Temples and gardens, pyramids and unearthly rivers began to float along. (eyes closed)
The air seemed washed to sparkling cleanliness.
The air was clean and crystalline. He felt cleansed and reborn.
The air was filled with curving color webs.
The air was fresh and clear.
The beautiful visions were the stimuli for spiritual emotions.
The beauty was so intense that I sobbed.
The boundaries of my mind opened.
The broadest scope of vision which was possible was now ours.
The city seemed to stand in Eden or to be built in heaven.
The colors in the room were vibrating, alive, glowed.
The colors were sumptuous, rich and bright.
The combined emotions were so overpowering.
The deepest level of the experience was purely spiritual.
The different colored lights meant things.
The dimensions of being I entered surpassed the wildest fantasies of my imagination.
The dimensions of the room were changing.
The drug released such a flood of new thoughts and perceptions.
The earth itself was reborn for me. I watched it dance and danced with it.
The effect was dazzling.
The emphasis was on experience and feeling (not verbal talk).
The entire experience seemed charged with value and significance.
The entire world seemed to shimmer with a beautiful radiance.
The experience opened up into an experience of oceanic bliss.
The experience seemed to satisfy every human want, physical or spiritual.
The experience unfolded range upon range of reality I hadn’t known existed.
The experience was fantastically extraordinary.
The experience was genuine, a view of what was possible.
The experience was so tremendously blissful and enlightening.
The experience was intense and highly emotional.
The extreme beauty invaded consciousness like a vision from heaven.
The exultation was pure and holy.
The fall colors were a blaze of glory (fall meaning autumn).
The feeling I received was so true I couldn’t deny it.
The floor seemed to tilt and roll.
The flowers trembled on the brink of being supernatural.
The garden acquired an atmosphere that was distinctly exotic.
The girl turned into a presence, magic and mysterious.
The gleam flashed on me with increasing radiance.
The going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance.
The grass, bushes and trees outside my window glistened with a strange beauty.
The grass was the greenest I had ever seen.
The great radiance filled the sky.
The home and youth of the soul was everywhere and nowhere, the union of all times.
The inward journey deepened.
The intensity of all emotions increased to overpowerful proportions.
The intensity of the colors was beautiful.
The joy of freedom and independence flowed through his veins like a strong potion.
The knots in her “mind and brain” became “untangled.”
The leaves of the trees and shrubs were arabesques of marvelous complexity and clarity.
The light aroused me.
The light grew brightly. The understanding deepened.
The light sparkling from the cars was as beautiful as anything I had ever seen.
The moon and stars were nearer and leaping on the sky.
The multicolored mosaic of space seemed to stretch.
The music became very profound, or my feeling became so.
The music burst through the walls and overwhelmed him.
The music carried and sustained me.
The music flowed through me.
The music he had heard a hundred times before, had been reborn.
The music pulsed through me, striking my very organs at their core.
The music rolled on in orgiastic waves of sound and color.
The music seemed more beautiful than any kind I had ever heard before.
The music seemed multidimensional, very beautiful.
The music seemed to take over the direction of the experience.
The music sounded divine.
The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments.
The music wove me into a cocoon and I burst out as a butterfly.
The natural processes such as rain, wind, and fire had mystical dimensions.
The nature of the infinite was realized by the mind.
The object on which I concentrated became a radiance of pure light.
The object psychically glowed. It seemed shiny to me and had a good clean vibe.
The paintings seemed suffused with a crystal light.
The past was the property of another life. (It’s a new life now.)
The pavements were a mosaic of dancing leaf-shadows.
The psychedelic experience signified the reality and the beauty of the flower of the spirit.
The radiant colors flooded the room.
The random patterns of blades of grass in a lawn appeared to be exquisitely organized.
The range of my vision was vastly expanded.
The reality I knew had cracked and through the cracks shone another order of reality.
The red necklace of my assistant took on a luminous sparkle.
The red stool throbbed.
The relationship of each being to the whole was somehow religious and also sexual.
The rhythm of the music became outbursts of beauty.
The room almost began to melt and flow.
The room breathed.
The room grew suddenly brighter and I took this as a sign that I was close to the truth.
The room had taken on new meaning for me.
The room seemed to shimmer. The world shimmers.
The room took on a unique flavor.
The room was celestial, glowing with radiant illumination.
The room was full of a great glory.
The rose came back into my life.
The sacrament had unlocked the door.
The sensation I now experienced was new.
The sensation of falling was similar to that of soaring.
The sky was more deeply blue than ever.
The spiritual path was the center of his life.
The stars are as big as huge diamonds—gleaming, sparkling, singing.
The stars were awesome.
The stars were dancing in vibration to the sound.
The stove, chairs, bottles—I bowed to each of them.
The stream broadened and grew glorified.
The substance of a thing was both seen and felt through the visual perception.
The subtle colors of the loose earth and dead leaves were rich and wonderful.
The sun was sending a thrill of light.
The sun was shining with a brightness that seemed almost supernatural.
The telephone set was wiggling and juggling like a demented jellyfish.
The total atmosphere was definitely paradisal and heavenly.
The tranquility and the vibrations were healing.
The tree assumed a deep archetypal meaning and became the Tree of Life.
The trees had faces and low-reaching arms. Trees seemed to sway.
The trees seemed as alive as the animals.
The trees, shrubs, flowers and lawn took on a transcendent beauty.
The trees waved at us.
The trees were sparkling with gold.
The trip had been SO interesting and ecstatic.
The trip was full of life and joy.
The ultra sensuality of this of this plant was overwhelming. I was floored.
The underlying qualities of being were universal.
The undulations of the curtains became the Ballet of the Flowing Folds.
The universe was experienced as living and not a dead machine.
The vision changed my life.
The vision had intense emotional resonance.
The vision was primal.
The visions were influenced in content by the music.
The visions were perfectly clear.
The vistas through the shrubbery were magically intriguing.
The whole cosmos broke loose around me.
The whole world was my body.
The women’s necklace and rings and bracelets came alive with glittering reflections.
The wood was a gorgeous, rich golden color.
The woods were vocal with heavenly music.
The world looked to me like it must to a little child, all big and beautiful.
The world turned into an orgy of color, a rainbow symphony.
The world was full of promise and hope.
Their beauty made me drunk with ecstasy.
Their minds were enlightened in an immediate experience of eternal life.
There seemed to be a pulsation, vibration within all objects.
There was a bright, radiant glow about Anniel’s face.
There was a clear awareness.
There was a feeling of knowing everything there is to know.
There was a heavier dimension to all this than I had realized before.
There was a psychic link between us.
There was a sense of buoyancy—an inexpressible joy.
There was a tempo, but no time.
There was an uncanny stillness and purity of presence in the moment.
There was full awareness of biochemical processes, cellular divisions and tissue growth.
There was joy in the wash of tears.
There was just the Great Divine, ineffable yet tangible.
There was mystery in the air.
There was no question that magic was real.
There was no time, no place, no me. There was only cosmic harmony.
There was nothing but God.
There was overwhelming significance in all this.
There was raw emotion in the room. Suppressed feelings came to the fore.
There was revelry within.
There was such a bright and dazzling radiance.
There was the sense that the world has no greater claim to substance than does a dream.
There were fantastic energy flows and information flows going through me.
These drugs tremendously intensified bodily sensations.
They became aware of the nature of the unconscious.
They discovered within themselves that universal river of ecstasy.
They experienced a deep inward change in their spiritual awareness.
They felt keener and more refreshed.
They had felt themselves to be in a rare state of accord and understanding.
They laughed in ecstatic revelation.
They said that they felt themselves “reborn” to a new sense of unity and harmony.
They stepped beyond the restrictions of their usual state of awareness.
They were all high on the magic.
They were shocked by the power and complexity of LSD.
Things felt more sacred, more intense and indescribably wonder-filled.
Things I had read and passed over before now took on a new and psychedelic dimension.
Things moved toward and away from me as though on waves.
This awareness was sudden but timeless.
This incredibly rich and complex experience lasted for what seemed to be eternity.
This inner letting go would ultimately liberate him.
This self-evidently was the mind’s natural state.
This tour was the most extraordinary journey of my life.
This vision had a sort of archetypal or mythic quality. (eyes closed)
This was no evasive flight from, but a deep probe into reality.
This was the fulcrum moment of eternity. God was present.
This wisdom was of a mystical nature.
Trees waved their slender limbs in invitation. Flowers winked.
Throbbing currents moved through my body.
Throughout everything, the music seemed an intrinsic part of the experience.
Twilight deepened.
Under LSD, childhood memories emerge which are relived with intense emotion.
Under LSD. I relived the strongest, most intense emotional experiences conceivable.
Unimaginable depth and range of sensations filled my entire being.
Uninhibited release of emotion can be immensely liberating.
Unrecognized sources of wisdom did seem to be set free by the drug.
Viewing the herbs and grass of the field in his inward light, he saw into their essences.
Visions of Paradise, universal truths and enormous insights were all experienced.
Vistas opened.
Walls, ceiling, floor and furniture sparkled virginally.
Walls of buildings had an added dimension to their surfaces.
We could see with the miracle of LSD vision.
We resumed our divine dance, effortlessly, timelessly, in tune with the pulse of the house.
We saw the multiple facets of our potential.
We walked around the garden together. It was like walking in Paradise.
We were again able to speak silently, heart to heart.
We were having visions together.
We were loving and the vibes were getting very intense.
What I was experiencing now was new and very exciting.
What the initiate experienced was “new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition.”
When he closed his eyes, the color dazzled him.
When the experience ended, he felt that some of his conflicts had been resolved.
Whenever I looked at my watch, I was always amazed that so little time had passed.
With ecstasy, the whole soul drank in revelations.
With the completest understanding, I saw the center of creation.
Without being a mathematician, I understood the infinite.
Words would come up from the paper toward me and then recede.
Your childhood began to unreel before your inner eye. (eyes closed)

as though one had stood before the Infinite in profound humility, overwhelmed by
feelings of awe and reverence

aware that I was not myself, but a selfless, egoless, joyous representative of all humanity,
loving, searching and soaring into the infinite

became a giant and was afraid the room wouldn’t be able to contain him, afraid his
expanding body might crush the guide’s body

became aware of fantastic dimensions of being, all of which possessed a profound sense
of reality

burst through the shell of language and convention into the country of the real under
impetus of the psychedelics

confronted by a chair, which after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I
recognized as a chair

contacted an Energy or an Intelligence that seemed to deserve the description
superhuman

contacted the molecular energies within the cellular structure, experiencing the “inner
light”

developed an affirmative attitude toward the totality of existence and a general
acceptance of whatever happens in life as being ultimately all right

discovered in her first experience that life is about expressing what she calls the Real
Self, a concept which she had not previously explored

dwindled to molecular proportions and was afraid of falling through the vast spaces
between the atoms, wanted to cling to the arm of the guide

encountered surpassing states of awareness and returned with the conviction that they had
attained the truth

experienced a breath of timelessness, liberation from the past and the future, blessedness
through being completely here and now

experienced an intense white light followed by a massive intellectual and moral
illumination

experienced that expansion of feeling, a new mental amplitude difficult to describe but
quite intense

experienced the rapid kaleidoscopic flow of images, visions, insights and ideas of another
world (eyes closed)

felt that this experience was a stage that everyone would have to go through one way or
another in order to reach a higher

had a very real insight that their existence is part of an intricate, interconnected cosmic
order

had an intensity of beauty, a depth of intrinsic meaning, incomparably greater than
anything he had ever found in the same music

had opened my eyes to beauty such as this world has never seen and to God (“This
world” means the so-called “real world” of ego, without LSD)

had opened new vistas to my experience and has hinted at many other realms yet to be
explored

had unitive states in which you melted into the cosmos and felt yourself to be part of an
interconnected web of consciousness

had visions of crystals, diamonds, jewels, ornate goblets and chalices in beautiful colors
and supernatural radiance (eyes closed)

image after image after image, flowing in succession more rapid than I would have
wished, but all exquisitely detailed and with colors richer and more brilliant than those
either nature or the artist has yet managed to create (eyes closed)

introduced to unfathomable realms within, new awarenesses and undiscovered
possibilities

jokingly complained about “constantly being tickled by fishes (a person’s comment about
his experience of being an ocean)

leaves of trees intricately patterned and at times resembled webs spun by god-inspired
spiders of a thread of unraveled emeralds

my ecstasy which heightened to behold the same rose-radiance lighting us up along our
immense journey

provided the subject with a living reality and a directional frame of reference previously
unknown

realized for the first time that during all the years of his life he had been behaving “like a
person who had no mind”

reported that their previous suicidal tendencies had actually been unrecognized cravings
for the ego-death and transcendence

revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given
unconceptualized event

said to himself, at that second, that for the infinite happiness he had felt that second really
might well be worth the whole of life

saw the magnificent unfolding of the cosmic design in all its infinite nuances and
ramifications

the enormity of the experience, the total confirmation, in that it was all intensely seen, the
clarity and reality of what was felt

the flowers so passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of
utterance

tuned in to experiences and values on sensory and spiritual levels which are diametrically
opposite to the materialistic power orientation of the American mainstream

undergone a series of evolutionary metamorphoses carrying them from protoplasm up to
man and experiencing all the stages on life’s way

understood the Cosmic meaning of all nature dances and how man and nature merge into
one

unveiled mysteries in which the drama of the self is played out within a lucid series of
sequential stages bearing the subject along to a moment of powerful resolution (eyes
closed)

watched 2 grasshoppers go into a kind of cosmic dance. The perception triggered a
transcendental experience of great intensity and depth

watching the first sunlight caught in the tree leaves and it was all about as fresh and clean
and lovely as you could want

amazed at the whole religious content of his experience
appeared as if bathed in a clear, magic brilliance
as if I had been pulled through infinity
as though I had experienced everything that ever happened all in one instant
as though someone had taken his senses and turned up the volume as far as it would go
awed by her discovery
awed by the realization
books, all of them glowed with living light, jeweled books
broke out of the prison of their linguistic and cultural conditioning
“broke through” the realm of the ego into the transcendent dimensions of being
called this experience the most interesting and thought-provoking of his life
carried into a world of very great intensity, very great beauty and very great challenge
converted from righteousness to total selflessness and God-centeredness
could look at reality with eyes unclouded by convention
could see objects from perceptions which were normally impossible
disclosed the nature of reality to him
discovered a new unexpected source of strength and their true identity
discovered and experienced feelings of cosmic unity
discovered final truths
discovered how to free the mind of humanity from culturally conditioned limitations
discovered infinite realities within the brain
discovered that “I” exist independent of social ego
discovered the truth
discovered their immortality and eternal life
entered a world of fantastic shapes, colors and visual detail
entered dimensions of consciousness that permanently altered their concept of reality
experienced a deep level of enlightenment
experienced a deep reverential attitude to the divine
experienced a glimpse of the pure truth
experienced a psychic rebirth
experienced a surge of energy, closely followed by a feeling of intense mental activity
experienced an intense awareness of God’s presence, a conversation with God
experienced that expansion of feeling
experienced this heightening of intrinsic significance
explored their own spirituality
eyes that had the depth of eternity
eyes which had the most remarkable depth and radiation
felt a clear-headed tranquility
felt as a powerful mystical opening and reconnection with the divine
felt cleansed
felt his mind go lifting up through the layers of consciousness
felt immersed in a warm, golden glow and experienced herself as loving and being loved
felt overflowing energy
felt she became electric with fantastic energy going through her
felt with an intensity a thousand times greater than when it happened (a memory)
flipped out of his mind and spun up to heaven
flipped out of their conditioned mind sets into the world of magic, myth, and Mysticism
found one’s true identity in the inmost Self
found they had creative capabilities they’ve never suspected
freed me from many planes that I was trapped in
glimpsed what is beyond the door
glowed with a living golden radiance
had a profound influence
had an experience that completely turned his life around
had arrived at awareness of everything
had dived inward and was reliving phases of childhood
had never dreamed that such heavenly bliss was available to mankind
how liberating and glorious it was
lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion
looked at the painting, could “taste the color red”
looked into the heart of creation
made him a new man and radically changed his way of life
opened doors to other planes
opened the door to the discovery of myself
opened the neural doors to the future
opened up my sensory awareness
opened up so many areas of exploration for me
overwhelmed with perceptual changes
passed through the gate and entered the spell of the magic
perceived with great clarity and distinctiveness
produced a very rich array of insights
realized the Buddha nature of all creatures
realized the possibilities of his true self
reawakened us to the innate joy and playfulness that is also part of life
received a great flash of insight
revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence
said he looks at the outside world and it has the glory and freshness of a dream
saw a multicolored mosaic on the ceiling and for a while the ceiling rippled like a pond
saw beautiful scenes and colors and felt rich emotions
saw flying masses of color
saw luminous, moving patterns of great beauty
saw visions of such beauty that he sobbed with joy
shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance
shucked off the mind and awakened to eternity
so extended was time—lit a cigarette, seemed like hours and it still had its first ash
spent hours in pure metaphysical joy
spoke in a voice that sounded as if, in fact, it were coming from the depths
spun out into the richness of inner space
stimulated areas of consciousness not usually brought to the surface
surrounded by the most beautiful creations of Art
suspended outside the illusion of time
swept up to heaven
tapped into that ancient heavenly connection
the beauty of nature, the feeling it awakened in me
the full conviction that all I heard and felt was real
the “layerness” I felt in myself
the possibility of freedom I felt
the profound depth of what I felt
the sky and landscape whose splendors were vivid
taught me experientially what awe is
this greatness of beauty and goodness that I saw and felt
vividly experienced memories of his childhood
was a profound and overwhelming mystical experience
was at the heart of meaning and the radiant core of the energy process
was glory enough for a lifetime
was like uncovering a secret revelation or discovering the Holy Grail
went down the stairs and they never ended, like going down into the center of the earth
were illuminated with new meaning
whirled through the energy dance, the cosmic process
whose face was radiant with divine majesty
winds sparkling and diamond clear and full of color as they glittered through the valley