It will be questioned when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea—Oh no, no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, -Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.-   

—William Blake

We are to find in his dream all human possibilities—for out of that human nature, that psychological plasm, which swims dark and deep beneath the surface of the meagre words, the limited acts, the special mask, of one man's actual daytime career, all history and myth have arisen—victim and conqueror, lover and beloved, childhood and old age—all the forms of human experience.

—Edmund Wilson on Finnegans Wake

The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks plainly nor conceals, but discloses through hints.   

—Heraclitus

The array of psychedelic experiences is vast almost beyond belief. Trying to describe and classify them is somewhat like trying to describe and classify all experience: it is hard to find a place for analysis to get a grasp. The street language of head trips, body trips, ego trips, heavy trips, bum trips, mystical trips, and so on suggests the variety in a crude way. Huxley called taking mescaline "a voyage to the mind's Antipodes"; sometimes it is like the discovery of the New World, or a visit to the celestial spheres, and yet it can also be like sitting in an airport all day waiting for the plane to take off. Talk about set and setting as the determinants of psychedelic experience has become so commonplace that we hardly hear the words any more; maybe their meaning is made fresh by the reminder that set and setting determine all experience. The time, the place, the companions, intelligence, imagination, personality, emotional state, and cultural background of the drug user can be decisive. As small a matter as opening or closing the eyes, changing the music, or slightly increasing the dose can transform the quality of the experience. In experiments, most drugs make all the subjects feel more alike; LSD actually tends to accentuate any differences in mood that exist among subjects at the start (Clyde 1960, p. 586). The narratives of psychedelic drug trips are as luxuriant and varied as myths, dreams, and psychoanalytical revelations. In a sense there is no "psychedelic effect" or "psychedelic state"; to say that someone has taken LSD tells little more about the content and import of his experience than to say that he has had a dream.

In this situation we are all like the blind men in the fable groping at an elephant for the first time. It is too easy to mistake the experience of one person or a few people for the whole. The psychedelic trip journal has become a familiar literary form, with its origins in De Quincey's and Baudelaire's opium and hashish tales; in the 1960s, especially, millions took trips and thousands wrote about them. As a result, many people think they know more than they do about the nature and limits of the experience. For example, some of the best-known literary accounts, such as those of Huxley and Watts, hardly touch on the most profound effects. Having a few psychedelic trips and reading a few descriptions of them does not justify anyone in believing that he knows what it is all about any more than recalling a few dreams and reading ' a few descriptions of them qualifies anyone to understand everything about dreams.

If we remember that expansion does not necessarily mean enrichment or improvement, the term -consciousness expanding" is accurate enough: it is as though more of the neurophysiological activity of the brain is passing the usual defensive barriers and coming into awareness. One scientist has called the word "expansion" as used here "a metaphor without a physiological home." In a way that is true, but it is also true of most other language used for mental states, including Freud's spatial and mechanical metaphors. Expansion of t awareness in this sense is not necessarily desirable. Many students of psychedelic drugs have been attracted by Henri Bergson's picture of the brain as a reducing valve or filtering mechanism that protects us against an overwhelming onslaught of stimuli and so permits us to be the thinking and acting animals we are. Psychedelic drugs can then be said to turn off the reducing valve, producing "an exteriorization and magnification of the conflicts intrinsic to human nature and human experience" (Grof 1975, p. 6). While they thus in an important sense enlarge the realm of the conscious, they also diminish the capacity to think and act in the wonderfully varied adaptive ways we call ordinary.

The complaint that consciousness expansion is a misleading metaphor suggests another problem as great as the range and individual variability of the experiences: the difficulty of finding an adequate language for them. In the 1960s an ideological battle was fought partly over questions of terminology. The polemics of the drug culture separated the -heads- and the "straights" into irreconcilable camps between which communication was impossible. The straight Mr. Jones knew that something was happening here, but he didn't know what it was—and he reacted with uncomprehending anger. That was a propagandistic oversimplification of the many subtle differences of opinion that actually existed, but it had a certain limited validity. Opposing terms like psychosis vs. revelation, hallucination vs. vision, regression vs. mystical insight, and sensory distortion vs. sensory enhancement embodied two different attitudes toward the experience and even suggested two different world views. Psychedelic drug users thought that the words of psychiatry and medicine were being used as a weapon against them; some outsiders were annoyed or even horrified at the drug takers' use of the poetic and religious language.

Language that sounds silly, boring, exasperatingly self-satisfied, or even mentally disturbed to nonusers can evoke shared experience among drug users. The uninitiated, drug users say, hear only distant and confused noise that can be dismissively tagged with words pertaining to intoxication or mental illness. The experiences produced by the drugs are not entirely new, but they have been reported before, mainly by mystics and poets, who are granted a special status: they are not judged adversely by everyday standards of truth because they are not taken seriously by those standards. The hostile reaction comes only when the formerly esoteric invades the marketplace and makes insistent daims on everyone's attention.

There can be no doubt that the language of psychedelic drug users is much more vivid, colorful, eloquent, and seductive than any "neutral" analytic terms. Most attempts at rephrasing to eliminate the emotional charge produce results that seem inept, impoverished, and fragmented—like a dull literary analysis that drains the meaning out of an exciting poem or story. That "neutral" kind of analysis would have to justify itself by some superior power of explaining or explaining away the drug effects. Explanation is hard to define in this field, but a growing consensus about the nature of the drug experience would be one sign that we were moving closer to it. Unfortunately, no consensus has appeared. That is one reason for the intuition that most analytic language is being imposed as a means of denial and dismissal. On the contrary, it is the drug users' language that suggests a potential consensus, as of travelers to different parts of the same country. It would be wrong to dismiss the meaning the experience has for a person who undergoes it in the name of a broader "coherent" theory that no one has been able to produce anyway. Whatever modifications we may introduce, we must begin by taking seriously on its own terms what the drug users say.

That means looking closely at a great deal of language that at first sounds idiosyncratically rhetorical to find the common features. Many analysts of psychedelic drug effects shrink from doing this. For instance, here is the justification for a book recording the rather dull fragmentary communications from subjects under the influence of LSD in a laboratory in conditions of minimum sensory and emotional stimulation: "These are not blurred retrospective descriptions tempered by time and modified by the wish to appear eloquent and literary" (Pollard et al. 1965, p. 198). This reveals a wish to diminish the whole phenomenon. It is like preferring the confused running commentary in the mind of a participant in a historical event to his later coherent account of it viewed in the perspective of the rest of his life and times.

Fear of the full force of psychedelic narratives also appears in the insistence that those who provide the most eloquent accounts are so atypical that they are telling us only about their own imaginative powers. This belief is based on a correct insight: Aldous Huxley's trip, as we have emphasized, is not Joe Smith's, much less Charles Manson's. But the obverse of the great variability of psychedelic experiences is their basis in common features of the human mind. So the gifted man, the ordinary man, and the madman are traveling through the same regions, and their tales are recognizably similar. Although all have something to contribute, we are not wrong to pay most attention to the most learned, articulate, wise and emotionally balanced witness at a time when he is recollecting in tranquillity. If his experience of psychedelic drugs is somewhat different from that of other people, so is his experience of everything else; its universal relevance is never denied for that reason. The verbally fluent may have more power to distort and falsify with words, but they also have more power to tell the most important truths. As long as we assume a substratum of shared experience, there is no reason for a bias toward the inarticulate. Are deaf-mutes the best witnesses because they tell no lies? The opposite complaint is also sometimes heard: that too much of the rhetoric inspired by psychedelic drugs is commonplace. But so is most religious rhetoric, or for that matter most conversation; most people lack literary talent, but that is not regarded as a reflection on the authenticity of the experience they aim to convey, and they are not asked to justify the importance of what they say by the standards of great poetry. All this criticism of drug takers' words as too eloquent to be genuine or too banal to be worthy of attention indicates an unwillingness to attend to what they are talking about, some haltingly and some fluently, with the authority of (partially) shared knowledge.

In fact, there is a sense in which psychedelic experiences do not defeat words but magnify their power. By bringing unconscious material into awareness, the drugs give language or, at least, symbols a grip on phenomena that are ordinarily incommunicable because they do not take a symbolic form. A psychedelic drug trip is one kind of raid on the inarticulate, and often it produces unexpected exaltation and eloquence of language. There are repeated references to a tendency to talk—usually after the experience is over—with unaccustomed poetic facility. These supposedly ineffable experiences have always engendered a strong urge to talk and write about them; it is as though words are never more necessary than when we approach the limits of language. The surplus of meaning does not just make people conscious of the inadequacy of language; it may also convince them that for the first time they are having an experience for which certain dimly understood words (for example, ecstasy and awe) are appropriate. The common recourse to capital letters in psychedelic and mystical literature expresses this feeling that certain words have come into their own as much as it does the feeling that something more than ordinary words is needed.

These remarks about language are partly an excuse and partly a justification for relying heavily on quotations from articulate drug users to describe the psychedelic experience. Despite various other observations, tests, and experiments, without their words very little of what is going on is available to us. We will consider three ways of classifying this almost too rich material. One is to discuss discrete aspects of consciousness like mood, time and space perception, speech, visual and auditory effects, learning, memory, and so on. The evidence can be set out for inspection in this fragmented way, but it proves to be unsatisfying for analytical purposes. A more interesting approach is to correlate the effects of the drug with personality types. And still another kind of analysis tries to make explicit the hidden consensus among drug takers about the countries of the mind they are traveling in, preserving the integrity of the narratives by treating the various aspects of the experience as different stages and byways of a voyage into the unconscious. Whatever classification is imposed, the words of psychedelic users cannot be treated merely as raw material for analysis; they transcend all analytic categories, and they should be the primary object of attention.

Our dependence on words to identify this language-transcending experience is made clear by the fact that experiments on animals tell us so little about it. Studies of conditioned learning and other work based on behaviorist models are not very revealing, since the heart of the psychedelic effect is a complex change in consciousness rather than any consistent peculiarities of behavior (see Boissier 1974). Other animal experiments have produced variable and puzzling results that do not provide much evidence for a general theory of psychedelic drug effects. General stress or excitement probably causes many of the observed symptoms, but specific ones include the following: under LSD or mescaline Siamese fighting fish move slowly, as if in a trance, and their color darkens; guppies swim until they hit the wall of the tank and then keep trying to swim; carp rise to the surface of the water (Witt 1975). Under the influence of LSD, spiders weave more geometrically regular webs with a smaller surface, and weave them more slowly; chronic exposure causes abnormal web structures. Mescaline, strangely, seems to produce irregular webs even in a single dose (Groh and Lemieux 1968). Higher animals show unusual movements, seem to hallucinate, and may even have delusions. Monkeys and apes apparently react very much as human beings do, with the same large individual variability among animals of a single species. Rhesus monkeys, macaques, baboons, and chimpanzees show symptoms like grimaces of fear, difficulty in orientation, stereotyped movements, time and space disturbances, unusual tameness, and other "inappropriate- behavior, and apparent visual hallucinations or illusions (Black et al. 1969; Siegel et al. 1974). It would be interesting to administer a psychedelic drug to one of the chimpanzees that has been taught the rudiments of language and see if it could give any coherent report. One striking feature of the experiments is that in every animal tested, from spiders to chimpanzees, LSD is far more potent than mescaline and psilocybin (Witt 1975, p. 604); this suggests that the drugs affect some neurophysiological function that operates in the same way in all creatures with a central nervous system.

In human beings, with the distinctions made possible by words, the full complexity of psychedelic experiences becomes apparent. The most common way of categorizing them is the somewhat artificial one of changes in perception, mood, thought patterns, and intellectual and physical performance. Perceptual effects are among the earliest and most obvious. Underlying them is a heightened intensity of awareness or subjective sensitivity; whether or not objective tests show a "real" increase in sensory acuity seems laughably irrelevant to the drug user in the face of this. Vision is the sense most profoundly affected. The look of everyday things takes on a tinge of the marvelous; in the words of Blake borrowed by Aldous Huxley for the title of a book, "The doors of perception are cleansed." People and objects become as fascinating as if they were the first of their kind ever seen; they look like pictures created and framed in their space by a genius. Anything in the environment—a painting on the wall, a pattern in the carpet—may become a universe to be entered and explored; drug users say that they understand what Blake meant by "the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower." Colors seem dazzlingly bright and intense, depth perception heightened, contours sharpened, and relief clearer; details usually overlooked become intensely interesting. It is but a short step from sensory enhancement to perceptual distortion. Everything may seem bathed in a theatrical or lunar light or illuminated from within. Objects change their shape and size; walls and floors undulate as if breathing; spatial perspective is distorted into exaggerated depth or flatness; stationary objects look as though they are in motion (without seeming displaced in space); faces become younger, older, or caricatured in various ways. Fully formed persons or objects may appear in external space as pseudohallucinations. (True hallucinations, in which the image is confused with reality, are rare.)

The most celebrated feature of the psychedelic visual world is the dreamlike eidetic images that appear before closed eyes—what the writer Henri Michaux calls "the retinal circus." These visions resemble the hypnagogic imagery that many people see just before falling asleep, but they are incomparably more vivid. They often begin with afterimages of objects seen with eyes open; then come lacework patterns, geometrical forms, architecture, fountains, fireworks, landscapes, persons, animals, historical and mythical scenes, all constantly moving and changing. Heinrich Kliiver has investigated what he calls the form-constants of the elementary images, and he finds themes like httices, cobwebs, tunnels, alleys, and spirals that are also common in hypnagogic images and in the delirium of high fever (Klüver 1966 [1928]; see also Siegel and Jarvik 1975). At first the visions are just an entrancing display without much emotional content, but if the dose is high enough and the drug taker allows it, they can become the gateway to deeper levels of psychedelic experience.

Hearing, touch, taste, and smell are heightened in the same ways as sight. There is greater sensitivity to significant background sounds; for example, people who are hard of hearing may find it easier to pick out the meaning of spoken words. Music can assume a previously inconceivable emotional and esthetic intensity. A pleasant taste becomes ambrosial, an unpleasant one disgusting; smells set off equally fierce reactions. Sensitivity to heat, cold, pressure, and other touch sensations is usually increased; yet sensitivity to painful high-intensity stimulation is often greatly reduced. The blending of senses called synesthesia is common, usually in the form of seeing lights or color patterns when a sound is heard, but also in many other combinations: a color has a taste or produces a burning sensation; light shatters and gives out the sound of a bell; a pinprick appears as a circle; a voice that seems cold causes a shiver; the ordinary feeling of the boundaries of one's body turns into an outline image of it before closed eyes.

Changes in body feeling and body image are nearly universal. The drug user's own body is often distorted in a way that is esthetically unpleasant or causes anxiety. His foot may seem to be five yards away from his eye or right under his chin, his hand shriveled with age or shrunken to a baby's, his body large enough to cover the landscape from horizon to horizon. The body may feel hollow, boneless, transparent; its substance may seem to change to wood, metal, or glass; it may feel heavy and light at once, or hot and cold at once.

There may be orgasmic feelings throughout the body, or no feeling at all. Some drug trips are dominated by purely physical feelings, especially when resistance is strong. Consciousness sometimes appears to be localized or concentrated in some body part; in a generalization of the phenomenon of transferred pain, strange sensations like "nausea in the fingertip" are sometimes reported. People may sense internal organs and physiological processes usually kept out of consciousness. Some drug takers can project images of themselves onto walls; a few see their bodies as if from above or to the side, or even perceive themselves as having left the body behind to travel in the almost immaterial "astral body" of occult literature. One of the most powerful effects of this kind is the total dissolution of the body or some part of it into the environment. Like the emotions associated with distortions of the body image, the sense of transcending the self that often accompanies bodily dissolution can lead on to more profound experiences.

Some of the most uncanny effects are on the perception of time. Usually it goes more slowly: people speak of years or even literally an eternity passing in a minute, and events may seem to be without beginning or end. But time can also pass infinitely quickly, or the events of a psychedelic experience may take place in a time outside of time. The world may freeze for a moment like a film when the projector stops. Time may also run backward; past, present, and future events may be experienced as happening all at once; or the whole idea of temporal succession and measurement may seem irrelevant and artificial. These subjective time alterations need not cause any actual misjudgment, since the drug user is often capable of discounting them when asked a question about clock time. Timelessness seems to be an aspect of the release from recollection and anticipation, the concentration on the present moment, that psychedelic drugs produce by crowding so much into immediate awareness. It is impossible to select quotations that illustrate only one aspect of the perceptual effects of psychedelic drugs or even ones that illustrate perceptual effects in general with no reference to their emotional and metaphysical connotations. In the following descriptions, esthetic or sensory experiences predominate, but there are continual intimations of something more.

Probably the most purely esthetic kind of sensory psychedelic experience is the closed-eye imagery. One of the earliest accounts of it is Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's 1896 essay on mescaline intoxication in The Lancet. Mitchell drank peyote extract, waited about an hour, and lay down in a dark room with his eyes closed:

My first vivid show of mescal colour effects came quickly. I saw the stars, and then, of a sudden, here and there delicate floating films of colour—usually delightful neutral purples and pinks. These came and went—now here, now there. Then an abrupt rush of countless points of white light swept across the field of view, as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow a sparkling river before the eye. In a minute this was over and the field was dark. Then I began to see zigzag lines of very bright colours, like those seen in some megrims.. ..
 

When I opened my eyes all was gone at once. Closing them I began after a long interval to see for the first time definite objects associated with colours. The stars sparkled and passed away. A white spear of grey stone grew up to huge height, and became a tall, richly finished Gothic tower of very elaborate and definite design, with many rather worn statues standing in the doorways or on stone brackets. As I gazed every projecting angle, cornice, and even the faces of the stones at their joinings were by degrees covered or hung with clusters of what seemed to be huge precious stones, but uncut, some being more like masses of transparent fruit. These were green, purple, red, and orange; never clear yellow and never blue. All seemed to possess an interior light, and to give the faintest idea of the perfectly satisfying intensity and purity of these gorgeous colour-fruits is quite beyond my power. All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these. . . .
 

After an endless display of less beautiful marvels I saw that which deeply impressed me. An edge of a huge cliff seemed to project over a gulf of unseen depth. My viewless enchanter set on the brink a huge bird claw of stone. Above, from the stem or leg, hung a fragment of some stuff. This began to unroll and float out to a distance which seemed to me to represent Time as well as immensity of Space. Here were miles of rippled purples, half transparent, and of ineffable beauty. Now and then soft golden clouds floated from these folds, or a great shimmer went over the whole of the rolling purples, and things, like green birds, fell from it, fluttering down into the gulf below. Next, I saw clusters of stones hanging in masses from the claw toes, as it seemed to me miles of them, down far below into the underworld of the black gulf. . . .
 

But it were vain to find in words what will describe these colours. Either they seemed strangely solid, or to possess vitality. They still linger visibly in my memory, and left thefeeling that I had seen among them colours unknown to my experience... .
I was at last conscious of the fact that I was at moments almost asleep, and then wide awake. In one of these magic moments I saw my last vision and the strangest. I heard what appeared to be approaching rhythmical sounds, and then saw a beach, which I knew to be that of Newport. On this, with a great noise, which lasted but a moment, rolled in out of darkness wave on wave. These as they came were liquid splendours huge and threatening, of wonderfully pure green, or red and deep purple, once only deep orange, and with no trace of foam. These water hills of colour broke on the beach with myriads of lights of the same tint as the wave. This lasted some time, and while it did so I got back to more distinct consciousness, and wished the beautiful terror of these huge mounds of colour would continue. .. .
 

For the psychologist this agent should have value. To be able with a whole mind to experiment mentally upon such phenomena as I have described is an unusual privilege. Here is unlocked a store house of glorified memorial treasures of one kind. .
 

I predict a perilous reign of the mescal habit when this agent becomes attainable. The temptation to call again the enchanting magic will, I am sure, be too much for some men to resist after they have once set foot in this land of fairy colours, where there seems to be so much to charm and so little to excite horror or disgust. (Mitchell 1896, pp. 1626-1628)

Here is another description of closed-eye images:

Then began the images I had wanted to see, brilliantly colored and drenched in white and golden light. Also, objects in the images seemed to generate a light of their own and cast off glowing and pulsating or rippling waves of color. The first image I remember was of an Egyptian tomb made of granite, alabaster and marble. Behind it great golden sculptures of pharaohs rose to awesome heights and there was the fragrance of eucalyptus burning in brass bowls mounted upon tripods of iron that had the feet of falcons. Priests in ornate headdress ringed the tomb and raised their arms to greet a procession of many brightly robed figures bearing torches and with faces obscured by masks resembling the heads of various beasts. Funerary orations seemed to blend into marriage ceremonies where fruit and great platters of meat, even the forbidden pig, were served up by fierce glistening black slaves. The platters were placed upon massive stone steps leading to a dais upon which were seated royal figures in carved black chairs whose arms were the heads of solemn cats. . .
 

In many of the images that came to me I saw myself, sometimes with my wife, more often alone. I was a fur-capped Mongol huntsman, cold-eyed and cruel, bow in hand, striking down a running rabbit from the back of a racing, gaunt half-wild stallion. I was a stark black-robed figure, protected by an amulet suspended from a heavy gold chain that was worn about my neck, somberly wandering, lost in bitter ascetic reflection, among the crumbling walls of old temples overgrown by thick, twisted and gnarled vines. At other times there were legions of warriors, darkening deserts or in ranks that extended across immense bone-littered plains. There were broWn-cowled monks, pacing cloisters in silent, shared but unadmitted desperation. 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. (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 8-9)

Other marvels appear before the open eyes. In his last novel, Island, Aldous Huxley used his experience with mescaline and LSD to describe the effects of the utopian drug moksha-medicine, named from the Sanskrit word for liberation. Here is how things looked under the drug's influence:

... he opened his eyes. The inner illumination was swallowed up in another kind of light. The fountain of forms, the colored orbs in their conscious arrays and purposefully changing lattices gave place to a static composition of uprights and diagonals, of flat planes and curving cylinders, all carved out of some material that looked like living agate, and all emerging from a matrix of living and pulsating mother-of-pearl. .. a bubble of explanation rose into consciousness. He was looking, Will suddenly perceived, at a small square table, and beyond the table a rocking chair, and beyond the rocking chair at a blank wall of whitewashed plaster. (Huxley 1972 [1962], p. 278)

Another kind of visual effect is represented in this quotation:

S is told to look at the flowered fabric of the couch on which he is sitting and to relate what he sees there. He perceives a great number of faces and scenes, each of them belonging to a different environment and to a variety of times: some to the American Gay Nineties, some to the nineteen twenties, some later. There are Toulouse Lautrec cafe figures, Berlin nightlife scenes and German art from the late twenties and mid-thirties. Here and there, a "Black Art- appears and he recognizes the work of Félicien Rops and drawings like those of the artist who has illustrated Michelet's Satanism and Witchcraft. There are various Modigliani figures, a woman carrying a harpoon, and persons such as appear in the classical Spanish art of the seventeenth century. Most interesting to him are "paintings" like those of Hieronymus Bosch, and he describes a great complex of sprawling yet minutely detailed figures which combine to make up a larger complex of a mountain scene of trees and snow. In another variation, this same complex consists of "a great face with the trunk of an elephant that is blowing liquid on the face of a demon whose body has been trampled into the ground. The elephant is blowing liquid on the face of the demon either in an attempt to revive him or as a gesture of contempt. A herculean male figure rises next to the elephantine face. He is trapped to the waist in stone and this marbled stone looks like sea foam, it is so delicate and lacy. Everything blends into everything else. The herculean figure is also the ear of a face and the elephant-like trunk is the bridge of the nose of another larger, still more complicated figure." (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 27-28)

Much psychedelic art is a dim reproduction of visions like these.
The effect on the other senses can be just as profound and even harder to represent. Huxley describes listening to Bach:

The Allegro was revealing itself as an element in the great present Event, a manifestation at one remove of the luminous bliss. Or perhaps that was putting it too mildly. In another modality this Allegro was the luminous bliss; it was the knowledgeless understanding of everything apprehended through a particular piece of knowledge. . . .
Tonight, 'for the first time, his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed. Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevances to drown the music or make a senseless discord. Tonight's Fourth Brandenburg was a pure datum—no a blessed donum—uncorrupted by the personal history, the second-hand notions, the ingrained stupidities with which, like every self, the poor idiot, who wouldn't (and in art plainly couldn't) take yes for an answer, had overlaid the gifts of immediate experience. (Huxley 1972 [1962], pp. 274-275)

Another report on music under the influence of LSD:

Ordinarily, I am not particularly susceptible to music. This time, lying on the cot, I became acutely aware of the Montoya record playing. This 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. . . . This was pure synesthesia, and I was part of the synthesis. I suddenly -knew- what it was to be simultaneously a guitar, the sounds, the ear that received them, and the organism that responded, in what was the most profoundly consuming esthetic experience I have ever had. (Richardson 1970, p. 53)

Art Kleps, who calls himself Chief Boo-Hoo of the Neo-American Church, on the effect of 500 mg of mescaline:

Every single word emanating from the radio got a magnificent image to go with it, as if the trivia being spoken had been the life's work of generations of media technicians on planets given over to the production of such artistic wonders—all for the purpose of this one showing in Art Kleps' one man screening room. (Kleps 1977, p. 13)

Humphry Osmond, on 400 mg of mescaline:

I looked into the glass of water. In its swirling depths was a vortex which went down to the center of the world and the heart of time. . . . A dog barked and its piercing reverberant howl might have been all the wolves in Tartary. . . . At one moment I would be a giant in a tiny cupboard, and the next, a dwarf in a huge hall. In spite of everything, I could behave almost normally. . . . I experienced my friend's criticism of me as physical discomfort. . . and this jarring was sometimes accompanied by a burning taste and smell. (Osmond 1970, pp. 26-27)

A mescaline taker is reading about the death of Archimedes at the hands of a Roman soldier:
 

. . Suddenly noises reach his ears, close-by, loud, resounding noises—the noises of the battle. Terrifying screams. Swords clashing. He hears violent blows striking the shields, walls collapsing, stones falling. As though he were out there in the open, in that city, in 212 B.C. It is the groans of the wounded, in particular, that have taken him to the spot. The uproar leaves him dizzy. . . .
. . . he turns to another text, a religious one this time—more appropriate to his purpose, and surely more appeasing: the description of the arrival of a foreign lama in a Nepalese monastery. Suddenly, once again, reading is rudely interrupted. The loud, brazen, magnificent sounds from great Tibetan trumpets resound powerfully, 'transforming his room into a high Himalayan valley, filled with the smell of rancid butter and an atmosphere of magic. (Michaux 1974 [1966], p. 82)

The psychologist Stanley Krippner, taking psilocybin at Harvard:

I seemed to be in the middle of a three-dimensional Vermeer painting. . . . I felt overwhelmingly tuned in to the -true nature of things.- An apple. . . had been placed in my hand by one of the others. I bit into it and was astounded by the extraordinarily delicious taste, the perfection of it. -This is ambrosia, the food of the gods,- I declared, urging the others to sample the apple. . . . My mouth was a mammoth cavern and I seemed to be able to visualize the mastication, the swallowing, and the descent of the apple pulp through the esophagus.
. . . Virtually every item in range of my vision was transformed. The alarm clock was a work of art from a Cellini studio.
. . . A painting on the wall began to move. The horses in the picture were stamping on their hooves and snorting about the canvas. . . .
I experienced a negation of time. Past, present, and future all seemed the same—just as the Yin-Yang symbolized unity and oneness.
Now a series of visions began. The imagery appeared to synchronize with the phonograph music.... I envisioned myself in the court of Kubla Khan. .. at a concert being held in an immense auditorium. . . in some futuristic Utopia. . . at Versailles. with Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. . . with Edgar Allen Poe in Baltimore. . . gazing at a statue of Lincoln. . . .
... I felt myself engulfed in a chaotic, turbulent sea.. . . There were a number of small boats tossing on the raging sea. Alice, Sam, Steve, and I were in one of these vessels. . we came upon a gigantic figure standing waist-deep in the churning waters.. .. His facial features were graced by an unforgettable look of compassion, love, and concern. We knew that this was the image of God.
We realized that God, too, was caught in the storm. (Krippner 1970a, pp. 35-39)

A San Francisco LSD devotee of the late 1960s summarizes as a spokesman for the drug culture:

You haven't eaten, you haven't tasted, you haven't fucked, you haven't seen colors, your fingers haven't touched rock and soil until you've had acid, and then you know you're alive and you know what life is. (von Hoffman 1968, p. 143)

Changes in body image and body feeling are described in these reports from four different subjects:

Any part of the body may then seem "changed," and in a changed position. . . .
... His arm, for example may now appear in various different ways.. . . It may, for instance, appear to him strangely remote. Or else elongated, unending, or curiously extending into furniture and objects, merging with the arm-rest of the chair. Or (but how is this possible?) as someone else's arm. . .. (Moreover, with his eyes closed, he might take the arm of a person nearby for his own.) Or transubstantiate into something unrecognizable or lost, or unconnected. An arm which no longer gives him information. Sometimes deadened, sometimes without firmness. At other times excessively, inexplicably light, ready to fly away, or just the opposite, extremely (and no less inexplicably) heavy; or partially invisible, reduced to one half or one third its size, shortened, twisted, or oddly segmented. (Michaux 1974 [1966], pp. 108-109)

Confronting the image in the mirror, I knew and yet did not know that this image was my own (although, oddly, it seemed to me later that there was, in the face of this tiger, something of my face). I reacted to the image, partly anyhow, as if it might be another tiger with whom I had come unexpectedly face to face. Yet something in me questioned the reality of the image, and I recall my bafflement when I ran my claws across the glass and touched the hard, flat surface. All the while I was making spitting and snarling noises and my muscles were tensed in readiness for combat. Finally, I turned away from the mirror and padded restlessly around the apartment, still making those sounds that somehow indicated to me bafflement and rage. (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 76-77)

... what I saw was my own face in transition: in rapid succession, there were all the expressions I had ever seen before in a mirror—and many that I had not. A quizzical gaze turned quite sad, contemplative, amused, broke into a broad grin, and then changed to mournful, tragic, and finally tearful (real tears, it seemed)—all these faces within just a few seconds, and never the same face for longer than a brief moment.... As the faces changed, I also became older, younger, and then older again, each face with a different expression and a different age. (Richardson 1970, pp. 53-54)

... I became aware of the body that encased me as being very heavy and amorphous. Inside it, everything was stirring and seemed to be drawing me inward. I felt that I could count the beats, the throbbing of my heart, feel the blood moving through my veins, feel the passage of the breath as it entered and left the body, the nerves as they hummed with their myriad messages. Above all, I was conscious of my brain as teemingly alive, cells incredibly active, and my mental processes as possessing the unity of perfect precision. Yet this last, I suspected, was not really true and instead my mind, "drunk on its own ideas," was boastfully over-estimating its prowess.
Sensations were acute. I heard, saw, felt, smelled and tasted more fully than ever before (or since). A peanut butter sandwich was a delicacy not even a god could deserve. Yet, I took only a few bites and was too full to eat more. 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. It was also to experience intense touch-pleasure and this was accentuated even further when, at the guide's suggestion, I -localized consciousness" in the fingertip with the consequence that all phenomena at that point were greatly enhanced. (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 9-10)

Slowed time or timelessness is a pervasive aspect of psychedelic experience, but the following report is somewhat unusual. It comes from Christopher Mayhew, a British M.P. and former journalist who took 400 mg of mescaline before television cameras in 1955 under the guidance of Humphry Osmond;

After brooding about it for several months, I still think my first, astonishing conviction was right—that on many occasions that afternoon I existed outside time.
I don't mean this metaphorically, but literally. I mean that the essential part of me (the part that thinks to itself, "This is me") had an existence, quite conscious of itself, in a timeless order of reality outside the world as we know it.
Though perfectly rational and wide awake (Dr. Osmond gave me tests throughout the experiment which showed no significant falling-off in intelligence) I was not experiencing events in the normal sequence of time. I was experiencing the events of 3.30 [p.m.] before the events of 3.0; the events of 2.0 after the events of 2.45, and so on. (Mayhew 1965 [1956], pp. 294-295)

He goes on to say that it is as if all events were in effect simultaneous for him and therefore could be experienced in any order. But the part of him that "knew" the future was unable to speak and could not foretell it for the people in the room. There was more:

At irregular intervals—perhaps twice every five minutes at the peak of the experiment—I would become unaware of my surroundings, and enjoy an existence conscious of myself, in a state of breathless wonderment and complete bliss, for a period of time which—for me—simply did not end at all. It did not last for minutes or hours but apparently for years. During this period I would be aware of a pervasive bright, pure light, like an invisible sun snow.
For several days afterward, I remembered the afternoon of December 2 not as so many hours spent in my drawing-room interrupted by these strange -excursions" but as countless years of complete bliss interrupted by short spells in the drawing-room. (Mayhew 1965 [1956], p. 296)

After five years, Mayhew called this experience the most interesting and thought-provoking of his life (Crocket et al. 1963, p. 173).

A common interpretation of the perceptual effects is that an unusual number of sensory stimuli from outside and within the body are reaching the centers of awareness in the brain, which can no longer code and integrate them in the ordinary way (see Bradley and Key 1963). Anticipation, recollection, and all forms of functional classification that serve the needs of action and survival are eclipsed; formerly familiar phenomena are either neglected as irrelevant or actually not perceived, like the chair that Huxley had to struggle to recognize through a metaphysical-esthetic prism as the utilitarian object it normally was. The controlling, designing, and planning (executive) ego becomes otiose and tends to dissolve: combined with a heightened awareness of body sensations, this may cause the body to seem to melt into its surroundings.
Experience overflows the boundaries of the specific sensory channels that confine it for practical purposes; the result is synesthesia. The normal habituation to sensory stimuli that keeps the world usefully stable and dull seems to fail, so the objects of the senses take on a pristine immediacy, looking as they may have looked to Adam on the first day or to the drug user as a child. The power of the senses is no greater, but the power of noticing transcends ordinary needs and desires. As assimilation of past actions in order to plan future ones ceases, the ordinary functional time sense is lost. The formation of images and ideas becomes less subject to will, as the mechanism for filtering out perceptual information and nascent feelings before they reach consciousness
is impaired. So the objects of the senses are transformed by the projection of unconscious wishes and thoughts, and every aspect of experience undergoes a multiplication of meanings and symbolic metamorphoses. Psychedelic drugs reveal vividly that the distinction between perception and hallucination is one of degree: in both cases we are selecting among the signals from the senses and forging a creative symbolic synthesis.

Here are some observations on how this perceptual disorganization-enhancement affects thought and speech:

The profound links which create the authentic union are missing because administrative thinking, incessantly synthesizing and resynthesizing, is missing, thinking which in the course of writing considers the various possibilities of the sentence and selects. . .
Everything else follows from that. Unable to formulate, he is still less capable of reformulating. To correct is impossible. To restore interdependences, impossible. (Michaux 1974 [1966], p. 33)

The guide asks a question and S responds that it is very difficult to give an answer entirely his own because it is almost impossible to eliminate the implied, suggested answer from a question. When he attempts to answer he finds that, simultaneously his mind "goes out" to find what the guide is asking for; he feels "closing in" on his mind and influencing him what he feels would be the guide's answer to the question; and "irrational impulses and instincts" come up "out of nowhere" to influence his answer and also in revolt against his feeling that an answer is being imposed from some external source. S remarks that these processes probably go on under nondrug conditions, but one is unaware of them. (Masters and Houston 1966, p. 28)

 . . The scraps of the sentence do not converge, I cannot force them to do so, words are like cliff faces, cliff units which do not interact, do not truly join. Why? Because in dealing with words, joining is always joining with a view to something (an idea, a need) which prevails over the others, or which the others will serve. And there is always someone who makes them join, makes them serve. .. someone whom this pleases, who finds it appropriate, who is its author, or at least its arranger. This "someone," here, can no longer do this. (Michaux 1974 [1966], pp. 31-32)

Soon trains of thought started to appear between every word of every sentence. The speed of these thoughts seemed to promote euphoria, but it was a different matter when I tried putting my thoughts into words for H--'s benefit, and found intruding ideas between each pair of syllables; this can have a very demoralizing effect on a would-be speaker. I would begin a sentence, and by the time I had finished, sa many thoughts had piled up that I was at a total loss where to begin the next sentence. And by the time the next sentence was begun, such a further backlog of ideas would have accumulated that finishing it would be out of the question.
As I paced, I happened to notice at one point the clock resting on the mantelpiece. It said, I clearly remember, 12:25. Then I lapsed into a train of thought whose various labyrinths seemed to lead me in thousands of directions for thousands of hours. And then I glanced at the clock again. This time it read 12:28. (Moser 1965 [1961], pp. 358- 361)

Psychiatrists sometimes call this -thought blocking--wrongly, according to some drug users:

When. . . he reads the words which he has spoken [apparently a transcript of a recording], he scarcely recognizes what has happened to him. . . . The stranger who, on reading these incoherent, unfinished, broken sentences, should attribute them purely and simply to a corresponding state of mental incoherence, would be almost wholly mistaken. A vast movement of coherence underlay the words. . . It is not sufficiently realized how unnatural it is to observe oneself aloud, not only in this particular case. Commenting on the spot is putting oneself in the way of what one feels. It is losing touch with it. (Michaux 1963 [1961], pp. 43-44)

To separate the changes in perception and thought from emotional effects is somewhat artificial; new sights and sounds, new meanings, and new feelings come together. As in dreams, names and things merge magically, words become suffused with the qualities of the objects they designate, puns take on great significance, and the mechanisms of condensation and displacement operate. The flow of associations speeds up and moves erratically, thoughts are projected as images, meaningful connections appear between seemingly unrelated objects. Feelings with overtones of metaphysical insight arise: glimpses of the primordial and absolute, sensations of unreality or superreality. The need for explanation imposed by the intensified sense of significance may cause what appear to be ideas of reference, delusions of grandeur, and other paranoid reactions.

It is as though the autonomy of the organizing systems of mood and perception, like that of the separate senses, breaks down, so that their impact on each other is greatly heightened. As objects become charged with symbolic meanings, they incorporate emotions, often of a religious nature; for example, the sun, becomes worthy of worship as the source of all light and heat, or a woman sees it as a cosmic lover. The enhanced impact of emotion is most striking in the way human beings are seen. A passing mood, a prominent physical feature, or an association with some imagined character trait can turn a face into a caricature; for example, someone known to be interested in Indians begins to look like an Indian, a person with a slightly porcine face looks like a pig, anguish or sadness distorts the drug taker's features in the mirror. Each person, including the drug user, tends to become something more than himself: sometimes himself at all ages, or the representative who symbolically incorporates all the features of some human group, or a mythical archetype embodying an important human characteristic, or a character out of history or fiction. Although strangers often look ugly, vicious, or ludicrous, the drug user usually knows that they are not really like that. But he may anxiously read distorted perceptions of his own face as a vision of his true character. Love or friendship for another is often translated into a beauty that the drug taker regards as symbolic of the loved person's inner nature. People may be seen surrounded by tangles of wires, loops, and electrical and color emanations that are regarded as representations of their complexity in visual form. A feeling that one is merging with another person may be associated with a vision of organic fibers connecting the two bodies.

Even apart from perceptual distortions, feelings toward other people become unusually intense. The drug taker becomes painfully or pleasurably sensitive to their gestures, voice inflections, and facial expressions; he is likely to read volumes of meaning into a casual phrase or movement. He may feel emotional isolation to the point of terror, or intense empathy to the point of literally identifying with another person. A sense of deep, wordless, almost telepathic communication or a feeling (often overvalued and overcelebrated) of universal love for mankind is not uncommon. Users of MDA especially, not hampered by anxiety-provoking perceptual distortions and mood changes, often sense this empathic awareness of others' thoughts. Mescaline and LSD enhance primary suggestibility (defined as execution of movements or experience of cognitive or perceptual change in response to repeated suggestions by another person that they will occur) in the same way hypnosis does (Sjoberg and Hollister 1965). This heightened responsiveness toward others makes the role of the guide or therapist who supervises a psychedelic trip particularly important.

The emotional atmosphere of a psychedelic session is spectacularly unstable. A minor change in the environment—a noise, the appearance of a new person on the scene, the sun passing behind a cloud—often creates an entirely new mood. Giggly euphoria, irritability, fear, depression, boundless love and joy pass in swift succession. There may also be intense emotions without any apparent object, or several conflicting emotions at once; tests show high scores on ambivalence (Katz 1970). Drug users refer to emotions or combiriations of emotions they have never felt before. These changes in feeling appear at the lowest doses, even before perceptual effects: 20 micrograms of LSD produce euphoria and unmotivated smiling (Vojtéchovsk5r et al. 1972). (This exaggerated sense of the amusing can accelerate into what is sometimes called posmic mirth.) The dominant emotional tone of a trip depends, of course, on set and setting; but no one would use the drugs if the experience were not often pleasant. In one experiment, subjects were given 100 to 200 micrograms of LSD and later asked to classify eighteen experiences in the order of their prominence. The first eight were euphoric relaxation, understanding, mystical wonder, esthetic sensations, empathy, religious feelings, alertness, and perceptual disturbances; the last five were depression, delusions, hostility, anxiety, and hallucinations (Ditman and Bailey 1967); 80 percent of the subjects enjoyed the trip. In another experiment with different people in different circumstances, about half had a more or less euphoric reaction and half a more or less depressive one (Levine et al. 1955b).

But terms like pleasant and unpleasant, good trip and bad trip, are too crude to reveal much about this complicated experience. They suggest a kind of holiday for the mind, about which the appropriate question is whether you had a good time. But psychedelic trips, even when they begin as holiday tours, often turn into voyages of exploration filled with hardship; the appropriate question then is not whether you suffered but whether it was worth- i while. The emotional territory traversed by psychedelic voyagers includes regions to which they give names like Limbo, Chaos, the Desert, the Ice Country, and, of course, Heaven and Hell. Often they are perceived as actual places or -spaces,- an expression that has passed into ordinary language as a metaphor for emotional states but can be felt during an LSD trip with the weight of the literal. To list, classify, and rate as pleasant or unpleasant the emotions of a psychedelic experience is no easier or more useful than trying to list, classify, and rate all human emotions; in fact, it is the same task.

The following two quotations, one long and one short but evocative, illustrate the multifarious ways in which the senses and the emotions impinge on each other under the influence of psychedelic drugs:

And suddenly—destruction! The air was thick with the ammonia smell of death. Noxious vapors stung the eyes and choked the throat. The stench of the Apocalypse rose up with the opening of the graves of the new and old dead. It was the nostrils' view of the Night on Bald Mountain, an olfactory Walpurgisnacht rite. The world had become a reeking decay. Then I heard R rebuking someone with the words: "Christ, Timmy, couldn't you have used your sandbox?" Timmy was the cat and the apocalyptic smell had issued from a single turd he had deposited in the middle of the floor.
I turned my attention from Timmy's tangible residues to Timmy himself. He stretched himself with infinite grace and arched his back to begin—The Ballet. Leaping through time and space, he hung like Nijinsky—suspended in the air for a millennium, and then, drifting languidly down to the ground, he pirouetted to a paw-licking standstill. He then stretched out one paw in a tentative movement and propelled himself into a mighty spiral, whirling into cosmic dust, then up on his toes for a bow to his creation.
He was a cat no longer—but Indra, the primeval God dancing the cosmic dance in that time before time, setting up a rhythmic flux in non-being until it at last had attained to Life. The animating waves of the Dance of Creation pulsed all around me and I could no longer refuse to join in the dance. I arose to perform a pas de deux with the cat-Indra, but before I could allow myself more than a cursory leap into the cosmic fray a great flame erupted somewhere in the vicinity of my left elbow and I felt obliged to give it my attention. The guide had started a fire burning in the hearth and it commanded I concentrate upon it to the exclusion of all else.
It was a lovely fire. Mandalas played in it and so did gods, and so did many hundreds of beings, known and unknown, rising in El Greco attenuations for one brilliant moment, only to lapse again into nothing. I fell into musing and after aeons had gone by and worlds within worlds within worlds had been explored, I looked up and said something to R. It was an attempt to define our relationship at that precise moment, and I said: "You and I, we are ships that sometimes pass one another on the seas but never meet." "Bull--!" said R—and my vast, rippling reflections were shattered. (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 20-21)

I pick up a book. Hard to read. I skip a chapter. Suddenly the shadow of the pages I have turned, shifting, becomes large, too large, falls across me, across my life. A shadow that is unbearable, heavy, crushing, which I must be rid of as soon as possible. (Michaux 1974 [1966], p. 68)

Going beyond appearances to actual transactions among people, here is an interesting example of communication under the influence of LSD:

. . . Two subjects, S-7 and S-8, were participants in a group session. Previous to the session these two men had only a nodding acquaintance. But during the session they
I sat across a table from one another and communicated "psychedelically," later feeling that many thousands of words had been interchanged (although aware that spoken words had been few). They considered this "conversation" the most meaningful, interesting, and important of their lives. The interchange. . . consumed one-half to three-quarters of an hour and went approximately as follows:
S-7: Smiles at S-8.
S-8: Nods vigorously in response.
S-7: Slowly scratches his head.
S-8: Waves one finger before his nose.
S-7: "Tides."
S-8: "Of course."
S-7: Points a finger at S-8.
S-8: Touches a finger to his temple.
S-7: "And the way?"
S-8: "We try."
S-7: "Holy waters."
S-8: Makes some strange apparent sign of benediction over his own head and then makes the same sign toward S-7.
S-7: "Amen."
S-8: "Amen."
. . . Their "conversation" had ranged over "the human condition" and such subjects as cosmology, theology, and ethics, to a shared exploration of the significance of each to the other and, finally, of their personal relationship to the Infinite. They had felt themselves at all times to be in a rare state of accord and understanding. (Masters and Houston 1966, p. 102)

But this sense of sharing may be merely a projection:

For example, during a group LSD session, a male subject, S-18, told a female friend: "Walls are falling away from me. My walls are crumbling down.- He then observed her closely for a while and added: "And your walls are falling away, too. You're not so damned enigmatic as you usually are. I feel for the first time that I really know you." S told the guide later in the session that he had felt an intense communion with his friend, "a communion much closer than any sexual communion."
On the other hand his friend, also taking LSD, told the guide that throughout her session she had felt "no empathy whatsoever- with D. On the contrary, she had mostly felt that the two were "different island universes drifting in space and not at all related to one another. His contemplating me so intensely merely annoyed me and I thought: "How dare you try to encroach upon my universe!" I felt that his contemplation of me was a terrible invasion of my privacy." Had his friend been less honest, perhaps "just to be agreeable,- S today might be extolling LSD "empathy" instead of proclaiming his "skepticism" with regard to it. (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 112-113)

Masters and Houston describe how twins (it is implied but not stated that they were identical) found themselves taking the same trip and -became- one person:

For the first hour or two of the session, the pair kept up their customary bickering. Then they became absorbed in their altered sense perceptions and images and soon began comparing notes. To their astonishment each was experiencing almost the same changes of perception and the same images experienced by the other. They repeatedly inquired of the three other subjects in the room what those subjects were experiencing; and found, somewhat to their dismay, that the others were having quite different and highly individualized experiences.
The twins also discovered that they were reacting almost identically to ideas and people, finding the same things funny or sad for the same reasons, and drawing similar conclusions about their co-subjects.. ..
. At first they giggled at one another nervously, but then became pensive and finally appeared to be in a profound and almost trancelike sort of communion. It was while in this -empathic- state, they said later, that they had discovered themselves to be "essentially the same person." Each woman proclaimed herself to be -variations on my twin," but declared that the "overlapping of identities- no longer was a source of discomfort.
The effect of this experience was to make the sisters -great friends--and so they have remained for more than two years. At a time when one sister was going on a trip, she solicitously urged a family friend to -take care of my other self--something she -could never possibly have said- previous to the LSD session.
It might be added that among the most unusual examples of shared experience in this case were several involving a shared synesthesia. (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 110-111)

Psychedelic feelings are often so profound, and so inseparable from the accompanying thoughts, that they turn into proofs of some metaphysical or ethical wisdom. In a letter Huxley describes his experience with mescaline in a group session:

For five hours I was given a series of luminous illustrations of the Christian saying, -Judge not that ye be not judged- and the Buddhist saying, "To set up what you like against what you dislike, that is the disease of the mind." (Bedford 1974, p. 564)

Another metaphysical emotion expressed by Huxley was "an unspeakable gratitude for the privilege of being born into this universe ('Gratitude is heaven itself,' said Blake—and I know now exactly what he was talking about)"
(Bedford 1974, p. 713).

The writer Alan Harrington describes similar metaphysical emotions during one of his trips:

Why was the experience so rewarding? The inner space traveler feels invaded by a huge force. He felt the walls of consciousness opened by an enormous thrust, and he was cast out of time. .. . He felt that he was reliving the history of the species, and only incidentally of himself. Crying out, he groped and crawled over a soft living-room rug, his ancient mud and swamp, before he was able to stand erect and think again. When he came back down to the present, and the do-it-yourself brain-washing was over, he felt clean and marvelously refreshed. The ecstatic and sometimes hellish passage also provided an atheist with what can be described as a religious or anyway metaphysical insight, and this has not dimmed. To one who has never thought in terms of lotuses, reincarnations, stages of existence, etc., and who through the years has been irritated by the enthusiasts of Eastern philosophy, the LSD journey brought evidence of recurring personal death and rebirth. It made possible a vision of eternity not unlike those of Blake and Swedenborg. (Harrington 1966, P. 73)

Everything that I could think about was insanely and pitiably funny. The world. The universe. All the poor sweet pitiful people I knew. Myself. What a scene! Filled with noble, ridiculous people! The world, the world!
This reaction, which has been described as 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.
. Then into the laughter comes a new sound, of fear. The voice trembles. The same force projected through me an enormous grief over the Cosmic Joke. . . . I wept and sobbed, occasionally laughing. Even now, listening to the tape, I feel sorry for this individual as though it were somebody else.
. . The confession of phoniness will sound trivial, but it was a matter of terror to me, absolute terror, that I was boring. The sum total of me in the universe was boring.
The voice on the tape sobs: "I'm boring. Oh, Jesus, so boring," etc., until finally Arthur's voice replies with some annoyance: "Yes, as a matter of fact you are boring," and the absolution, or whatever it was, made the panic go away. (Harrington 1966, pp. 92-94)

A dying unbeliever breaks out into religious emotion:

Quite early in the session Matthew felt an intense need for warmth and reached for Joan (the second author). She responded immediately and held and cradled him for more than four hours. He continued listening to the music in this way with an ecstatic expression on his face; his features showed an unusual mixture of infantile bliss and mystical rapture. He was uttering seemingly disconnected sentences that sounded alternately like excerpts from Buddhist texts and accounts of Jewish and Christian mystics: "One world and one universe. . all is one. .. nothing and everything ... everything and nothing. . . nothing is everything. . . let it go when it's time. . . it does not make any difference. . . disease. . . injury. . it is either the real thing or it is not . lower forms and higher forms. .. the glittering extremities of his majesty's possession . . . so I am immortal. . . it is true! .
Deborah, who occasionally came to the door of the living room where the session was taking place, could not believe that these statements were coming from her pragmatic husband. (Grof and Halifax 1977, P. 67)

R. Gordon Wasson on the Mazatec Indian psilocybin mushroom rite:

It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backward and forward in time, to enter other planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to know God. It is hardly surprising that your emotions are profoundly affected, and you feel that an indissoluble bond unites you with the others who have shared in the sacred agape. All that you see during this night has a pristine quality; the landscape, the edifices, the carvings, the animals—they look as though they had come straight from the Maker's workshop. This newness of everything—it is as though the world had just dawned—overwhelms you and melts you with beauty.. .. All these things you see with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to yourself, "Now I am seeing for the first time, seeing direct, without the intervention of mortal eyes.". . .
In common parlance and among the many who have not experienced it, ecstasy is fun, and I am frequently asked why I do not reach for mushrooms every night. But ecstasy is not fun. In our everyday existence we divide experiences into good and bad, "fun" and pain. There is a third category, ecstasy, that for most of us hovers off stage, a stranger we never meet. The divine mushroom introduces ecstasy to us. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles, until you fear that you will never recover your equilibrium. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe, or to float through that door yonder into the Divine Presence? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word, and we must re'capture its full and portentous sense. (Wasson 1972a, pp. 197-199)

Michaux tries to convey the purity, intensity, and infinite quality of some of his feelings:

Absence. Long absence. He "comes to himself" sitting on a bench. The harmony which now fills him is indescribable. He experiences a rightness, a rightness of extraordinary scope, a rightness of which he had no idea.
Everything is fine, fine as it should be, magnificently fine. It is unthinkable that anything in the world could be better. Everything is related in an almost suffocating benevolence, utterly benevolent, perfect, right. He is overcome. Flooded. His channels are filling. A supreme kind of mercy. And an illumination. Immensity proceeding from unbelievable immensity: a cosmic insemination occurs. An immense calm has set in. A fusion of contradictions. There are no more obstacles. Like an infinitely calm body of water, which periodically stirs, moving imperceptibly. „ . How disarming, the Infinite. And this Immensity seeks its course. (Michaux 1974 [1966], p. 87)

Michaux conveys his experience of self-loathing by describing the vision of a demon:

As soon as I am in difficulty, there appears that repulsive face which I have already seen thirty or forty times, that face which I immediately turn away from, rushing off to throw water over my hands and forehead, that horrible, grimacing face which exultingly follows my thoughts, the thoughts of a man at bay. It is not God, it is the demon who sees man, who is man's conscience. (Michaux 1975 [1964], p. 144)

The grimaces of the demon are an experimental phenomenon. In my normal state and even in dreams I had never in my life seen such an unbearable Luciferian face.
Those of the Middle Ages never meant anything to me. The idea of the grimace to express the demon had always appeared to me to be the height of grotesqueness and proof of the stupidity and impoverished imagination of righteous people.
And yet we have the word of Catherine of Siena, and she can be relied on:
. The face of the demon is so horrible that there is no man sufficiently courageous to be able to imagine it.". . .
"You know (said Christ to her) that having shown it to you once, merely for a brief instant (a veritable split-second), you would have preferred, once returned to yourself, to walk upon a road of fire until the day of the last judgement and to walk upon it ceaselessly rather than see that face again." (Treatise on Discretion, chap. XXXVIII)
. .. The demon sought to lay you low by revealing your life to you as one long act of duplicity....
Such is the face of the one who sees with malevolent penetration, one who is in no way fooled by you (by the correct self. . . or by the saintly self, if the person in question is a saint). (Michaux 1975 [1964], p. 145)
The sight of this ugliness cannot be borne, for it represents the decomposition of all "virtus," of all steadfastness or pride and, by its example, brings about our moral collapse. . . . (Michaux 1975 [1964], p. 146)
The demoniacal workings, like the workings of madness, cannot be known except by one who has experienced them, through and through, deep within himself. . . .
Thousands of saints have accused themselves of being the most unworthy, the most evil and the most hypocritical of men. No one could believe it. But we should take their word for it. They have seen themselves. Unable to be corrupted by virtue, exasperated by their "saintliness" and having observed both sides of it, their demoniacal double had instructed them. They knew what saintliness is all about.
They knew the unfathomable evil. They knew the unfathomable duality. They knew the persistent accusation of trickery made by the Other. (Michaux 1975 [1964], pp. 147-148)

It is these metaphysically tinged emotions, rather than mere hallucinations or finite delusions, that make the worst trip. Being pursued by visionary demons and monsters is nothing compared with the following experiences. It should be emphasized that such things are not very common; if they were, no one would ever use the drugs.

William Braden, a religious journalist, describes the effect of 500 mg of mescaline:

A majestic Beethoven chord exploded inside my brain, and I instantly disappeared. My body no longer existed, and neither did the world. . . . I could feel the pressure of the earphones; but in the space between the phones, where my head should have been, there was absolutely nothing. . . nothing! I was mind alone, lost in an icy blue grotto of sound. . . . The notes danced along a silver staff of music that stretched from one eternity to another, beyond the planets and the stars and then I myself was one of the notes. I was being swept along on the silver staff, at twice the speed of light, rushing farther and farther away from my home back there in the Milky Way. In desperation, at the last possible moment, I reached up with hands I did not own, and I tore off the earphones. (Braden 1968 [1967], p. 193)

The experience becomes deeper:

... I was Being. I was the vibrant force that filled the room. I was the world, the universe. I was everything. I was that which always was and always would be. I was Him, and Jim was me, and we were everybody else; and everybody else was us.... Having been reunited with the Ground of my Being, I wanted urgently to be estranged from it again as quickly as possible.... I don't want to be God, I said. I don't even want to be city editor. But it did no good to laugh, and I stopped trying. Of course, I wasn't God. But I was All That There Was, and I didn't want to be that, either.... I was Everybody, the Self. And now I knew what the little selves were for, I thought. They were a fiction designed to protect the Self from knowledge of its own Being—to keep the Self from going mad....
Nevertheless, I never forgot that I was under the influence of a drug.... I was never wholly convinced that the drug's revelations were true; even during the best moments and the worst moments, a part of me warned that the truth might lie elsewhere. (Braden 1968 [19671, pp. 195-199)

Notice that Braden is able to preserve some detachment—even to the point of being able to joke about it—at the height of his metaphysical terror. This persistence of the detached observing ego is common even in the most intense psychedelic experiences. But it can be overwhelmed, as the following classic bad trip shows:

The room darkened and the music faded. I was lying on my back on the floor. Then the room itself vanished and I was sinking, sinking, sinking. From far away I heard, very faintly, the word "death." I sank faster, turning and falling a million light years from the earth. The word got louder and more insistent. It took shape around me, closing me in. "DEATH ... DEATH ... DEATH." I thought of the dread in my father's eyes in his final hours. At the last instant before my own death I shouted, "No." Absolute terror, total horror. With immense effort I began to lift myself back to life. It seemed to take an eternity.
Then the room reappeared and I was standing there shaking. My guide still sat in his chair, perfectly still. Suddenly I knew that he controlled me. There was no escape. No way to explain. I was his slave. His thoughts were my thoughts....
From far away I heard another voice. It said, "You are insane. Totally, finally, irrevocably insane."...
I never pray, God knows, but I fell to my knees in that chamber of horrors. "Jesus, help me." I said. "Help me. Help me."
My guide stood over me. "Take it easy," he said. "You always knew it could end like this." The way the words reverberated with menace, it was the most frightening thing I had ever heard. (Lingeman 1969, p. 137)

John Lilly, the dolphin scientist and psychic explorer, after taking 300 micrograms of LSD:

Suddenly I was precipitated into what I later called the "cosmic computer." I was merely a very small program in somebody else's huge computer. There were tremendous energies in this computer. There were fantastic energy flows and information
flows going through me. None of it made any sense. I was in a total terror and panic.
I was being programmed by other senseless programs above me and above them others. I was programming smaller programs below me. The information that came in was meaningless. I was meaningless. This whole computer was the result of a senseless dance of certain kinds of atoms in a certain place in the universe, stimulated and pushed by organized but meaningless energies. .. .
The computer was absolutely dispassionate, objective, and terrifying. The layer of ultimate programmers on the outside of it were personifications of the devil himself and yet they too were merely programs. There was no hope or chance or choice of ever leaving this hell. I was in fantastic pain and terror, imbedded in this computer for approximately three hours planetside time, but eternally in trip time.
Suddenly, a human hand reached into the computer and pulled me out.... I found that Sandy, seeing my terror and panic, had grasped my hand in order to comfort me.
In the fantastic release I cried and suddenly I was a baby again in father's arms and he was rocking me. (Lilly 1972, pp. 87-88)

Allen Ginsberg took ayahuasca in Peru in 1960 and

lay down expecting God knows what other pleasant vision and then I began to get high—and then the whole fucking Cosmos broke loose around me, I think the strongest and worst I've ever had it nearly. . . . First I began to realize my worry about the mosquitoes or vomiting was silly as there was the great stake of life and Death—I felt faced by Death, my skull in my beard on pallet on porch rolling back and forth and settling finally as if in reproduction of the last physical move I make before settling into real death—got nauseous, coughed and began vomiting, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, colored serpents in aureole all around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe. . . my death to come—everyone's death to come—all unready—I unready—all around me in the trees the noise of these spectral animals and other drinkers vomiting (normal part of the Cure sessions) in the night in their awful solitude in the universe. . . . The whole hut seemed rayed with spectral presences all suffering transfiguration with contact with a single mysterious Thing that was our fate and was sooner or later going to kill us. . . . I was frightened and simply lay there with wave after wave of death-fear, fright, rolling over me till I could hardly stand it, didn't want to take refuge in rejecting it as illusion, for it was too real and too familiar . . . finally had a sense that I might face the Question there and then, and choose to die and understand—and leave my body to be found in the morning. . . decided to have children somehow, a revolution in the Hallucination—but the suffering was about as much as I could bear and the thought of more suffering even deeper to come made me despair. . . .
I suppose I will be able to protect myself by treating that consciousness as a temporary illusion and return to temporary normal consciousness when the effects wear off. (Burroughs and Ginsberg 1975 [1963], pp. 55-60)

Córdova-Rios' last ayahuasca trip in the jungle:

I broke out in a dripping, running sweat, and a terrible nausea coupled with deep abdominal convulsions blotted out all other sensations. I remember groping for one control mechanism, but they all escaped me. . . sinister menacing tentacles began to form and extend toward me. Each became a hideous viper with flashing eyes and tongue. I was incapable of moving and found myself writhing on the ground enveloped in their undulating coils. . . .
I became aware of my heartbeat and could follow in great detail the coursing of my blood through my body. . . . It seemed that I had left my body and was observing all this from outside. Then I floated off into a boundless, hideous void. . . . A feeling of uncontrollable rhythmic acceleration toward some impending disaster plunged me, helplessly, into an indescribably agonizing purgatory of the mind. . . .
Visions of my family back in Iquitos appeared and I realized there was sickness—my mother was dying. Unendurable anguish at being away, at the flooding awareness that I would never see her again. . . .
I must have lost consciousness for a while. The next thing I recall was seeing the calm, almost sublime face of Chief Xumu, and with this moving vision I regained control of the visions. The black panther appeared. He and I became one—and prowled the forest, afraid of nothing. (Lamb 1974 [1971], pp. 183-185)

The visions of his family caused him to leave for home, where he became a healer and continued to use ayahuasca.
A DMT injection turns into a hellish experience:
 

I had been up for three days and two nights working on a manuscript. That was the first mistake. The room where the -experiment- was to take place was a dirty, dingy, insanely cluttered pesthole. That was the second mistake. I was told that I would see God. That was the third and worst mistake of all.
The needle jabbed into my arm and the dimethyl-tryptamine oozed into my bloodstream. At the same time the steam came on with a rhythmic clamor and I remember thinking that it would be good to have some heat. Within thirty seconds I noticed a change, or rather I noticed that there had never been any change, that I had been in this dreamy unworldly state for millions of years. I told this to Dr.--, who said, -Good, then it is beginning to pass the blood-brain barrier.-
It was too fast. Much too fast. I looked up at what a minute ago had been doors and cabinets, and all I could see were parallel lines falling away into absurdities. Dimensions were outraged. The geometry of things crashed blindly into one another and crumbled into chaos. I thought to myself, -But he said that I would see God, that I would know the meaning of the universe.- I closed my eyes. Perhaps God was there, behind my eyeballs.
Something was there, all right; Something, coming at me from a distant and empty horizon. At first it was a pinpoint, then it was a smudge, and then—a formless growing Shape. A sound accompanied its progress towards me—a rising, rhythmic, metallic whine; a staccato meeyow that was issuing from a diamond larynx. And then, there it loomed before me, a devastating horror, a cosmic diamond cat. It filled the sky, it filled all space. There was nowhere to go. It was all that was. There was no place for me in this—Its universe. I felt leveled under the cruel glare of its crystalline brilliance. My mind, my body, my vestige of self-esteem perished in the hard glint of its diamond cells.
It moved in rhythmic spasms like some demonic toy; and always there was its voice—a steely, shrill monotony that put an end to hope. ... The chilling thing was that I knew what it was saying! It told me that I was a wretched, pulpy, flaccid thing; a squishy-squashy worm. I was a thing of soft entrails and slimy fluids and was abhorrent to the calcified God.
I opened my eyes and jumped up from my chair screaming: "I will not have you! I will not have such a God! What is the antidote to this? Give me the antidote!" But as I said this I doubted my own question for it seemed to me that this was the only reality I had ever known, the one I was born with and the one I would die with. There was no future beyond this state of mind, there was no state of mind beyond this one.
"There is no antidote,- said Dr.--. "Relax, it's only been three minutes. You've got at least twenty-five more minutes still to go." (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 162- 163)

The sexual effects of all psychoactive drugs are variable because the central nervous system is connected with sexual functions in such a complicated and indirect way. For obvious reasons, that is even more true of psychedelic drugs than others. The basic rule, for stronger psychedelic drugs as for marihuana, is that they heighten sexual interest and enjoyment only when the user is already inclined that way. They are anything but a stimulus to indiscriminate activity. Nevertheless, if temperaments, mood, and circumstances are right, they can produce an extraordinary intensification, prolongation, and elaboration of sexual experience, as they can for almost any experience. A book published in the 1960s was entitled The Sexual Paradise of LSD (Alexander 1967). Timothy Leary, suiting his remarks to the audience, has described LSD for Playboy as -basically a sexual experience,- as -the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man,- and as a panacea for impotence, frigidity, and homosexuality; he speaks of -electric and erotic- touch and -cellular orgasm- (Leary 1973). This is not just an attempt to recruit the Playboy readership for the drug revolution. About the quality of psychedelic sex, some say that it often has a kind of Edenic innocence, others that it becomes symbolically charged; a sexual partner may change in age or appearance, take on the features of mythical and historical figures, and sometimes come to represent all men, all women, or natural features like landscapes, rivers, and oceans. But psychedelic drugs are not a reliable way to increase sexual pleasure any more than to achieve other emotional states. They not only enhance sexuality but transform it, often to the point where it becomes hardly recognizable; and they can be as powerfully anaphrodisiac as aphrodisiac. In the varying moods of the drug trip, intense sexual desire may suddenly turn into equally intense disgust or fear, or it may be transcended in a feeling of all-embracing cosmic love that makes mere sexual pleasure seem trivial and irrelevant.

A 1975 study of drugs and sex in Haight-Ashbury throws some light on this subject. Hippies interviewed there regard LSD and -mescaline- (probably LSD or PCP) as more effective sexual drugs than any others except cocaine and marihuana. Psychedelic drugs are said to enhance tactile sensitivity, general sensuality, the quality and number of orgasms, and the capacity to act out sexual fantasies. The main problems they create are in maintaining an erection and sustaining sexual desire. Low doses are recommended; high doses are said to take the user beyond sex as well as most other mundane preoccupations. In spite of its powers, taking LSD is followed by sexual intercourse fewer than one out of eight times; the experience is simply too intense, they say, for greater frequency (Gay et al. 1975). Nowadays MDA has a particularly high reputation as a sexual drug, since it is believed to produce psychedelic sensuality and intimacy without perceptual distortions and wild emotional swings.

Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) remarks:

Tim is absolutely right about LSD enhancing sex. Before taking LSD, I never stayed in a state of sexual ecstasy for hours on end, but I have done this under LSD. . . . Each caress or kiss is timeless. (Playboy Panel 1970)

Art Kleps is less enthusiastic:

Personally, I have found acid to be as sexually distracting as it is intensifying, although grass almost always makes a sexual experience more sensual and luxurious than it would be otherwise, as it does all direct and immediate experience we usually cloud over with game-planning. . . .

Acid, although producing exactly the same intensifications of present experience and abolition of perceptual and sensual inhibitions as marijuana, is always pushing beyond—like a geisha who, once she has her customer well enchanted, starts reading from the Tale of Genji and manifesting glorious visions on the surface of the carp pool in her moonlit garden. Under such circumstances, getting laid seems like something you might as well put off until tomorrow. If you insist anyway, it's absolutely true that the experience is in a class by itself, especially on a visionary level. Enough variety to satisfy the most jaded palate, one might say. It's like taking on central casting. But people who routinely use acid in this way are tamasic [approximately, -inertial.] types in almost every case, I have found: devoid of higher aspirations or interests beyond the satisfaction of their personal needs. (Kleps 1977, p. 104)

The following account is by a twenty-five-year-old married woman (notice the guilt she feels) who went with her lover, an art student, to a national park on the Pacific Coast for her first LSD experience (he did not take any drug):

I first noticed the effects of the drug when I opened my compact and caught a glimpse of myself in the small mirror. Staring back at me was an old, wizened face mottled with warts and whiskers. The eyes were sunk deep in the sockets, the mouth was puckered like the ring of an orange peel, and the skin was blotched by a dull brown color. "Would I look like this when I grew old?" I asked myself. I had once seen a film where a beautiful young girl had been instantly transformed into a wrinkled old hag. That scene immediately came back to my mind and, although I realized that the image I saw was the effect of the drug, I couldn't help feeling depressed at the thought of aging.
Fortunately, at that time, D. asked me what I saw in the mirror. I told him, and he suggested I hold up the mirror over my shoulder and watch the scudding clouds. Caught in the small frame, it seemed as if I was examining the slowly elongating substance of some form of microscopic life. It appeared to be caught up in a painful, silent agony. I then saw it as a cell groping for union with another to start the mute beginnings of life. Thus I came into existence, I thought: gray tufts of sperm floating aimlessly toward an unforeseen union with ovaries dropping like dew in a golden uterine mist.
My body at the time actually felt weightless. I could feel the ego sense leaving me as I grew lighter and lighter. It was as if I was molting my old skin and receiving a new one of light, shiny texture.
I noticed that D. had taken off his shirt and was watching me with his hands propped under his head. He immediately struck me as a beautiful young man, although, in reality, he has an interesting, but not handsome face as understood in conventional terms. "You're divine," I told him. He held a flower in his mouth on which he seemed to be playing a seductive tune. I imagined him as a young Greek god frolicking through the woodlands, piping his merry tune. Wood nymphs, lake spirits, elfin gods, and all the animal life of the forest gamboled after him over hills, dales, and streams. I became a white dove turning slow cartwheels in the sky, watching the tiny figures recede into groves and emerge again on a luscious field. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. In the open meadow, he lay down gazing at the clouds as the sun waxed his limbs. His band of followers had disappeared and a shower of rose petals fell from a magnificent rainbow, flecking his body with tiny flakes of all different colors.
I felt as if he were unaware of my presence and I thought I would really surprise him by appearing out of a clump of bushes like a tree spirit. I got up and, for a few minutes, retired behind a nearby tree where I took off my clothes. While walking, the hill seemed to bounce, rippling like waves with the trees bobbing like the masts of a fleet of wooden schooners. I had never felt as close to nature before, and I realized that I might have been some passive wildflower in a previous existence. With each article of clothing I peeled off, my closeness to the environment seemed to increase, It was as if all of nature silently expressed its approval of my desire to present myself in my natural state.
When I was finally nude, I was overcome by a warmth and sense of comfort that I've never experienced before or since. The pile of clothes on the grass seemed like an obscene article. My brassiere with its two padded cups struck me as being totally ludicrous. The short skirt and limp stockings bore no relation to the human form.
When I returned, D. had also stripped off his clothes. Against the luscious background, parts of his body were unnaturally white. Lying down, we looked for a while at the sky and the swaying treetops, which seemed to huddle in a protective circle around us.
D. took my hand and put it on his chest. It felt strange to feel the hair brush against my skin. At the same time I saw his body not as a whole, but as a multiple of millions of cells, each contributing its bit like the symphony of a harmonious piece of music.
When I touched a part of his body it came to life as if my fingers were a magic wand. I noticed his erection. Actually I had watched it swell, like a snake uncoiling itself. I had never really looked at a penis before, finding it somehow gross and somewhat pathetic. Now, for the first time, I really examined it and was stupefied at its power and complexity.
I became aware of the tremendous difference between male and female. The full nature of the sex act, which I'd never really thought about, suddenly became clear to my mind. I was thrilled to find how wondrously it had been arranged—the lock and the key and the mysterious juices that lubricated them. D. was stroking my breasts now. I'm not usually erogenous there, but this time, the slightest pressure multiplied into a vortex of sensation that sent spasms of pleasure into every part of my body. We touched each other with never more than the fingertips but the actual tactile sensations felt as if we were in contact all over.
We lay there exploring each other for a long time until I was seized by a frightening vision. Just as we were at the height of our passion and D. made ready to consummate the act, I saw his penis break off from the crotch and drop, lifeless, to the ground. The sun had disappeared and suddenly the knoll was alive with menacing shadows. I was afraid to speak of what I'd just seen and I grew even more terrified when I thought I could feel my vulva dry up and fill with dust.
D. told me later that I had turned around and curled up in the fetal position. With my eyes closed I saw a figure rise in the sky and address me in thundering tones. It was an awesome appearance—the devil perhaps. What it said terrified me so much I lay absolutely frozen, unable to move. I was asked to sacrifice D. on a small altar constructed from twigs to pay for my sins. According to D., I was in a frightful state, whimpering and crying words he couldn't understand. I then heard a rumble as if the earth were splitting and both of us were carried away on an immense floodtide where we floated for years until the waters receded.
The entire episode probably didn't take more than minutes and, as the flood subsided, the earth turned once again beautiful and fresh. I heard Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun playing softly through the foliage. Around me, the hill took on deep hues like a Tintoretto or Rubens painting while the sun slowly sank with an expression of pain on its face. A whole succession of what appeared to me Indian gods then marched by in single file—Shiva, Kali, the eight-armed Yoga, and the profoundly peaceful face of Buddha. The threat to D. had been averted and we made love to each other for what must have been hours. It was the most satisfying experience of my life. I would advocate the use of LSD for sex purposes without hesitation if it weren't for the unknowable terrifying sensations that may accompany it. It saddened me to think that such profundity of emotion and feeling needed the catalyst of drugs to be achieved. (Geller and Boas 1969, pp. 207-210)

The transformation of sexual feeling can go even further. Michaux describes a sexual fantasy, or rather an experience for which the words "sexual" and-fantasy,- the closest ones available, seem totally inadequate:

Great gushes of bodies stream past me, interlinked, interlocked, astraddle, adrift, trunks intertwined, holding on to each other. .

Earth, waters, mountains, trees writhe in riots of debauchery. All is fashioned by delight, for delight, but delight of a superhuman variety, ranging from the most excited rapture to a kind of half-death where searing pleasure yet seeps in....
... previously innocent things perverted, mentally perverted: the stem from which a flower hangs, the flower itself. ... and the fruit which it yields, currants, a cluster of currants (the expressive red, the spherical form about which no mistake can be made) and the very name, currants, swollen with sensuality like a sponge in a tepid bath filled with soapy water....
What I saw that one afternoon would give a lifetime of pleasure to any man. I know now what it is to be tempted by the devil, and I also know that no man can swim against this tide. ...
... This power is exclusively turned towards the erotic, with no other aim or occupation, with no room at all for anything else, not the slightest distraction, not the slightest diversion, and would constitute for the onlooker, maximum temptation, 100% perfect, irresistible, even for the man who is not a Christian and would, moreover, be more detrimental to love than the most puritan denial....
Seething with delight and sensuality, all sense of human belonging forgotten, all sense of human agency, one exists as a mere unit of being in a bestial Eden. One experiences a kind of return to a primitive state, a state familiar to unicellular beings (if they are capable of perceiving it). .
The images of this state are swamps, sludge, the ooze of waste matter, and this is quite rightly: it is a prison of drifting slime. Here is sin (yes, sin): against,,oneself, against the person one appears to be, against one's nobility, against the idea that one wishes to hold of oneself. ... and (for a man who possesses religion) against God....
. . . A solemn voice is heard, a woman's voice, in the distance. God, I only hope she stays there, in the distance, but of course all distance is immediately swept aside. Now towards me, like a wild woman seething with lust, tongue slurping from her mouth, drooling in whispered reverie, and this slurping noise, I know it well, it undermines all my resistance. And yet, I must resist, I must, there is no other way. There cannot be anything between us. While I am pulling myself together, or trying to, she divests herself unhesitatingly of her dress, her education, politeness, reserve, social conventions, our distant friendship, and in a single flick of the wrist stands forth divested of everything.
And how she laughs! Such laughter! Has she ever dared laugh like that before, has she ever dared reveal such laughter?
Desecration! I did not want that.... (Michaux 1975 [1964], pp. 76-86)

When mescaline at its highest point of intensity throws itself upon one who is naturally voluptuous, who was hoping to play the game of love with the drug, when it abruptly releases its galvanizing trance, its amazing multiplied quiverings, into the stream of languishments, into the cradle of the gentle current, which immediately becomes like a torrent, like a cataract, intersecting through thousands of pin-points, which it divides and atomizes, then it is really no longer a question of sensuality, but of something quite different. . . . (Michaux 1975 [1964], p. 174)

The following passages from two descriptions of psychedelic experiences by a writer, Daniel Breslaw, embody a number of themes we have mentioned. First, psilocybin taken in an experiment:

The three of them stiffened audibly. Audibly, because of the new acuity of my senses. The rustling of their clothes sounded in my head as someone crumpling cellophane behind my ear. Recalling Superman's ability to detect the footfall of an ant a thousand miles away, I strained to do likewise. And then I imagined a dull boom as the ant's foot struck the earth, and I began to throb with muffled laughter....
And the Doctor is beside me, asking excellent questions. What he does not consider is that by the time I have pronounced the initial word of my answer, a hundred or a thousand new thoughts have crossed my mind, and I am obliged to halt my sentence in bewilderment, overwhelmed by the avalanche of additions, corrections, qualifications to my original thought. I am officially crazy, I decide, and again I rise on a crest of Olympian laughter.
My own laughter is the thunder of colliding worlds, a noise signifying that the destruction of the universe is taking place. . . .
A smudge on the wall is an object of limitless fascination, multiplying in size, complexity, color. But more than that, one sees every relationship it has to the rest of the universe; it possesses, therefore, an endless variety of meanings, and one proceeds to entertain every possible thought there is to think about it. .. .
The sounds stretch out: I am left to meditate for hours upon each instant of noise. A nurse is tapping a pencil; there are no special intervals between any two -taps--it could be seconds or years, there is no difference.
A waterfall roaring. Where? My own breathing, how odd. Another odd thing, noted at the same moment: I no longer believe anything. (Breslaw 1965 [1961], pp. 330-334)

Second, mescaline:

There is no describing my state, except as one of pain. Not pain about anything, for any thought that crossed my mind proved equally distressing; all thoughts were drawn from a reservoir that was the essence of pain itself. As for its intensity, the mind reels: I should have preferred any degree of physical torture.

I began to walk. . . . Each block that I covered I strongly visualized as a mile into Hell....
Twenty minutes to get from the car to the front door. We pause to inspect fire hydrants, parking signs, to sway on the undulating sidewalk, to point laughing at the gnomes and giants who occasionally walk by; passing pedestrians who seem to wink at us slyly and to perform unutterably comic movements for our amusement; they turn their heads to look at us and their faces assume grotesque expressions; they alter their shape and size at will (our will); one could watch forever. . . .
A hallway, and a tiny room with a ladder, rising to a sort of chimney flue in the ceiling. I climb the ladder and place my head in the opening: complete darkness.
But there has never been anything to equal the next ten minutes. The little cubic space of blackness is an entirely new universe. Accustomed as I am to the hallucinogenic vision, I am staggered, for it is a universe of a totally different structure, operating within an entirely new set of laws; only now can I imagine what such a universe would be like—it is all compressed into a tiny dark space. It is the major event of my life, if one chooses to speak in a certain sense, and I choose. (Breslaw 1965 [1961], pp. 338-340)

Finally, one of Timothy Leary's trips:

The Timothy Leary game was suspended and the needle point of consciousness was free to move into any one of thirteen billion nerve cells or down any one of a billion billion genetic-code networks.
. . First the dial swung to the sensory. . . .
Then the dial swung to olfactory sensations. The room was filled with spaghetti tangles of smell tapes, and dog-like, I sorted through them. I could see each distinctive fume of scent. . . .
Then consciousness buried itself in tissue memories. A rapid newsreel sequence of my life. Early childhood picture albums. Model A Fords. Cotton candy at the beach. . . .
Sudden revelation into workings of oxygen monopoly. In the year 1888, British scientists, members of the Huxley family, discover that the oxygen supply of earth is failing . . . secretly bottle remaining vapors of air and hide it. Air is replaced by synthetic gas which possesses no life or consciousness, keeps people alive as plastic doll robots. Plump, mocking, effeminate, patronizing Englishmen have control of precious oxygen elixir of life which they dole out in doses for their god-like amusement and pleasure. LSD is air.
The rest of the human race is doomed to three-D-treadmill-plastic repetition. Trapped. . . .
Science-fiction horror. Hell! I wanted to shriek and run from the room for help. How to get back to life. Center. Pray. Love. Touch. . .
. . . I sank back into delightful tissue recollections—muscle memories. I cOuld feel each muscle in my shoulders and legs swelling, pulsing with power. Felt the hair growing on my limbs and the elongated dog-wolf foot-pad legs loping and graceful. ... Fierce ecstatic mammalian memories ...
And then death. Heavy, cold immobility creeping up my body. Oh God. Now be careful how you lie. Your posture now will be frozen into a mountain marble landscape statue. .. . I was paralyzing into sprawled appalachian disorder, geological pressures on every muscle (you remember all those Greek myths of metamorphosis, don't you?). So this is death. Good-bye to animal mobility, cellular pulsation. Now the elderly elemental mineral consciousness takes over. Had you forgotten? Rocks are aware.
   Inorganic matter—rocks, cliffs, valleys, mountains are alive and wise. . . . The eternal moist erotic friction of water and land. The tidal caress . . .
For millennia I lay in geological trance. Forests grew on my flanks, rains came, continental ecstasies. Great slow heaving supporter of life.

    . . I opened my eyes. I was in heaven. Illumination. 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. . . . Everything hooked up in a cosmic dance. Fragile. Indestructible. . . .
And the incredible shattering discovery. Consciousness controlled it all. Or (to say it more accurately), all was consciousness.
I was staggered by the implication. All creation lay in front of me. I could live every life that had ever been lived, think every thought that had ever been thought. An endless variety of ecstatic experience spiraled out around me. I had taken the God-step. (Leary 1968a, pp. 324-328)

In addition to these varied and extravagant accounts of the psychedelic experience, there exists a body of scientific investigation which supplements the travelers' tales. Not enough has been attempted in this field; even so, there is general ignorance of the little that has been achieved. For almost all of it we are indebted to psychologists and psychiatrists who studied psychedelic drugs from 1950 to the mid-1960s. The guidebooks to psychedelic country are sketchy; the geographical and archeological studies are tentative and disputable. But they at least supply a means of organization and points where the intellect can impose some order. Besides, in some of these investigations, especially in the psychiatric use of LSD, further levels of psychedelic experience come to light that are only dimly perceived and identified in descriptions of the more common and less profound sorts of drug trip. Evidence from psychological testing of drug takers, clinical evaluation of drug effects, and, especially, the long-term therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs all provide insight into the nature and value of psychedelic experiences. Since some of the experiences may sound incredible, we should emphasize that the question is not whether to take them at face value but how to make sense of them in the context of what we know about psychology and natural science.

Tests of perceptual, psychomotor, and cognitive capacity under the influence of psychedelic drugs are difficult to execute and interpret, partly because subjects tend to regard the testing with emotions ranging from annoyed indifferefice to derision and scorn. One subject described his impression of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory as "redundant, offensive, and ambiguous baby-talk" (Fischer 1972, p. 187). For this reason it is impossible to tell whether the lowered scores on various functions are caused by impaired capacity or decreased interest. Someone who is experiencing all-absorbing interest in a crack on the opposite wall, or a feeling that his body and ego are about to melt away is unlikely to be able to concentrate on counting backward by sevens from one hundred. If he is persuaded to try to do it, he may become so fascinated by the implications of the magic number seven that he can no longer count at all, much less count correctly. Whether we say he -cannot- or -does not want to- count backward makes little difference; what matters is the specific content of the emotion or perception that is preventing it.

Nevertheless, there is a large body of experimental work on this topic. In general, it confirms the enormous individual variability of reactions. None of these experiments involves amounts larger than about 100 micrograms of LSD or the equivalent, because it is impossible to test anyone under the influence of a dose large enough to produce the most profound effects. The testing itself also prevents deeper exploration.

According to some studies, psychedelic drugs not only heighten the senses subjectively but actually enhance measurable perceptual sensitivity on tests like color discrimination and the response to visual and auditory stimuli of low intensity (Silverman 1971). Other researchers deny this (Hartman and Hollister 1963; Hollister 1974). Sensitivity to high-intensity stimulation and especially to pain is usually reduced. Psychedelic drugs seem to increase the level of critical flicker fusion (CFF), the speed at which a flashing light begins to look like a steady one. An image stabilized in one spot on the retina of the eye, which normally fades from sight quickly, is retained longer under the influence of psychedelic drugs (Jarvik 1967).

The effect of moderate doses on intellectual capacity is usually to impair simple problem-solving, recognition, short-term memory, verbal comprehension, verbal memory, abstract thinking, and numerical calculation as measured by tests (Sankar 1975, pp. 348-350; Barr et al. 1972, pp. 46-51; Levine et al. 1955a; Jarvik et al. 1955). The drugs slow manual response to color and word signals (Abramson et al. 1955b) and in some tests impair hand-eye coordination (Abramson et al. 1955a). Disturbances also occur on word association tests. LSD produces more "close" associations (rhymes, repetition of the stimulus word, definitions) than a placebo; but unlike schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis, it does not also produce more "distant" associations like proper names and references to oneself. It also has the unusual property of causing as many uncommon or pathological responses to neutral words like "farm" as to words with high traumatic content, like "breast." LSD subjects give the most common responses less often and respond more slowly,(Weintraub et al. 1959). Raters who try to fill in deleted words from written samples of spontaneous speech do much better with placebo subjects than with LSD subjects; this suggests that LSD reduces the predictability and information content of speech (Amarel and Cheek 1965).

H. L. Barr, R. J. Langs, and their colleagues found that lists of aggressive and sexual words were learned faster than lists of neutral words by LSD subjects but not by placebo subjects; they concluded that LSD impaired the autonomy of cognitive functions so that aggressive and sexual drives took over an organizing and selecting role (Barr et al. 1972, pp. 54-59). On the Rorschach test, they found that LSD affected form more than content; in psychoanalytical terms, this suggested changes in ego function rather than id expres sion (Barr and Langs 1972, p. 79). On Rorschach responses, LSD impaired the more sophisticated controls like remoteness (seeing a man in skirts and describing him as a Scot in kilts) and context (seeing a sexual organ and calling it an anatomical drawing); it increased the use of "primitive" defenses like perceptual vagueness, retraction, and denial, and reduced use of intellectualizing defenses like obsessional thinking (Barr and Langs 1972, p. 76).

As the gulf between these experimental results and the excerpts quoted indicates, study of psychedelic reactions by such methods is obviously inadequate. The subtle interplay between the drug and the mind requires other approaches. One is to correlate drug effects with the personality of the user as determined by tests and clinical observations. That is what Barr, Langs, and their colleagues did in a study published in 1972, using psychoanalytic theory for interpretation. They administered 100 micrograms of LSD to thirty young men (separately) in a special laboratory room draped in black. Staff members observed each subject during the experiment; questionnaires and psychological tests were given before, during, and after it. The moderate dose, the continual testing, and the rather forbidding environment prevented the most striking emotional extremes, fantasy, regression, and insight; but the experimenters were able to identify several classes of drug reaction and associate them with different personality types. From responses to questionnaires and staff ratings during the sessions, four symptom clusters were derived and the subjects' degree of reaction in each category judged. The four clusters were:

A. Elation, loss of inhibitions, loss of control of attention, and perceiving new meanings
B. Feelings of unreality, of being a dissociated observing self, of fear and suspicion, severe loss of control, physical regression to infancy, and delusions of reference
C. Body-image alterations and physical symptoms
D. Anxlety and fear of losing control accompanied by physical symptoms like nausea, blurred vision, and ringing in the ears

The subjects fell into seven groups defined by questionnaire and rating results on these scales; six of them resembled groups determined by personality tests beforelhe drug session. These were:

I. Emotionally open, narcissistic, exhibitionistic men with high self-esteem, intellectual, introspective, creative, colorful in their use of words, willing to accept their impulses. In their drug sessions the emphasis was on self-knowledge and sensuous pleasure; Scale A symptoms were dominant, and they shifted easily from rich fantasies to performing experimental tasks.

II. Poorly integrated, schizoid personalities, with low self-esteem, stereotyped thinking, inability to express anger verbally, and a tendency to somatize (manifest psychological problems in physical symptoms). The impact of LSD on this inadequately defended group was tremendous. Scale A and B symptoms were dominant. A great deal of unconscious (primary-process) material broke through into consciousness. They felt manic elation and often lost their ego boundaries and power to test reality; they saw fascinating or frightening visions, and their thinking was seriously impaired. Nevertheless, most of them enjoyed the experience and wanted to take LSD again.

III. A group characterized by passive-aggressive attitudes, inner turmoil, suppressed sensuality, and a tendency to submit to paternal figures. The peculiarity of their drug reaction was that it was powerful but quickly over. Scale B and Scale D symptoms were dominant: silliness, uncontrolled laughter, and anxiety. Cognitive functioning remained more or less intact, as in Group I.

IV. Obsessional, emotionally bland and defensive, verbally aggressive men, rebels who tended to anticipate exploitation and externalize blame. They felt mainly Scale C and especially Scale D effects: infantile helplessness and a flood of anxiety over rising hostile feelings. The men in their drawings became smaller, weaker, older, and less sexual; the women became more active and acquired hostile facial expressions.

V. Poorly integrated personalities who tended to be anxious, paranoid, withdrawn, and obsessional but not overtly depressed or hostile; they were also creative and introspective, and they liked to indulge in hypomanic role-playing or clowning. Their ego functioning was poor. Under LSD they scored very high on Scales C and D, especially the former. In their drawings males became less sexual, females more sexual. They produced very earLy memories, but their intellectual capacity remained intact.

VI. Independent, assertive, practical men, low in fantasy and sensuality, with some tendency toward defensiveness and a feeling of being unloved. Their reaction was slight: scores on all four symptom scales were low; drawings and Rorschach tests changed little. They felt only some fluctuations of mood and minor physical symptoms. Strong defensive needs and matching capacities limited the tendency to regress. The authors believe that LSD acts mainly by altering ego defenses in individually characteristic ways, thereby confirming the theory, sometimes challenged, that stable and persistent personality traits are as important as the immediate situation in determining behavior.

In this experiment the use of a single moderate dose, the laboratory setting, a certain uniformity in the subjects (all were male, all were unemployed actors, and an unusually large proportion were homosexual), and the absence of expectations, advice, or guidance created serious limitations. To do justice to the spectacular qualities of some psychedelic drug trips, classifications based on wider experience are needed. Timothy Leary has devoted some attention to this subject, especially in his popular Baedeker for drug voyagers, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964). Other accounts have been given by R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston, and more recently by Stanislav Grof.

Masters and Houston guided more than two hundred individual LSD sessions, using fairly high doses of up to 300 micrograms. The setting was more like a living room than a laboratory; they prepared the subjects by explanations, and they provided props (music, art, flowers, and so on) and suggestions during the trip. For analytic purposes they divide the experience into four stages or levels: the sensory, the recollective-analytic, the symbolic, and the integral. The sensory level encompasses the common mood alterations and changes in the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of things, including the closed-eye imagery in its early stages. Since this is the most accessible part of the experience and the most familiar, its importance is often overestimated.

The dose may be too low to push things further, or the drug taker may avoid deeper exploration by finding distractions. But if the dose is high enough to force the issue, or the drug taker chooses to experience more, he can move on to the recollective-analytic level. Here an upsurge from the unconscious produces a recovery of forgotten childhood events, age-regression, and a release of repressed feeling through abreaction (discharge of emotion by means of recall). The emotional problems and conflicts of childhood are revived and childhood experiences like weaning, toilet training, and early sexual incidents may be relived. At this stage deep underlying emotions often dominate consciousness: low self-esteem, infantile dependency or rage, demands for attention, need for dominance or submission. Sometimes these feelings are opposed to the everyday character patterns of the subject: timid and anxious people become hostile and aggressive, those who feel inferior become grandiose and overconfident, autocratic characters display a deep insecurity, and macho men reveal doubts about their masculinity. Such experiences are often elicited in therapy, and this is the level where cures of neurotic symptoms are said to occur. Some examples of these relivings, recollections, and emotional abreactions:

Dr. Hanscarl Leuner, of Goettingen, Germany, tells of a patient who had an attack of violent nausea under LSD and was oppressed with the smell of a particular antiseptic. As he drifted further into the experience he seemed to be surrounded by a milky fluid or fog; he became aware that he was a baby, but even more aware of a pain in his stomach and the feeling that he was dying. Checking later with his parents and doctors, the man discovered that when he was about six months old he had been ill with colic and had almost died. Doctor and parents alike identified the antiseptic they had used as the one he had smelled under LSD. (Caldwell 1969 [1968], p. 74)

... Richard suddenly deeply regressed into infancy and experienced himself as a one-year-old baby swaddled in a blanket and lying on the grass by a field, while the adults were harvesting grain. He saw a cow approach him, graze in the immediate proximity of his head, and then lick his face several times with her huge, rough tongue. During the reliving of this episode, the head of the cow seemed gigantic and almost filled the session room. Richard found himself gazing helplessly into the monstrous salivating mouth of the cow and felt her saliva flowing all over his face. After having relived the happy ending of this situation, in which the adults discovered what was happening and rescued the baby, Richard felt enormous relief and a surge of vitality and activity. He laughed for a solid five minutes and was able to joke about his shocking encounter with the cow. (Grof 1975, p. 59)

Experiences of this kind in therapy are often produced by MDA:

At this point a reminiscence gradually began to dawn on him. "Something happened with the gardener—there was a gardener in the house—and something happened, I don't remember what—. I see myself sitting on his lap—can this be true?" Then there was an image of the gardener's penis and his sucking it, then a feeling of his face being wet, all of a sudden, and his perplexity. All this had something to do with little pictures which came in cigarette packages, and he gradually remembered that this man gave them to him in exchange for sexual manipulations. And he did not want them for himself. . . no, for his sister. . . yes, for his sister he would do this, so that she would have these little prints for her collection. . . for she was competing with his older brother, and this brother (now he remembers the important part) . . . his brother caught him! He remembers him looking into the garage, and he remembers his own fear—his brother would tell his parents!
It took about five hours to reconstitute the whole situation brought about by the long-forgotten episode. (Naranjo 1975 [1973], p. 42)

Another MDA therapy session:

The verbal kind of communication we were having did not seem to put him in touch with his ongoing experience at the moment, so I turned to the non-verbal level. I asked him to let his body do whatever it wanted most at the moment, without questioning it, and he went back to the couch. . . .

After two pleasant hours—

At this point, his enthusiasm was clouded by a different feeling... . I repeatedly instructed him to express and elaborate on his experience of the moment, but this he rejected more and more: "It is not this, it is not this moment, but something in my past. Something happened to me, and I don't know what."
. .. His associations have taken him ... to his nanny, his wet nurse. Now he clearly evokes his feeling for this nurse. He writes: "Affection with some DESIRE. I tremble."
. . He writes several times: "Nana and not Mama. Nana and not Mama." He then remembers more of his nanny. ... and as he remembers her, he feels sadder and sadder, sad at having lost her, of not having his Nana any more. "Nanny left," he writes "Alone. Alone. Alone. Anxiety. Mother was part, not all. Nanny was all. She left. Came to see me later. Loved me. Painful wound. I am. With pain. I am more myself. I am myself. I am myself. I am myself with my nanny. How sad that she left. She gave me so much for nothing. No! Because she loved me, more than her own son......
. He could now see all his life as a begging for love, or rather, a purchase of love in which he had been willing to give in and adapt to whatever others had wanted to see and hear.... The change from Nana to Mama involved moving from the kitchen to the dining room. He felt constrained here, uncomfortable, unloved. Intimacy and warmth were now missing in his life.... It seemed to him that she had been fired, Mother was jealous, perhaps, because he loved her best, or because his father had an affair with her.... -Did you accept this without protesting? If you did, perhaps you felt guilty...." And now he has it: guilt.
... -She didn't have a child to have him, but to make him. To make him into her image! And she forced me into this stupid thing of sin and hell. . . . No authenticity . . . they both exploited an image. Ouch, how tough it is to see your parents shrink. How small do I see them now! It seems that they joined forces against me. Not against me, against Nana, against life..
This is far from the picture of his parents and the feelings that he had expressed toward them in his autobiography. He even remembered the dining room as beautiful.... A complete change had occurred in his feelings in that these were buried and replaced by a set of pseudo-feelings acceptable to his parents. (Naranjo 1975 [1973], pp. 28-33)

From the recollective-analytic level the subject may pass on, with or without suggestion from a guide, to the symbolic level—what Leary calls, after Hermann Hesse, the "magic theater.- The drug taker's self merges more and more with the imagery until it is actually participating in the scenes passing before the closed eyes. Image and emotion become one as unconscious material appears in the form of symbolic objects and metaphorical allusions. One patient in psycholytic therapy felt herself become "literally—a closed-up clam at the bottom of the sea, the music of a violin, Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus,' an evil fur thing, a scared sperm; and in one magnificent episode. . . the very Energy that exists before it is translated into Matter- (Newland 1962, p. 20). The drug user takes part imaginatively in exotic rites and ceremonies, assumes the character of famous historical figures, lives through the archetypal adventures described in myths and fairy tales, symbolically acts out childhood fantasies of murder, cannibalism, and incest, relives his own conception and birth. A therapist or friend can play the role of Virgil on these symbolic interior journeys, suggesting ways to direct the fantasy in more illuminating and tranfiguring directions, The symbolic adventures seem to convey the same meanings as dreams, myths, and fairy tales, but they are unusually vivid and explicit in their application to the individual's life. Masters and Houston even speak of "transparent allegory- in which the meaning of the fantastic journeys is explained to the subject by visualized diagrams or cartoons. Among the mythical themes they and others have found are the Child-Hero, the Creation, the Eternal Return, Paradise and the Fall, the Sacred Quest, and Prometheus-Faust. They devote a section to the enchanted forest, with its fairytale creatures out of Celtic and Teutonic mythology, as the symbolic abode of the childhood self of many American subjects. In this state consciousness is even more protean than in dreams. The subject is both actor and observer, both child and adult, both himself and the mythical hero.

We have already quoted some accounts that touch on the symbolic level, but there is much more. Here is an example of early memories and unconscious drives projected in symbolic form, from a book on psychedelic drug therapy:

One of the commonest mother archetypes in psychedelic therapy is the so-called mystic mother. . . .

My voice died away. My soul had entered heaven but I was perfectly aware that a facade remained in that room, a facade that must appear at every moment more and more curious to the observer. But then the music swept through me, and I cared no more. Exalted and urgent, I was struggling up and up, through the clouds of blue-green evening sky, where the stars hung low and bright. 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. At the final triumphant chords the heavens parted. Before me, radiant in a glory of light, stood an altar covered with pink roses. On it lay a child; behind it, great wings of indigo, royal blue, and purple extended outward to the ends of the earth. In their center was an angel whose face I could not see, an angel whose presence breathed the clearest light of tenderness and compassion that I had ever known.
I labeled my madonna the -mother of the sky" to distinguish her from the physical mother of the earth. I could find no possible relation between anything Freud had talked about and this experience with its exalted spirituality. When the therapist suggested that this vision was my own mother, I rejected the idea vehemently. -My mother hated me!" I retorted. No, I was quite sure this was an archetype, a goddess, a suprapersonal creation of my own desire. . . .
Three sessions later the experience was repeated—with modifications. The goddess was enthroned in the sky. I was lifted up beyond a starry heaven aflame with flickering northern lights. As I passed them I noticed a curious pattern in one of the bands, like a textile design. Yes, that was it, like the design on the hem of a skirt. Suddenly to my chagrin, all became clear. This was a vestigial memory. The impression of being lifted into the sky was based on being picked up from the floor, my infant habitat. The mother of the sky was my own historical mother. The grandiose mystification was gone, but the sweetness of the exaltation remained. I had made my first discovery of the resolution of all those gods and demons, the archetypes of the mind. (Caldwell 1969 [1968], p. 150)

Another symbolically transformed memory from the same source:

Suddenly 1 found myself standing on a desert of white sand and ashen rocks. The sky was burned to a metallic gray by the blinding sun. The sturdy cactus, the lifeless sage, the very air seemed to wither at its touch. The stillness itself was a horror. No leaf would ever stir; no rain would fall; no scream of anguish would change that pitiless silence of heat and shimmering light. I seemed to face a doom of slow attrition, of agonized waiting for something that would never occur. . . .
Into my mind came a paraphrase from the Bible, completely out of context, but intoned almost as if by the voice of God: -I will make a loud noise unto my Maker.''
Then, as if a dam had broken, I was crying loudly and vociferously enough for a male of twentieth-century America. There was joy in the wash of bitter hot tears, joy in the voice raised in outrage and anguish at the pain of life. . . .
Now there appeared before me a baby. Face and eyes red, his cheeks stained with tears, his little mouth contorted in sublime release, he bellowed and howled. . . .
Gradually my exultation subsided to annoyance and then distress as his angry screams sank into sobs and then into silent heaves and snuffles. Finally, anguished silence reigned and the anxiety I thought I had conquered returned again, more intense than before. . . .
. The child and I fused into one being; and the giant cactus before us, stretching its long arms upward, melted and reformed into the slats of a baby bed. Only the sun remained, casting its merciless light in my face. I was standing in a crib, waiting in helpless anxiety for a bottle that might never come. (Caldwell 1969 [1968], pp. 184— 185)

Sexual fantasies are common:

She had just finished incorporating the male aspects of her psyche into consciousness, and she gasped at the strength that flooded her body, flexing her muscles in the sudden access of power .. . she fantasied a sexual act in which she was both male and female. The beauty and power were both hers. And while she exulted in this union of her psydhe, she realized that she was one thing more. For out of the union of herself with herself issued a child, a product of the creation who was also herself, transformed, renewed, recreated from the lost, locked energies and limbos of the subconscious. (Caldwell 1969 [1968], p. 267)

Some time ago I observed a patient trying to resolve an impotence problem. As is sometimes helpful, he fantasied himself in the sex act, to observe what imaginary complications might occur. They were not long in appearing. Oppressed by a sudden fear, he looked to find an enormous black spider spreading a web about the head of the bed. .. . Instead of attacking him, as he had expected, the spider advanced toward the patient's fantasied sexual partner. While the patient watched in a sweat of horror, the spider .. . slowly and stealthily placed its stinger in her womb and injected the black poison of death.

By this time the patient was in torment, but psychedelic therapy is not for the fainthearted and he would not not back away. "Who is it?" he groaned. . . it turned into a hideous old crone. . . the old woman had turned into a girl. "It's a girl!" he said, staring intently into the inner space of his psyche. "Oh, my God, it's me! It's a girl me! I was jealous of all the women, my mother and grandmother and my sister. The girl is myself fighting a battle of supremacy with the other women, just as I fought the battle with males. How could it be?" Nobody knows quite how it can be, but it is. Nearly every psychedelic patient hits on the fact eventually. (Caldwell 1969 [1968], pp. 222-223)

First he lingered on the female anatomy, finding excitement in the female vagina. Later the center of attraction shifted to the anus. As he explored these associations it seemed that the attraction to the female body was but a projection of his own sensual excitement; and his attention turned to his own penis. . . . Then he found himself staring head on at a penis in a most unusual fantasy. All he could see of it was the tip, with the small opening in the center where the urethra emerges.

The sexual feeling was approaching a new peak when suddenly his whole psychic field of consciousness erupted. While the very walls of awareness cracked and dissolved about him, he observed the orb of the penis expand and soften, while the aperture in the center closed and protruded into a soft red button: the penis had become his mother's breast, and a breast alive with an awesome sensuality, before which the former excitement was as nothing. .. .

Man's first contact with this feeling is at mother's breast. There is a madness of identity-dissolving delight. Hence the orgiastic feeling, if felt deeply and strongly enough in sex, always includes an element of self-transcendence, of blinding release into the primitive selfless psyche of the infant. (Caldwell 1969 [1968], p. 235)

Aggressive fantasies also appear:

Somewhere in the therapy nearly every patient stumbles into an almost boundless reservoir of hidden antisocial urges. At this point the devil may appear. Half man, half beast, almost reptilian in his stealthy muscular grace, the figure breathes not only malevolence but the reckless courage of defiant will and exultant self-assertion. If one enters the archetype and becomes the devil an almost delirious demonic strength floods body and mind. (Caldwell 1969 [19681 p. 136)

. . . No one who has not done it (and most patients in psychedelic therapy have) can describe the drunken glory of crushing whole cities with a fist, of wiping out nations in one fiery breath, or shattering paper-thin earth like a nutshell. These fantasies are dreadful to ordinary consciousness, but they are accurate indications of universal desires. They help explain trivial things like the joy our youngsters find in monster movies. More seriously, they help explain the sudden orgies of violence that erupt when social bulwarks crumble. (Caldwell 1969 [1968], pp. 163-164)

Mythical adventures may be enacted:

S described himself as having been a spiritually precocious child and adolescent, much given to prayer and meditation as well as to theological reflection. The death of his father when S was twenty-one years old left him the sole support of his mother and six brothers and sisters all much younger than himself. Thus, instead of being able to pursue the career in literature and philosophy that he had planned, S was forced to take over his father's business interests. . . .
. . . What follows is the record of the subject's utterances as they were recorded by the guide. The story is told in terse sentences comprising a polyglot mythology of the child-hero with whom the subject identified. The actual (symbolic level) "incarnational" sequence took about forty minutes to unfold:
"Yes, the light is coming up. I see a woman lying on top of a mountain ... . She is struck by a thunderbolt .. . and out of this union. . . I ara born. A race of ugly dwarfs seek to destroy my mother and me.. . so she hurries down the mountain. . . hides me in a swamp.... A serpent with great jaws flicks out his tongue .. . draws me into his mouth. . . I am swallowed. . I am passing down inside the snake. This is horrible. Incredible demons line the shores of the snake's insides. Each tries to destroy me as I float by . . . I reach the end of the tail and kick my way out. . raining very hard in the swamp. . . I am drowning. . ..No . . I am caught in a net. . . being pulled out of the water. . . . An old fisherman has caught me in his net."

The fisherman and his wife raise him, and at the age of four:

. They tell me I must avenge myself on the sea monster who tried to destroy me and bit off my fisher-father's leg. I dive into the water to go and find the sea monster.
For many hours I swim around and finally I find it. It is swimming towards me at tremendous speed. It has grown gargantuan and horribly ugly. . . opens its jaws to consume me but! evade them and get a strangle hold on its throat. For many days we battle together. . . . The sea is crimson with our blood. . . .Great waves are created by our combat. . . . I am the conqueror .. . tear open its belly. . . I slay the internal demons. . . . In its stomach I find the leg of my fisher-father. I take the leg back to land and fit it onto his stump. It instantly joins and he is whole again. My parents take me to the temple to give thanks for my victory. . . . We approach the high priestess with a thanks offering. . . tell her my story. When she hears of it she swoons. . . . She comes to and says to me, 'My womb was quickened by the thunderbolt. You are the son of promisé whom I hid so long ago.' She raises her hands to the heavens and .. . she says • 'Speak, 0 Lord, to this your son. Speak to his strength and glory. He hath prevailed over the Evil One. He hath delivered the deep of its Enemy. Set your purpose upon him Lord.' A great thunderbolt shatters the air. . . . A thunderous voice speaks: `Aquarion, my son, you are now your own man. Go forth into the Wasteland and bring forth fruit. Know that I shall be with you always and where once there had been drought . . wherever you pass. . . there shall spring up a Green Land.'"
S recounted this classic and fully developed scenario of the child-hero in a hushed monotone, as if he were reciting the forbidden liturgy of a mystery rite. He seemed to be speaking from far away, or from so deep inside of himself that one had the general impression that his was a disembodied voice. . . . Several days later he felt more like talking and said that the session had been the most important, most profound and most intense experience of his life. His "inner state," he reported, was burgeoning, "like a spring garden" and he felt that his life had been "transfigured" by the "new being" which had emerged out of the depths of his psyche. He felt that his experience had been so transparent an allegory that interpretation would be ridiculous. (Masters and Houston 1965, pp. 226-228)

Masters and Houston interpret this adventure in Jungian fashion as an allegory of the battle of the self in its search for wholeness against the invading external world and the engulfing unconscious. Several years after this session, the person who went through it still regarded the child-hero as the activating symbolic agent" that preserved him as the whole man he had become.

The consciousness of confronting something underlying and eternal, at the very heart of oneself and the universe, is present to some degree at all levels of psychedelic experience but becomes wholly dominant at what Masters and Houston call the integral level. Subjects find only religious language adequate to convey what is happening in these intense confrontations with what can be named only in terms like the "Primordial Essence" or the "Ground of Being." Like the resolution of a symbolic drama, such an experience can be felt as a turning point in the life of one who undergoes it.

Stanislav Grof has examined this and other aspects of the psychedelic experience longer and more closely than anyone else. As a psychiatrist working with LSD, DPT, and other psychedelic drugs since 1956, first in Czechoslovakia and then in the United States, he has had far more opportunity than most investigators to observe the full range of their effects. He has repeatedly guided patients through many LSD sessions and observed the transformations in their form and content as therapy proceeds. The changes over time in the experiences of a single person prove to be even more striking than the variations among personality types recorded by Barr and Langs. (Analysis of psychedelic drug effects based on a single session or a few sessions is like interpreting a single incident in someone's life without knowing anything of his biography.) Grof began using a psychoanalytic framework but gradually became convinced by his own and his patient's experiences that radically new concepts were demanded.

He distinguishes four types of psychedelic experience: abstract and esthetic, psychodynamic, perinatal ("around birth"), and transpersonal. The chief theoretical novelty lies in the last two categories and in the relationship between the psychodynamic and the perinatal. Grof says that the relatively superficial abstract and esthetic experiences, which dominate most street drug trips, rarely appear at advanced stages of therapy. At the psychodynamic or Freudian level, the familiar material of psychoanalysis is revealed either in direct reliving or in symbolic form. In this realm of the personal unconscious, patients are said to display structures of unconscious memory that Grof calls "systems of condensed experience," or COEX systems. Hanscarl Leuner, an- other European LSD therapist, has suggested a similar idea independently (Leuner 1962). The COEX systems are described as constellations of memories linked by a single theme and associated with a single powerful emotion or situation: humiliation, anxiety, emotional rejection, threat to physical survival, violence, and so on. Each COEX system is related to a particular defense mechanism and definite clinical symptoms, and each is based on some infantile "core experience." Each personality is said to have several COEX systems; some are beneficial, but most are emotionally crippling, at least in the psychiatric patients treated by Grof. Grof believes that the most profound traumatic experiences are associated not with emotional disasters but with physical damage and threats to physical survival. Although these tend to be neglected by psychoanalysts, he says, they assume great importance for patients in LSD therapy. When the emotional cathexes attached to a memory prove to be far out of proportion to its objective importance, it is because the incident has been assimilated symbolically with similar traumatic experiences in the same COEX system.

Whatever interpretation of the details is accepted, clearly LSD has the capacity to induce regression in the presence of a more or less intact observing ego beyond the level usually achieved in psychoanalysis. One of the most interesting discoveries of psychedelic drug research is that this regression appears to go all the way back to birth. An apparent reliving of biological birth during LSD sessions is reported independently, often with some embarrassment and self-doubt, by many psychotherapists and illicit drug users (cf. Abramson 1960, pp. 94-98). Often, both for those who undergo them and for those who watch, these experiences seem genuine, with physical symptoms adding their own suggestions of authenticity: fetal postures, agonizing pain, facial oontortions, gasping for breath, heart palpitations, cyanosis (bluish skin from deficient oxygenation), tremors, sweating, vomiting, production of mucus and saliva, fear of losing control of urethral and anal sphincters. Sometimes unusual physical details of a particular birth remembered under the drug's influence are reported to be confirmed by independent evidence from adults pr'esent at the birth; and some patients are said to suggest, either in words or through their behavior, an accurate knowledge of physiology and embryology far beyond their adult learning or their powers of fantasy and fabrication. In these crises the birth agony is often felt as somehow the same as a death agony, and the end of life as well as the beginning is pictured in the accompanying imagery. The events are often described as a death and rebirth. (see, e.g., Pope 1971, pp. 36-38)

This clinical material suggests a level of the unconscious corresponding to Otto Rank's theory of the birth trauma. Freud admitted the possibility of a birth trauma but denied that it could be brought to awareness or used to interpret patient problems, and psychoanalysts generally have followed him by treating imagery and thoughts connected with birth and the womb as fantasy to be interpreted in relation to early childhood events. The evidence from the deep regression produced by psychedelic drugs suggests that maybe the issue ought to be reexamined. We present Grof's framework and some of his cases here, not because his work is the only source of this material or because we are convinced that his explanations are correct, but because no one else has had so much clinical experience with it or devoted so much theoretical attention to it. Any explanatory system at this stage is bound to be inadequate; what really matters is whether the narratives imply that there is something important to be explained.

Grof attaches great importance to the birth trauma both therapeutically and theoretically. He regards it as the template or matrix of the -systems of condensed experience- that produce neurosis, and the place where studies of psychopathology can best illuminate normal psychology. He also sees it as the point of intersection between individual and transpersonal psychology, and between psychology and religion. In analyzing the birth symbolism of LSD trips, he refers to four stages of birth as "basic perinatal matrices," or BPMs. BPM I is the peaceful and satisfied condition of the fetus in the womb, associated with oceanic ecstasy and a blissful sense of cosmic unity; it is disturbed only by the mother's disease or emotional distress. Here are some examples:

When I was able to give up my analytical thinking and accept the experience for what it was, the nature of the session changed dramatically. The feelings of sickness and indigestion disappeared, and I was experiencing an ever-increasing state of ecstasy. This was accompanied by a clearing and brightening of my visual 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. The scenery opened up, and an incredible amount of light and energy was enveloping me and streaming in subtle vibrations through my whole being. On one level, I was still a fetus experiencing the ultimate perfection and bliss of a good womb or a newborn fusing with a nourishing and life-giving breast. On another level, I became the entire universe. I was witnessing the spectacle of the macrocosm with countless pulsating and vibrating galaxies and was it at the same time.... 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.... Pantheistic religions, Spinoza's philosophy, the teachings of the Buddha, the Hindu concepts of Atman-Brahman, Maya and lila [divine play]—all these suddenly came alive and were illuminated with new meaning. . . .

On one occasion, the good-womb experience seemed to open into time instead of space. 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. The scientist in me was struck by another riddle: can the genetic code, under certain circumstances, be translated into a conscious experience? (Grof 1975, pp. 113-114)

The session started with a feeling of "pure tension" that was building up to higher and higher levels. When the tension was transcended, Michael 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." The scene then changed into an endless bluish-green ocean, the primordial cradle of all life. Michael felt that he had returned to the source; he was floating gently in this nourishing and soothing fluid, and his body and soul seemed to be dissolving and melting into it. . .
This ecstatic condition was suddenly interrupted and the sense of harmony deeply disturbed. The water in the ocean became amniotic fluid, and Michael experienced himself as a fetus in the womb. Some adverse influences were endangering his existence; he had a strange, unpleasant taste in his mouth, was aware of poison streaming through his body, felt profoundly tense and anxious, and various groups of muscles in his body were trembling and twitching. These symptoms were accompanied by many terrifying visions of demons and other evil appearances; they resembled those on religious painting and sculpture of various cultures. After this episode of distress passed, Michael re-experienced his own embryological development.. . .
Toward the end of the session, Michael returned to the feelings of fusion and melting in the ocean alternating with identification with the entire universe. . . .
The following day, Michael was in the calmest, most joyful, and most balanced emotional condition he had experienced in his entire life. After this session, his psychotic symptoms never reappeared. (Grof 1975, pp. 235-236)

BPM II is described as the fetus' experience of the contractions of the uterine wall at the onset of delivery: endless, hopeless, intolerable, and yet inescapable anxiety, pain, and misery. Life seems monstrous and meaningless; there is a sense of pervasive insanity and guilt. The visions are of religious hells, condemnation at the Last Judgment, engulfment by maelstroms or monsters, and descent to the underworld. The subject feels himself to be all dying soldiers, all victims of persecution, or a robot in a world of robots. Grof calls this matrix the basis for psychological systems dominated by a feeling of constriction and oppression or helpless passivity before an overwhelming destructiv6 force, especially one that threatens life. An example follows:

The sickness enveloping me was at first very subtle. Mild feelings of nausea and tension were making themselves manifest. Soon the nausea and tension were intensified to a point where every cell seemed to be involved. It is difficult indeed to describe this experience: it was so all-encompassing. The slightly humorous description of every cell in my body being drilled by a dentist begins to convey the atmosphere of impending disaster, emergency, and excruciating pain that for me seemed to last for eternity. Although I saw no images, I began to think of Petronius, Seneca, Sartre, and other philosophers who deemed suicide the only meaningful death. I had the fantasy of lying in a bath of warm water and my life's blood flowing out from my veins. In fact, I am quite convinced that had I the means at that time, I would have killed myself. I was totally submerged in a situation from which there would be no escape except through death. And like life, the absurdity of it all, the exhaustion of carrying my pain-filled body through days, years, decades, a lifetime, seemed insane. . . .This state persisted for hours. I thought I would never leave that place, yet even though there was an element of strangeness about this state of consciousness, I recognized it as something familiar. It was a state that I had experienced before in various forms; in fact, it seemed to be the underlying matrix which has influenced my world view and my mode of existence. To live it so intensely, if only for a few hours, in the form of an amplified hell from which there was no escape was an important lesson. (Grof 1975, p. 123)

In the next stage, BPM III, uterine contractions continue but the hopeless feeling of entrapment is said to disappear, since the cervix is dilated and the fetus is being propelled through the birth canal. It struggles against mechanical crushing pressures and the threat of suffocation as it begins the difficult journey to the outside, where it comes into contact with blood, mucus, urine, and feces. The encounter with death now takes the form of a titanic struggle with associated visions including earthquakes, tornadoes, exploding stars, nuclear bombs, and tidal waves. The agony and tension often turn into a kind of rapture that Grof calls volcanic ecstasy, as opposed to the oceanic ecstasy of BPM I. The release of destructive and self-destructive energy is sometimes manifested in powerful sadomasochistic fantasies. Subjects identify with ruthless tyrants and mass murderers; they take all the roles in historical and mythical scenes of torture and execution and are surprised to find a resemblance between the torturer's state of mind and his victim's. There may be hours of overwhelming sexual ecstasy accompanied by images of participation in wild orgies and fertility rites and identification with historical and fictional characters famous for their sexuality. The mixture of the exhilarating with the macabre can be reminiscent of saturnalia and witches' sabbaths. Visions of blood, urine, and feces are often accompanied by strikingly realistic taste and smell sensations. Grof writes, -The combination of perverted sex, sadomasochism, scatology, and an emphasis on death, with elements of blasphemy, inverted religious symbolism, and a quasi-religious atmosphere, is characteristic of BPM III (Grof 1975, p. 133). Here is an example:

The experience of being born was very, very confused. I never really clearly saw the birth canal or the process of birth or the relief of birth. I only knew that I was being pushed and crushed and wildly confused. The clearest part of my role as baby was being immersed in what seemed to me like filth and slime that was all over me and in my mouth choking me. I tried and tried to spit it out, to get rid of it and finally managed to clear my mouth and throat with a huge scream, and I began to breathe. That was one of the major moments of release in the session. Another aspect of the birth experience was the confusion resulting from the fact that the genitals and thighsof the woman were the place of sex and love and also the place this nightmare of birth and filth had happened.
There were many images of the torturer and the tortured as the same person, very much as the mother and the baby were the same person. At one point, I experienced the horrors of Buchenwald, and I saw Stan as a Nazi. I had no hatred for him, only a profound sense that he, the Nazi, and I, the Jew, were the same person, and that I was as much torturer and the murderer as I was the victim; I could feel myself as Nazi as well as Jew.
For a long time then the next section as I recall it was tremendously erotic. I went through a whole series of sexual orgies and fantasies in which I played all roles and in which Joan and Stan were sometimes involved and sometimes not. It became very clear to me that there was no difference between sex and the process of birth and that the slippery movements of sex were identical with the slippery movements of birth. I learned easily that every time the woman squeezed me I had to simply give way and slide wherever she pushed me. If I did not struggle and did not fight, the squeezing turned out to be intensely pleasurable. Sometimes I wondered if there would be an end and no exit and if I would suffocate, but each time I was pushed and my body was contorted out of shape, I let go and slid easily into wherever I was being sent. . . . You simply let go and life squeezes you and pushes you and gentles you and guides you through its journey. Amazing, fantastic, what an extraordinary joke that I had been so fooled by the complexities of life! Over and over again I had this experience and laughed with intense pleasure. (Grof 1975, pp. 136-137)

In the final stage of delivery, which Grof calls BPM IV, the child is expelled from the womb, takes its first breath, and completes its physical separation from the mother with the cutting of the umbilical cord. Here, accord-
ing to many psychedelic drug therapists, subjects reexperience the sights, sounds, and smells of the room where they were born; they allegedly remember independently verifiable details about things like lighting, the use of forceps, and the position of the umbilical cord. Here is a case cited by a Dutch psychiatrist at a 1959 conference on the therapeutic use of LSD:

One of my patients was a man who on 400 micrograms nearly became unconscious, in a twilight state. He screamed and sighed a lot, and after an hour or more, suddenly came to his senses and cried for his wife. I turned the light on in the room and asked him what had happened. He said, don't know what happened, but there is something about my left arm which changed. I don't know, but my left arm was never normal. I always had a feeling that my left arm was somehow blocked. I don't know what happened now." He waved his left arm, a look of bewilderment on his face, and said,
don't understand anything about it.-
Some days afterward I called in this patient's mother and asked her if she knew whether something traumatic had happened to her son's left arm. She couldn't remember anything except that he had been born with his left arm behind his head. . . .
She said she had never told him, so he couldn't have known. . . .                                                                                       
When he had this experience, he was not conscious of being born. He was in great fear and did not understand what was happening. I have had other patients who, symbolically, are expelled from the amniotic fluid, who see the walls around them and the canal they must go through. But this man didn't see that. He knew that he was in very great peril and very great pain, and that there was something the matter with his left arm. . . . This patient did not -see- anything; most of the others do, when they are symbolically born. (Abramson 1960, p. 96)

Symbolically BPM IV is manifested as death and rebirth: total annihilation—biological, psychological, and moral—followed by visions of blinding white light, expansion of space, and an atmosphere of liberation, salvation, and reconciliation. The subject feels purged of guilt, anxiety, and aggression. The associated images are heroic victories over demons and monsters, deities symbolizing death and resurrection (especially Christ on the cross), admission to Valhalla or Olympus, visions of the Supreme Being as a cosmic sun or pure spiritual energy, and the reuniting of individual self (Hindu Atman) with its divine source in the universal self (Hindu Brahman). Other symbols include the overthrow of tyrants, the end of wars, and survival of natural disasters. The natural imagery is of oceans after storms, budding trees, spring meadows, sunny mountain peaks successfully ascended, and newborn animals: beauty, safety, and fertility. Grof considers BPM IV to be the matrix for all later memories of the satisfaction that follows the end of conflict in a discharge of tension. Some passages describing scenes from this realm follow:

The best way of describing this roller coaster and this entrance into the loss of control would be to compare it to walking on a slippery, very slippery surface. There would be surfaces all over the place and finally all of them would become slippery and there would be nothing left to hold on to. One was slipping, slipping and going further and further down into oblivion. The scene that finally completed my death was a very horrible scene in a square of a medieval town. . . . While the animals, the humans, the demons pressed in upon me in the square before these Gothic cathedrals, I began to experience intense agony and pain, panic, terror, and horror. There was a line of pressure between the temples of my head, and I was dying. I was absolutely certain of this—I was dying, and I died. My death was completed when the pressures overwhelmed me, and 1 was expelled into another world.
It turned out that this outer world was to be a continuation of deaths at a very different level, however. Now the panic, the terror were all gone; all that was left was the anguish and pain as I participated in the death of all men. I began to experience the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. I was Christ, but I was also everyone as Chrisi and all men died as we made our way in the dirgelike procession toward Golgotha. .. . The sorrow of this moment is still so intense that it is difficult for me to speak of it: We moved toward Golgatha, and there in agony greater than any I have ever experienced, I was crucified with Christ and all men on the cross. I was Christ, and I was crucified, and I died. . . .
. . . The gradual rising of all men began to take place. These were great processions in enormous cathedrals—candles and light and gold and incense, all moving up. I had no sense of my personal existence at this time. I was in all the processions, and all the processions were in me; I was every man and every man began to rise. The awe and splendor of this rising was almost beyond description. . . . We all became very small—as small as a cell, as small as an atom. We all became very humble and bowed down. I was filled with peace and feelings of joy and love; I loved God completely. While this was happening, the touch of the garment was like a high voltage wire. Everything exploded, and it exploded us into the highest place there is—the place of absolute light. It was silent, there was no music; it was pure light. 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. (Grof 1975, pp. 146-148)

Here is a complete account of a psychedelic birth experience:

After the vulture-mother ordeal, I have the sensation of having died. When MB and WR move my body on the couch, I perceive it as my corpse being placed in the grave. However, I experience the placing of the corpse in the grave as simultaneous with the placing of the egg in the womb. It is not death but birth that terrifies me. I am standing before a frightful tunnel, again the vision of one of those fiery, infernal organs in Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Delights (the identification of hell with the womb is pervasive throughout the drug-session). Pervasive and total is also the knowledge that man's greatest trauma is birth, not death, that it takes no courage to die but infinite courage to be born.
I have the awful sensation that I have been born an infinite number of times and that I will continue to be born forever and ever. . . .This also parallels the awareness of Dante's hell where the constriction (guilt) and expansion (rage) of energy are punishments because they are meaningless and so do not generate life.
I realize that I must go through the tunnel of birth again and I plead with MB: -No, not again, please, I don't want to be born again; I have been born so many, many times. Why must I be born again?" But I must, she insists. She is very understanding; she's holding me, embracing me, and almost weeping: she's so sorry for the pain I will endure, but she cannot help me. I must be born. So I plunge through the birth canal and it is utterly terrifying. Forces are pushing me, squashing me; hairs, mucus, liquids are choking me. I cannot breathe; I will die and disintegrate. I am the brittle little egg that will be squashed by the claws of contractions. I am suffused with the realization that man perceives his own death (extinction) at the moment of birth. The two processes are inseparable. I cannot breathe; I am being squashed. I feel the pressure of all the mountains of the world, of all the planets; I am a speck that will be obliterated. I am ready to die. At this moment, a tremendous force pushed me through an opening and I an born. Water, piss, blood, milk, semen gush forth and I recognize them all as the same sacred elixir of life. I am being bathed, baptized in this blessed fountain of human sap. I also experience an enormous discharge of energy that I can only very lamely describe as the orgasm of a star (human orgasm next to it resembling a sneeze). The orgasm of a star involves an ecstatic overflow of heat and light that extends the outlines of my celestial body to the vastness of the universe and sends out waves of my power throughout all existence. The ecstasy of this moment is, once again, indescribable. I am transported by the most beautiful dark, blue gods who embrace me and hold me. I am bathed in the most beatific, blue light of benediction, I feel the music in Bach's Magnificat: Blessed, blessed lamb of God that washes away the sins of the world. I am the Madonna with the Christ Child, both the child and mother at once; I am all the mothers and babies of the world suckling at the breast. The feeling of ecstatic tenderness and fulfillment at this moment is beyond all words. (Richards and Berendes 1977-78, pp. 138-140)

Grof admits that he is trying to construct an orderly sequence from experiences that often arrive chaotically and in interrupted flashes. The succession of perinatal matrices varies greatly from person to person and from LSD session to LSD session, and the birth experience can be repeated many times on different levels. But he says that one common path for severely disturbed patients is this: after working through the traumatic memories of the personal unconscious, they reach the -no exit- stage, BPM IL, later they come to the life-and-death struggle of BPM III and then to the rebirth of BPM IV, finally passing over into the blissful cosmic unity of BPM I and on to the transpersonal level. Passage through the death-rebirth experience is said to be easier for those who are less emotionally disturbed and therefore need to do less work on the psychodynamic level.

In the last ten years the word -transpersonal- has become established as a name for certain states of consciousness; there is even a Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. The transpersonal encompasses the Jungian collective unconscious, reincarnation phenomena, mystical ecstasy, and other experiences in which the mind seems to transcend the boundaries of the individual self or the limitations of time and space. It is open to challenge whether transpersonal psychology is a proper field of study with a distinct subject matter. Many psychiatrists and psychologists would relegate the phenomena it is concerned with to odd (and often pathological) corners of individual consciousness. And the convergence of its investigations with religious traditions is not reassuring to those who are concerned about the status of psychology as a science. Whether it makes sense to speak of transpersonal psychology, the experiences on which the idea is based require interpretation. As we have seen, intimations of this form of consciousness appear at many points during LSD
trips. In Grof's opinion, they actually become dominant only after a patient or experimental subject has resolved the traumas of the personal unconscious and the crisis of death and rebirth.

Past-incarnation experience is one form in which the mind seems to transcend ordinary time limitations. The drug user believes that he is remembering, or rather reliving, what happened to him in another body, at another place and time; he has a sense of knowing beyond doubt that he has been here before and that these are memories of a past life. Even sophisticated persons who had previously considered reincarnation a superstition find these experiences hard to dismiss. And even when they reject reincarnation as an explanation, the strangely compelling quality of the memories may make them unwilling to accept the more conventional psychiatric interpretations. They often talk in language that recalls the Hindu ideas of karmic law and liberation from karmic bonds. Experiences of this kind can of course be produced without drugs—for example, by hypnosis. They are evidently the basis for the reincarnation doctrines that are a central part of many religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Plato's theology, the mystery cults of Greece, and some
early Christian sects. Here is an example:

In the advanced stage of Renata's psycholytic therapy, an unusual and unprecedented sequence of events was observed. Four consecutive LSD sessions consisted almost exclusively of scenes from a particular historical period. She experienced a number of episodes that took place in Prague during the seventeenth century. . . .
During her historical sessions, Renata had an unusual variety of images and insights concerning the architecture of the experienced period and typical garments and costumes, as well as weapons and various utensils used in everyday life. She was able to describe many of the complicated relationships existing at that time between the royal family and the vassals. Renata had never specifically studied this historical period, and special books were consulted in order to confirm the reported information. Many of her experiences were related to various periods in the life of a young nobleman, one of the twenty-seven members of the nobility beheaded by the Habsburgs. In a dramatic sequence, Renata finally relived with powerful emotions and in considerable detail the actual events of the execution, including this nobleman's terminal anguish and agony. On many occasions, Renata experienced full identification with this individual. . . .
. . . I tried to apply a psychoanalytic approach to the content of Renata's stories. . . . No matter how hard I tried, the experiential sequences did not make sense from this point of view. . . .
Two years later, when I was already in the United States, I received a long letter from Renata with the following unusual introduction: "Dear Dr. Grof, you will probably think that I am absolutely insane when I share with you the results of my recent private search.- In the text that followed, Renata described how she had happened to meet her father, whom she had not seen since her parents' divorce when she was three years old. After a short discussion, her father invited her to have dinner with him. . . . After dinner, the father showed Renata with considerable pride a carefully designed, ramified pedigree of their family, indicating that they were descendants of one of the noblemen executed after the battle of White Mountain. (Grof 1975, pp. 165-167)

Grof considers these observations difficult to explain in any conventional way, but he does not provide enough information to exclude the possibility that her father's genealogical research had been registered in her mind as a young child. Here, the relived life belongs to someone who might be a biological ancestor of the drug user. If taken at face value, it would suggest genetic transmission of acquired memories; and, as Grof points out, in this case there is also the even more unlikely implication that the memory of a death agony could be genetically transmitted.

Another case of reliving an ancestor's life follows:

. . To my great surprise, my ego identity was suddenly changed. I was my mother at the age of three or four; it must have been the year 1902. I was dressed up in a starched, fussy dress and hiding undei:neath the staircase; my eyes were dilated like those of a frightened animal, and I felt anxious and lonely. I was covering my mouth with my hand, painfully aware that something terrible had just happened. I had said something very bad, was criticized, and someone roughly put their hand over my mouth. From my hideout, I could see a scene with many relatives—aunts and uncles, sitting on the porch of a frame house, in old-fashioned dresses characteristic of that time. Everybody seemed to be talking, unmindful of me. I had a sense of failure and felt overwhelmed by the unrealistic demands of the adults—to be good, to behave myself, to talk properly, not to get dirty—it seemed so impossible to please them. I felt excluded, ostracized, and ashamed.-
Motivated by professional interest, Nadja approached her mother to obtain the necessary data about her childhood, which they had never discussed before. . . . No sooner had she started her story than her mother interrupted her and finished it in full accord with the reliving. She added many details about her childhood that logically complemented the episode experienced in the LSD session. She confessed to Nadja how ominous and strict her mother had been to her; she talked about her mother's excessive demands regarding cleanliness and proper behavior. This was reflected in her mother's favorite saying, "Children should be seen but not heard." Nadja's mother then emphasized how lonely she had felt during her whole childhood, being the only girl with two much older brothers, and how much she craved to have playmates. Her description of the house exactly matched Nadja's LSD experience, including the large porch and the step leading up to it. (Grof 1975, pp. 164-165)

Millions of Hindus take the transmigration of souls just as much for granted as orthodox Christians do the existence of heaven. Psychedelic drugs are apparently capable of giving even unbelievers some sense of the persuasive force of the experiences on which these doctrines are based. Despite attempts at empirical confirmation by a few serious Western researchers (e.g., Stevenson 1974, 1977), it seems just as difficult to incorporate the notion of reincarnation as it is to incorporate the notion of heaven into a scientific explanation. The rare psychiatric term "" cryptomnesia," hidden or disguised memory, is sometimes used for such experiences; it suggests that they are personal memories and preoccupations that have been symbolically distorted. An explanation might be founded on the sense of displacement in time or freedom from ordinary temporality often produced by LSD, combined with the characteristically vivid psychedelic imagery in which the drug user can lose himself. Belief in reincarnation has also been regarded as a defense against fears of death (although in fact the prospect of multiple rebirths is regarded by Buddhism, and often experienced during psychedelic drug trips, as a source of anguish rather than relief). In any case, the immediate question is not whether these phenomena are what they seem to be, but why they are so powerful, convincing, and (apparently) potentially universal, and what they tell us about the human mind.

In collective and racial experiences, the subject participates in episodes from various contemporary or past cultures, sometimes allegedly displaying an inexplicable knowledge of exotic customs. Masters and Houston report the following case, in which they admittedly provided considerable suggestion:

 . . This subject, 5-1 (100 micrograms LSD), was a high-school graduate whose reading matter rarely extended beyond the daily newspapers and an occasional popular magazine.
The guide initiated the ritual process by suggesting to the patient that he was attending the rites of Dionysus and was carrying a thyrsus in his hand. When he asked for some details the subject was told only that the thyrsus was a staff wreathed with ivy and vine leaves, terminating at the top in a pine cone, and was carried by the priest and attendants of Dionysus, a god of the ancient Greeks. To this S nodded, sat back in his chair with his eyes closed, and then remained silent for several minutes. Then he began to stamp the floor, as if obeying some strange internal rhythm. He next proceeded to describe a phantasmagoria consisting of snakes and ivy, streaming hair, dappled fawn skins, and dances going faster and faster to the shrill high notes of the flute and accelerating drums. The frenzy mounted and culminated in the tearing apart of living animals.
The scene changed and S found himself in a large amphitheater witnessing some figures performing a rite or play. This changed into a scene of white-robed figures moving in the night towards an open cavern. In spite of her intention not to give further clues, the guide found herself asking the subject at this point: "Are you at Eleusis?" S seemed to nod "yes," whereupon the guide suggested that he go into the great hall and witness the mystery. He responded: "I can't. It is forbidden. . . . I must confess. . . I must confess. . ." (The candidate at Eleusis was rejected if he came with sinful hands to seek enlightenment. He must first confess, make reparation, and be absolved. Then he received his instruction and then finally had his experience of enlightenment and was allowed to witness the mystery. How it happened that this subject was aware of the stages of the mystery seemed itself to be a mystery.) S then began to go through the motions of kneading and washing his hands and appeared to be in deep conversation with someone. Later, he told the guide that he had seemed to be standing before a priestly figure and had made a confession. The guide now urged the subject to go into the hall and witness the drama. This he did, and described seeing a "story" performed about a mother who looks the world over for her lost daughter and finally finds her in the world of the underground (the Demeter-Kore story which, in all likelihood, was performed at Eleusis). This sequence dissolved and the subject spoke of seeing a kaleidoscopic pattern of many rites of the death and resurrection of a god who appeared to be bound up in some way with the processes of nature. S described several of the rites he was viewing, and from his descriptions the guide was able to recognize remarkable similarities to rites of Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. S was uncertain as to whether these rites occurred in a rapid succession or all at the same time. The rites disappeared and were replaced by the celebration of the Roman Catholic Mass. . . . The guide then said: "You are the thyrsus," to which S responded: "I am the thyrsus. . . . I am the thyrsus. . . I have labored in the vineyard of the world, have suffered, have died, and have been reborn for your sake and shall be exalted forevermore." These are the mystic words that with variations have been ritually spoken by all the great gods of resurrection—the great prototypes who embody in themselves the eternal return of nature and who, in a deeper sense, are identified with the promise of eternal life to righteous man.
The extraordinary aspect of this case lay not so much in the surface details, but rather in the manner, the meaning, and the sequence in which this material was evoked. We notice, for example, how the theme of eternal return, death, and resurrection, moves in the subject's mind from its initial confrontation in primitive rites to highly sophisticated and universal expressions. (Masters and Houston 1966, pp. 218- 219)

Collective experience, whether it takes a ritual form or not, can include the whole of a racial or cultural group or the whole of mankind. Some consider it evidence in favor of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. Others may prefer to believe that these experiences with their corroborative details are the product of forgotten readings of magazine articles and historical novels combined with fantasy and suggestion. But in any case they suggest how much of what we have felt and thought is registered permanently in the brain and accessible to consciousness in various transmutations.

The ordinary limits of consciousness are also transcended in animal identifications associated with a feeling of regression in time which may be interpreted as phylogenetic memory; in the rare experience of identification with plants; in a sense of oneness with all life or with inorganic objects; and especially in the heightened awareness of internal body processes, which sometimes goes so far that the drug user imagines he is feeling his own body organs, tissues, and cells from within, as though they had minds of their own. Here is Grof's account of plant identification:

. . . An individual tuned in to this area has the unique feeling of witnessing and consciously participating in the basic physiological processes of plants. He can experience himself as a germinating seed, a leaf in the course of photosynthetic activity, or a root reaching out for water and nourishment. On other occasions, a subject might identify with the venus flytrap or other carnivorous plants, become plankton in the ocean, and experience pollination or cellular divisions occurring during vegetable growth. Subjects have also reported that they witnessed botanical processes on a molecular level. . . .
. . . No matter how fantastic and absurd their content might seem to our common sense, it is not easy to discard them as mere fantasies. They occur independently in various individuals in advanced stages of treatment and have a very special experiential flavor that cannot be easily communicated in words. It is difficult to identify their source in the unconscious or explain them from some of the more usual unconscious material; also, the reason why the subject experiences them is often completely obscure. (Grof 1975, p. 182)

A vision from within of conception and embryonic development:

 . . The middle part of my back was generating rhythmical impulses, and I had the feeling of being propelled through space and time toward some unknown goal; I had a very vague awareness of the final destination, but the mission appeartd to be one of the utmost importance. After some time I was able to recognize to my great surprise that I was a spermatozoid and that the explosive regular impulses were generated by a biological pacemaker and transmitted to a long flagella flashing in vibratory movements. I was involved in a hectic super-race toward the source of some chemical messages that had an enticing and irresistible quality. By then I realized that the goal was to reach the egg, penetrate it, and impregnate. In spite of the fact that this whole scene seemed absurd and ridiculous to my sober scientific mind, I could not resist the temptation to get involved in this race with all seriousness and full expenditure of energy. . . .
. . . What was happening had the basic characteristics of the physiological event as it is taught in medical schools; there were, however, many additional dimensions that were far beyond anything that one could produce in fantasy in a usual state of mind.
The consciousness of this spermatozoid was a whole autonomous microcosm, a universe of its own. There was a clear awareness of the biochemical processes in the nucleoplasm; in a nebulous atmosphere I could recognize the structure of the chromosomes, individual genes, and molecules of DNA. I could perceive their physiochemical configuration as being simultaneously elements of ancestral memories, primordial phylogenetic forms, nuclear forms of historical events, myths, and archetypal images. Genetics, biochemistry, mythology, and history seemed to be inextricably interwoven and were just different aspects of the same phenomenon. . . .
. . . Then came the culmination in the form of a triumphant implosion and ecstatic fusion with the egg. During the sperm race my consciousness was alternating between that of the sperm heading toward its destination and that of the egg with a vague but strong expectation of an overwhelming event. At the time of the conception these two split units of consciousness came together, and I was both germinal cells at the same time. Strangely enough both units involved seemed to interpret the same event in terms of individual success as well as joint triumph. . . .
After the fusion of the germ cells the experience continued, still in the same hectic pace 'set by the sperm race. In a condensed and accelerated way, I experienced embryogenesis following conception. There was again the full conscious awareness of biochemical processes, cellular divisions, and tissue growth. There were numerous tasks to be met and critical periods to overcome. I was witnessing the differentiation of tissues and formation of new organs. I became the branchial arches, the pulsating fetal heart, columns of liver cells, and cells of the intestinal mucous membrane. An enormous release of energy and light accompanied the embryonal development. I felt that this blinding golden glow had something to do with biochemical energy involved in the precipitous growth of cells and tissues. . . .
Even when I returned to my usual state of consciousness, I had the feeling that this experience would have a lasting effect on my self-esteem. No matter what my life trajectory will be, I have already had two distinct successes—having won the sperm race in a multimillion competition and completed successfully the complicated task of embryogenesis. Although my reason forced me into a condescending smile while I was thinking these ideas, the emotions behind them were strong and convincing. (Grof 1975, pp. 192-193)

These fantastic visions of biological processes are not confined to scientists with a detailed knowledge of the processes involved. The conception fantasy, for example, occurs repeatedly in all kinds of people. Here is Timothy Leary again, on related subjects:

. . . confrontation with and participation in cellular flow;. . . visions of microscopic processes; strange, undulating multi-colored tissue patterns; being a one-celled organism floating down arterial waterways. . . recoiling with fear at the incessant push, struggle, drive of the biological machinery. (Leary 1968 a, p. 301)

The breakdown of macroscopic objects into vibratory patterns, the awareness that everything is a dance of particles. . . visions of the void, of world-ending explosions, of the cyclical nature of creation and dissolution. (Leary 1968 a, p. 296)

Grof recounts a rare voyage to a distant place:

In this situation, it suddenly occurred to me that I do not have to be bound by the limitations of time and space and can travel in the timespace continuum quite deliberately and without any restrictions. This feeling was so convincing and overwhelming that I wanted to test it by an experiement. . . . I continued thinking in terms of directions and distances and approached the task accordingly. All of a sudden it occurred to me that the proper approach would be to make myself believe that the place of the session was actually identical with the place of destination. When I approached the task in this way, I experienced peculiar and bizarre sensations. I found myself in a strange, rather congested place full of vacuum tubes, wires, resistors, and condensers. After a short period of confusion, I realized that I was trapped in a TV set located in the corner of the room of the apartment in my native city where I had spent my childhood. I was trying, somehow, to use the speakers for hearing and the tube for seeing. ... At the moment when I realized and firmly believed that I could operate in the realm of free spirit and did not have to be restricted even by the velocity of light or other types of electromagnetic waves, the experience changed rapidly. I broke through the TV screen and found myself walking in the apartment of my parents. I did not feel any drug effect at that point, and the experience was as sober and real as any other experience of my life. .. .
I felt I needed a much more convincing proof of whether or not what I was experiencing was -objectively real- in the usual sense. I finally decided to perform a test—to take a picture from the wall and later check in correspondence with my parents if something unusual had happened at that time in their apartment. I reached for the picture, but before I was able to touch the frame I was overcome by an increasingly unpleasant feeling that it was an extremely risky and dangerous undertaking....
I found that I was extremely ambivalent in regard to the outcome of my test. On one hand, it seemed extremely enticing to be able to liberate oneself from the slavery of time and space. On the other hand, it was obvious that something like this had far-reaching and serious consequences and could not be seen as an isolated experiment. ... The world as I knew it would not exist any more; I would lose all the maps I 'relied on and felt comfortable with. I would not know who, where, and when I was and would be lost in a totally new, frightening universe, the laws of which would be alien and unfamiliar to me.
I could not bring myself to carry through the intended experiment and.decided to leave the problem of the objectivity and reality of the experience unresolved. (Grof 1975, pp. 188-190)

Psychedelic drugs produce not only these disarrangements of space, time, and human identity but also intensely realistic encounters with disembodied entities: astral bodies, spirits of the dead, angelic guides, deities, inhabitants of other universes, and so forth. John Lilly tells of a meeting with guardian spirits after taking 300 micrograms of LSD in an isolation tank:

I became a bright luminous point of consciousness, radiating light, warmth, and knowledge. I moved into a space of astonishing brightness, a space filled with golden light, with warmth, and with knowledge. .. .
Slowly but surely, the two guides began to come toward me from a vast distance. ... Their thinking, their feeling, their knowledge was pouring into me.. . . They stopped just as it was becoming almost intolerable to have them any closer. As they stopped, they communicated, in effect, -We will not approach any closer as this seems to be your limit for closeness with us at this time. . . . You can come and permanently be in this state. However, it is advisable that you achieve this through your own efforts while still in the body so that you can exist both here and in the body simultaneously. Your trips out here are evasions of your trip on your planet when looked at in one way. ..
I came back from this trip totally exhilarated, feeling extremely confident and knowing exactly what I had to do, but there was a quality of sadness about the return, a bit of grief that I was not yet ready to stay in that region. (Lilly 1972, pp. 55-56)
There were times when I denied these experiences, denied them any validity other than my own imagination. . . . The two guides warned me that I would go through such phases of skepticism, of doubt. One thing that does stick with me is the feeling of reality that was there during the experiences. I knew that this was the truth. At other times I have not been so sure. Apparently I am in a position of waiting and seeing. (Lilly 1972, p. 58)

A visit to the underworld under the influence of LSD:

After we crossed the threshold of life and death, I found myself in an uncanny and frightening world. It was filled with fluorescent ether of a strangely macabre nature. There was no way of assessing whether the space involved was finite or infinite. An endless number of souls of deceased human beings were suspended in the luminescent ether; in an atmosphere of peculiar distress and disquieting excitement, they were sending me nonverbal messages through some unidentifiable extrasensory channels. They appeared unusually demanding, and it seemed as if they needed something from me. In general, the atmosphere reminded me of the descriptions of the underworld that I had read in Greek literature. But the objectivity and reality of the situation was beyond my imagination—it provoked a state of sheer and utter metaphysical horror that I cannot even start describing. My father was present in this world as an astral body; since I entered this world in union with him, his astral body was as if superimposed over mine. . . . It was by far the most frightening experience of my life; in none of my previous LSD sessions did I encounter anything that would come close to it. (Grof 1975, p. 196)

It is at the intermediate levels of the personal unconscious that psychedelic drugs, more than any others, accentuate human individuality and variability. Beyond that, apparently, lies common human ground, if not something still more universal. This is most evident in the most profound of the experiences described as transpersonal: identification with the Universal Mind, the reality underlying all realities, the formless, dimensionless, ineffable sat-chit-ananda(being-awareness-bliss) of Hinduism, compared with which all ordinary consciousness appears as maya, illusion. Here matter, space, time, and other partial realities are wholly transcended, and the basic questions of ontology and cosmology seem momentarily answered, once and for all. The ultimate fullness of the Universal Mind can also be experienced, paradoxically, as the pri-
mordial emptiness and silence of the Void, source and sink of all existence. The Void is realized as emptiness pregnant with form, and the forms of the Universal Mind as absolutely empty. This experience is even more profound than the feeling of cosmic unity associated with regression to a fetal state; it seems to be the same one represented as a stage of the mystical path in many religious traditions.

This is an appropriate place to illustrate some of the varieties of psychedelic mystical experience. The selection is necessarily limited and includes only drug-induced experiences, but passages similar in content and style can be found not only all through the annals of psychedelic drug trips but also throughout the millennia-old world literature of mysticism. First, William James' classic description of the anesthetic revelation provided by nitrous oxide, with his rueful commentary:

With me, as with every other individual of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel, only as sobriety returns, tbe feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a cadaverous-looking snow peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand....
The center and periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its objects, the rrieum and the tuum are one. . . . every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher unity in which it is based; ... a denial of a statement is simplji another mode of stating the same, contradictions can only occur of the same thing—all opinions are thus synonyms, are synonymous, are the same. . .. It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small
. and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans [-standing now," a medieval term for the contemplative state] of life... .
And true Hegelians will ilberhaupt [on the whole] be able to read between the lines and feel, at any rate, what possible ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive. ...
But now comes the reverse of the medal ... the rapture of beholding a process that was infinite changed, as the nature of the infinitude was realised by the mind, into a sense of dreadful and ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is incommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens is indifferent. This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced. I got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to produce incipient nausea.. . . A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis, but in the fact that whichever you choose it's all one—this is the upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright. (James 1882, pp. 206-208)

Here is a report of a ketamine trip which should prove that people much less articulate than James can experience an equally profound sense of illumination:

. . . First the outer sensory apparatus disappears so you begin to feel—I haven't been in one—but what Lilly discusses when he talks about the [sensory] deprivation tank. .. .
I got deeper and deeper into this state of realization, until at one point the world disappeared. I was no longer in my body. I didn't have a body.
And I reached a point at which I knew I was going to die. There was no question about' it, no -maybe I will- or -perhaps I will.-
And I reached a point at which I gave it all away. I just yielded. And then I entered a space in which. . . there aren't any words. Because, it's like the words that have been used have been used a thousand times—starting with Buddha, right? I mean, at-onewith-the universe, recognizing-your-godhead, all those words which I later used to explore what I had experienced.
The feeling was: I was home. That's really the feeling of it. . . . It was a bliss state. Of a kind I had never experienced before. . . .
And when I talked about it to the guy who was my guide, and shared with him some of the words about the experience, he said: -Yeah, what happened and happens to others is that you finally get rid of that heartbreak feeling that we carry from childhood. Finally, that's expunged somehow.- And that was the feeling. I was rid of my heartbreak. My heart was no longer broken. It was like, -Whew!" That was the long-lasting effect, what really lasts. (Stafford 1977, pp. 348-349)

A revelation that emphasizes the intellectual aspect, this time an LSD experience:

I was experiencing directly the metaphysical theory known as emanationism in which, beginning with the clear, unbroken and infinite light of God, the light then breaks into forms and lessens in intensity as it passes through descending degrees of reality. . . . The emanation theory, and especially the elaborately worked out layers of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology and psychology had heretofore been concepts and inferences. Now they were objects of the most direct and immediate perception. I could see exactly how these theories would have come into being if their progenitors had had this experience. But beyond accounting for their origin, my experience testified to their absolute truth. (Pahnke and Richards 1966, p. 179)

Drug users often speak of seeing the Clear Light or White Light, a familiar landmark in psychedelic country:

The most impressive and intense part of this experience was the white light of absolute purity and cleanness. It was like a glowing and sparkling flame of incandescent whiteness and beauty, but not really a flame—more like a gleaming white-hot ingot, yet much bigger and vaster than a mere ingot. The associated feelings were those of absolute awe, reverence, and sacredness. Just before this experience 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. (Pahnke and Richards 1966, p. 180)

Finally, here are passages that illustrate loss of self and the need for paradoxical language. The first two quotations are from an essay by Wilson Van Dusen, the chief clinical psychologist in a mental hospital in California. (After taking LSD he became interested in occult and mystical subjects and eventually wrote a book about the eighteenth-century Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg.)

Suddenly and totally unexpectedly the zenith of the void was lit up with thé blinding presence of the One. How did I know it? All I can say is that there was no possibility of doubt.... How could I be both God and man at the same time? My conventional concept of myself had been shattered in a few moments. .. .

Gradually there was no longer an "I" or a "me." There was no them. There was just vast, total nothing. . . . There was nothing to see but there was seeing of this nothing to see. There was a being in process, or moving in a process. But there was no "process." There was just being. No inside or outside but the "other one." Dualities ceased, there was just a wonderful moving in nothing—empty, still, and quite nothing. There was hearing of the sound of no sound. (Van Dusen 1961, p. 13)
... I experienced a shattering 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. .. .
There is no sensation as such at the core—only a state of utter ineffable bliss. Here, as in the earlier phases, one is aware of a tremendous surge of compassion and a powerful desire to share one's rapture with others. As the self dissolves, the other becomes one with all else and so there is no selfishness. .
I have no idea whether I was seconds or hours in this state. (Houston and Masters 1972, pp. 307-308)

Voltaire described apparitions as -supernatural visions permitted to him or her who is gifted by God with the special grace of possessing a cracked brain, a hysterical temperament, a disordered digestion, but above all, the art of lying with effrontery.- Blake responded that in the face of the reality of visionary experience such mockery was futile—in his famous image, sand thrown against the wind. Although few people today would be as ill-mannered or sarcastic about it as Voltaire, his remark succinctly embodies one kind of rationalistic attitude toward the experiences we have been describing. Claims to knowledge derived from this source have always been an annoyance to those who are unsympathetic to religious feeling and religious doctrine. Therefore most of the discussion about them has centered on the question of authenticity: whether knowledge gained through vision and mystical intuition is real knowledge, or whether drug-induced mysticism is somehow inferior to other kinds. An overwhelming feeling of conviction is notoriously no guarantee of truth. When someone says that under LSD he has relived a past life as an ancient 'Egyptian embalmer and produces an accurate formula for constructing a mummy (Grof 1975, p. 170), he has probably read the formula somewhere, even if he cannot remember doing so. When he speaks of meetings with the spirits of dead ancestors or floating away from his own body, it is obviously not evidence for a separable spirit or soul. And when he maintains that he has been blissfully united with the ground of the universe, we may be inclined to say (and he may be inclined to admit) that he literally does not know what he is talking about. We could easily have littered our descriptions with quotation marks to indicate suspension of belief, but that would be beside the point. To insist on posing the question in terms of real versus delusional, authentic versus inauthentic, is to turn the investigation into a sterile ideological debate between opposing party lines. We do not have to choose between Voltaire and Blake at this level. Besides, there is a parallel here with the problem of talking about an experience that supposedly reveals the inadequacy of words. How can we estimate the truth or reality of phenomena that are alleged to demand a revision in the very standards by which we are accustomed to judging truth and reality? Instead, we must ask what it means to see a spirit, why visions of past lives or relivings of birth have a special quality and significance, and what aspect of reality is encountered in mystical revelations.

In other words, these phenomena deserve to be placed in a theoretical framework rather than dismissed with casual psychiatric epithets and ad hoc explainings-away on the one hand or affirmed as self-evident revelations of the highest truth on the other. William James was implicitly responding to critics like Voltaire when he attacked the genetic fallacy that certain sources are by their very nature too impure to produce any genuine contribution to knowledge. He wrote of such experiences that they are no more or less subject to evaluation and correction than what comes to us from the external senses. As their name suggests, psychedelic drugs manifest universal native capacities of the mind and permanent possibilities of human experience. For most people the drugs may be the easiest way to elicit them, but religious tradition testifies that they are available to consciousness in other ways as well.

To judge whether these experiences have any value as sources of knowledge, we have to provide a psychological context for them. In the twentieth-century West the favored context has been Freud's depth psychology of the personal unconscious, and some investigators of the deeper psychedelic experiences believe they can be fully accounted for in Freud's categories. But to others, psychoanalytical explanation has seemed at best an unfulfilled promise, evaded by dismissive terminology and a premature reductionism. Even Barr and Langs concluded that their LSD experiments required basic revisions in psychoanalytic theory. Others who began as more or less orthodox psychoanalysts have found themselves going beyond the Freudian conception of the unconscious to Rank's theories about the birth trauma, to Jungian notions about archetypes and the collective unconscious, and finally to the psychology and cosmology of the Eastern religions. It would be easy to dismiss such explorations as voyages to the wilder shores of fantasy proving only that LSD can make its investigators as suggestible as its users, if it were not for the fact that so many people experimenting with psychedelic drugs move in the same direction. There is a tendency to consensus both among psychedelic drug researchers and between these researchers and more venerable investigatory and therapeutic traditions. Undoubtedly the tendency is limited, leaving much room for oddities of interpretation and plain nonsense; the consensus is far from being solid enough to constitute a science. Yet it is something more than a cult phenomenon requiring sociological analysis or a kind of mass suggestion.

Not everyone admits this. It is common to domesticate the strangeness of these experiences and depreciate their importance by insisting that they are merely the effect of a therapist's preconceptions or the expectations created by a pervasive cultural atmosphere on a mind made unusually suggestible by the drug. As an analogy the observation is sometimes offered that the patients of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysts obligingly produce dreams that confirm Freudian and Jungian theories, respectively. The issue is a genuine one. Heightened suggestibility is especially important in determining both the adverse effects and the therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs. But it is of limited value in explaining the deepest content of psychedelic experiences.

This is clear in the case of a psychiatrist like Grof, who started with no special interest in Jungian or Hindu ideas and therefore cannot be accused of filling his patients' heads with them. It was the other way around: his patients' experiences made him take those ideas seriously. As for the expectations and cultural biases of the drug users themselves, the same argument holds. Although some of the specific symbols and myths are culturally (or individually) determined, certain general themes seem to recur at the deeper levels of psychedelic experience irrespective of the drug user's social background and previous knowledge. In many cases it is quite implausible to talk of suggestion. Some people who use language and concepts reminiscent of Indian religion to describe what is happening to them have never heard these ideas before, or, like Alan Harrington in the quotation cited previously, have always been -irritated by the enthusiasts of Eastern philosophy.- The experience of death and rebirth that occurs in so many forms also appears to be spontaneous. In any case, suggestibility can never explain why, of all the ideas in the air, psychedelic experiences seem repeatedly to promote interest in some and not others. Expectations and cultural atmosphere reinforce these phenomena and modify their details and the language in which they are discussed, but the expectations and the cultural atmosphere themselves could not exist without a basis in untutored experience.

Another objection to this use of the idea of suggestion is that it creates more problems than it solves. The term -hypnotic suggestibility,- for example, is notoriously a label rather than an explanation. Of some psychedelic phenomena it must be said that if suggestion can produce these states of mind, it must be a far larger and more complex matter than we have imagined, requiring a much deeper analysis than we usually give it. In other words, if we are going to demand so much work of suggestion, we will have to give it a much larger theoretical role in psychology—a role so large that analyzing suggestion will be as difficult as, or even largely the same thing as, analyzing psychedelic experience.

There have been few serious attempts to make theoretical sense of the full range of psychedelic experiences in terms that do justice to the understanding of those who undergo them. Psychologists and psychiatrists have chosen to ignore and dismiss most of this impressive clinical material, possibly because it seems so hard to incorporate into any acceptable theory of the mind.° But we should not treat an experience as meaningless or demanding no explanation just because our present explanatory powers are inadequate to it. We ought to take these matters more seriously and at least try to find ways of investigating them as we do more familiar and intellectually comfortable aspects of our world. Neither Voltaire's dismissive mockery nor Blake's poetic affirmation is an adequate response; here we should follow James. The present disreputable status of psychedelic drug research has been created partly by unwillingness to confront these phenomena intellectually and emotionally. This unwillingness not only obstructs advances in the relatively narrow field of psychopharmacology, but also limits the improvement of our general understanding of human nature and experience.

'An exception is Fingarette (1963), who offers an interesting synthesis of psychoanalytical and Buddhist ideas without referring to psychedelic drugs.