LSD Experience - Revelations of the Mind

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Like everything else with LSD, sex will be wildly intensified and infinitely better than one could have ever imagined. Timothy Leary said it well in his interview with Playboy in 1966. This quote is also from page 127 of his book, The Politics of Ecstasy:

“An enormous amount of energy from every fiber of your body is released under LSD, most especially including sexual energy. There is no question that LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man. Sex under LSD becomes miraculously enhanced and intensified. I don’t mean that it simply generates genital energy. It doesn’t automatically produce a longer erection. Rather, it increases your sensitivity a thousand percent. Let me put it this way: Compared with sex under LSD, the way you’ve been making love, no matter how ecstatic the pleasure you think you get from it, is like making love to a department-store-dummy. In sensory and cellular communion with LSD, you may spend a half hour making love with eyeballs, another half hour making love with breath. As you spin through a thousand sensory and cellular organic changes, she does too. Ordinarily, sexual communications involves one’s own chemicals, pressure and interactions of a very localized nature, in what psychologists call the erogenous zones. A vulgar, dirty concept, I think. When you’re making love under LSD, it’s as though every cell in your body is making love with every cell in her body. Your hand doesn’t caress her skin but sinks down into and merges with ancient dynamos of ecstasy within her.”

Timothy Leary has more to say about it in his book, High Priest. This is from page 153:

“We were dealing with a powerful aphrodisiac, probably the most powerful sexual releaser known to man. The effect was sensory-contact was intensified thousand-fold but also deeper. The union was not just your body and her body but all of your racial and evolutionary entities with all of hers. It was mythic mating. Neurological union. Cellular sex. Archetypes merging. It was the direct reliving of thousands of matings.”

The LSD experience is sensuous, the ultimate in sensuousness. It is also erotic, exotic, timeless and eternal so that all of the good feeling will seem to never end. It is a religious experience of remembering one’s full identity and it’s all heaven and paradise. When a man and a woman are tripping together, it’s a God and a Goddess having ultimate, spiritual sex on a cosmic level. The union is deeper and richer because both people are ultimately and infinitely far beyond the ego games. The two bodies can be so merged that each person doesn’t know where their body ends and the other begins. It is as if there is just one body. Sex under LSD is the ultimate merging of the bodies combined with the ultimate merging of the minds. Typical sexual relationships, including almost all marriages, are based on the ego, meaning that they are just a tiny fraction of one percent of what sex, relationships and sexual relationships can be.

The Western religions interfere with one’s full enjoyment of sex and love. Here is how Robert Anton Wilson puts it on pages 258-259 of his book, Sex and Drugs:

“Christianity and even Protestant Christianity has remained, willy-nilly, the most authoritarian and bigoted of all world religions. He who attempts to question or modify any of its dogmas quickly gets into very hot water in any Christian country. There has been one ‘revelation’ and it is enough. He who has new ideas is probably inspired by the Devil or has been out in the woods taking strange drugs with the witch women.

“If such a heretic admits that he has indeed been taking strange drugs, the Christian response is even more vehement, quick and hostile. And, of course, if his teaching involves sexual liberty at all, the historical pattern is reactivated at once and a new witch hunt is sure to follow.

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“This is a peculiarly Christian reaction. The Hindus, the Moslems, the Buddhists, the Taoists, all the major religions have had their sexual mystics and have honored them. Every Hindu knows that the Tantrists achieve their mystical visions through sexual intercourse with a beloved partner; the Buddhists, Moslems and Taoists all have similar sects. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had highly developed cults of hierogamy, ritualized sex magic. Christianity is alone in thinking that sex is entirely the Devil’s business and an offense to God.

“The consequences of the doctrine are even more bizarre than the belief itself. If a man writes a poem to his beloved in a Christian nation and is too frank about expressing that love, he is in danger of being called ‘obscene’; throughout most of Christian history, he could be jailed, tortured or even killed, at times. As William Blake wrote in horror:

Children of the future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was called a crime

“Hating, kicking, stabbing and all manner of sadism are allowed in movies for Christian audiences; only love is vile.”

Is any of that not true? Robert Anton Wilson, like Timothy Leary, will write things that are true, knowing that it’s hitting a nerve. Let’s expand on what he’s saying. The Western religions aren’t really religions because a religion is not a religion if the people who “believe in it” have no idea what a religious experience is, let alone having had one. To put it another way, if a religion has nothing to do with having religious experiences, then how is it a religion and not just brainwashing propaganda?

Does it make sense to think that you were born with sin or guilt because of something from 2000 years ago? It’s from 2000 years ago and we don’t even know exactly, for sure, what happened. Therefore, certain “assumptions” were made and pushed as the truth, leading to the formation of a “religion.” This is somewhat like John Doe saying that he alone is the one and only God, convincing some people that it’s true and then forming a “religion” based on that. That’s great except that John Doe is off the wall. So is anyone who believes in him. The Western religions are based on assumptions that are just as silly.

Every child is told that they are separate from God. They’re told that if they aren’t good and do and think as they are told all of their life, then they will go to tortuous, everlasting hell after they die. They’re told that because they were born in sin, they have to suffer in order to not feel guilt. The choice is to be miserable and suffer or live with guilt and shame. They’re told not to question anything that they are told about their religion and to just blindly go along with it. All of this is quite a lot to throw at a child. As Alan Watts says on pages 89-90 of his book, This is It:

“The Hebrew-Christian universe is one in which moral urgency, the anxiety to be right, embraces and penetrates everything. God, the Absolute itself, is good as against bad, and thus to be immoral or in the wrong is to feel oneself an outcast not merely from human society but also from existence itself, from the root and ground of life. To be in the wrong therefore arouses a metaphysical anxiety and sense of guilt-a state of eternal damnation-utterly disproportionate to the crime. This metaphysical guilt is so insupportable that it must eventually issue in the rejection of God and of his laws–which is just what has happened in the whole movement of modern secularism, materialism, and naturalism. Absolute morality is profoundly destructive of morality, for the sanctions which it invokes against evil are far, far too heavy. One does not cure the headache by cutting off the head. The appeal of Zen, as of other forms of Eastern philosophy, is that it unveils behind the urgent realm of good and evil a vast region of oneself about which there need be no guilt or recrimination, where at last the self is indistinguishable from God.”

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As if everything mentioned before wasn’t absurd enough, a person is told that sex is forbidden unless someone is married and then it’s all right if it’s with the spouse, but it’s a sin to use contraceptives, to get involved with an abortion, to watch pornography and that it’s pretty much a sin to say or do anything without getting permission or approval in advance. All of this is religion? This country is not going to find out what religion is until it finds out what LSD is. The Western “religions” are based on that tiny fraction of one percent of the brain, meaning a tiny fraction of one percent of what religion really is.

A person is put into an impossible situation. The person can be “good,” suffer through their whole life and maybe, if God is nice, he will let them go to heaven or they can sometimes enjoy themselves, which is a “sin” that will surely send them to hell. This is what Alan Watts called a double-bind situation, meaning that both choices are horrible and the person can’t win no matter what choice they make. They are stuck and maybe paralyzed in not being able to pick from the two terrible options and act. The person has no one to turn to because everyone says that this is God’s will, that this is life and that this is the way it is. Well, that’s not God’s will, that’s not life and that’s not the way it is. A person can’t get out of the double-bind until they realize that this game of two negative choices is all nonsense, a con, a fraud. There is religious indoctrination as well as social indoctrination and both are brainwashing propaganda.

The Western “religions” are pretty much saying that feeling good is a sin or something that’s not natural or proper. As a result, in psychology, everything seems geared to the negative. If someone feels good, it’s said that they are in a “euphoric state” as if there is something wrong, bad or unnatural about it. Timothy Leary goes into this in his book, Changing My Mind Among Others. It says on page 194:

“Academic psychology is concerned with conditioning humans to accept what Freud called ‘the reality principle’, implying that only the artificial, conditioned games of the current social order are real; that natural pleasure is somehow a hallucination, even a psychotic outburst.

“The entire range of pleasurable experiences has gone unstudied, unlabeled, undefined. You will not find the word ‘fun’ in the index of most psychology texts. Indeed, until the psychedelic movement of the last decade, unconditioned behavior and unconditioned experience were considered ipso facto schizophrenic.”
Leary had more on this in his book, High Priest. This is from page 63:

“To interpret the visionary experience laymen use the language of ecstasy and psychiatrists use the language which is familiar and natural to them, the dialog of diagnosis. Now the curious thing about psychiatric language is that it’s almost completely negative, a pompous, gloomy lexicon of troubles, symptoms, abnormalities, eccentricities.”
Leary described the mentality that he faced at Harvard on page 153 of his book, Flashbacks:

“Most of our colleagues in the psychology department still couldn’t take our brain-change work seriously. They couldn’t admit that our new subject matter even existed. Moreover, the professional language we had in common lacked concepts for the types of data that our experiments were producing. Altered states of consciousness simply didn’t exist as a category in the psychology of that time. It was the familiar tunnel vision that has always narrowed the academic mind.”

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Of course, that is still the way it is. A therapist or a teacher has to do things according to accepted standards, no matter how absurd those standards are. As Leary says on page 194 of his book, Changing My Mind, Among Others:

“As prime conditioner of his fellow men, the psychologist or educator must be an exemplar-calm, serious, controlled, sensibly cynical, smugly pessimistic and above all, rational. To study the unconditioned state, to produce pleasure in his subjects and to act in a natural, hedonic manner would lead to his excommunication.”

In Timothy Leary’s, High Priest, he mentions how he and Aldous Huxley had a different outlook than conventional psychology in what they were trying to do. This is from pages 65-66:

“We talked about how to study and use the consciousness-expanding drugs and we clicked along agreeably on the do’s and the not-to-do’s. We would avoid the behaviorist approach to others’ awareness. Avoid labeling or depersonalizing the subject. We should not impose our own jargon or own experimental games on others. We were not out to discover new laws, which is to say, to discover the redundant implications of our own premises. We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret ecstasy as mania or calm serenity as catatonia; we were not to diagnose Buddha as a detached schizoid; not Christ as an exhibitionist masochist; not the mystic experience as a symptom; not the visionary state as a model psychosis.”

Leary and Huxley did not believe in the aspect of scientific research which says that the scientist cannot try LSD himself because he would lose his “objectivity.” With LSD, there is no such thing as doing research on others or animals. The scientist has to experience it for himself in order to understand what he is supposed to be researching. On page 186 of Huxley’s writings, Moksha, is a letter he wrote to Leary about this:

“You are right about the hopelessness of the ‘scientific’ approach. Those idiots want to be Pavlonians not Lorenzian Ethnologists. Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The ‘scientific’ LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychoses.”

Leary had an interesting comment mentioning scientists. This is from page 101 of The Politics of Ecstasy:

“Yes, it is frightening and this defines the scientist of consciousness. He must have courage. He must embark on a course of planfully and deliberately going out of his mind. This is no field for the faint of heart. You are venturing out (like the Portuguese sailors, like the astronauts) on uncharted margins. But be reassured-it’s an old human custom. It’s an old living-organism custom. We’re here today because certain adventurous proteins, certain far-out experimenting cells, certain hippy amphibia, certain brave men pushed out and exposed themselves to new forms of energy. Where do you get this courage? It comes from faith in your nervous system, body, cells, the life process, the molecular energies released by psychedelic molecules and faith in the harmony and wisdom of nature.”

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There is a direct connection between religion and psychology. The uptight Western “religions” negatively influence our psychological makeup. Freud understood the concept of the unconscious, that there is “information” in the brain that we are not consciously aware of or that we have completely forgotten. His problem was that his theory was too limited and too negative. He saw the unconscious as painful memories of a person’s past that have been blocked out of consciousness and that’s it. According to Freud, there is nothing in the brain that goes beyond a person’s biographical past and that what’s there is pretty grim and dreary. Freud had enough vision to see that there is more to the brain than meets the eye, but he couldn’t see that it’s possible for something positive to be in the brain.

Carl Jung was much more insightful than Freud. Jung’s concept of the unconscious went far beyond anything that Freud was able to comprehend. Jung was saying that there is not only the individual unconscious for each person that Freud was talking about, but that there is what he called the “collective unconscious.” The individual unconscious contains the biographical history of the person. The “collective unconscious” contains the history not only of the particular individual, but the history of all mankind, of all people who ever lived. According to Jung, every person has access to the “collective unconscious.” Jung’s theory can be carried one step further. It can be said that an individual can get beyond even the “collective unconscious.” There is no word or term to identify this but it would contain not only the history of all mankind, but the history of all life and all existence. This and the “collective unconscious” can be thought of as positive, spiritual dimensions of the brain, far beyond the negativity of Freud’s limited individual unconscious. With LSD, you can become conscious of the positive, spiritual dimensions of the brain.

Needless to say, not many people knew what Jung was talking about. It was Freud who got the publicity. The negativity of Freud poisoned the field of psychology. That, along with the negativity of the Western “religions” and the negativity of social conditioning, results in the people being almost hopelessly repressed.

LSD can take someone infinitely further than anything Freud, the world of psychology, the Western “religions” or the ego knows about and LSD is also infinitely more positive than anything Freud, the world of psychology, the Western “religions” or the ego knows about. We have a natural, living, clean, clear, positive, ecstatic, infinite brain, which is aware of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe and which has stored in its super computer everything that has ever happened to anyone or anything, ever, in the history of the universe, but who will believe it unless they have had a religious experience?

If the cells of the brain had an election, the ego would get a tiny fraction of one percent of the vote. Yet, the ego runs the show like a dictator. Do you want your brain back or do you want to remain a prisoner of the ego? LSD is the hero that can get you your brain back so that you can begin to live for real. One day, people will look back and wonder how we could have been so foolish, not because we don’t know yet about the rest of the brain, but because we are completely closed to the idea that there actually can be more to the brain than the ego and all its silly, negative games. For someone who has seen the ego for what it is, to cherish the ego is like cherishing the idea that the earth is flat or trying to make your fingertip touch itself.

The ego is inhibiting. It’s like something which tells you that in order to open your mouth and eat, you must use your hands to force the mouth open or having to use your hands to lift your feet in order to take each step and walk. We all know that the mouth naturally opens by itself and that the feet know what to do on their own if you want to walk. What we don’t all know is that the ego is like a criminal or disease that controls and in turn destroys us in subtle ways, so subtle that we are taken in by it and think that the ego is real and supposed to mean something. Freud and our concept of modern psychology, the Western “religions” and social conditioning are all a joke because they are all based on the sacredness of the ego.

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When you are tripping and the ego has to confront LSD, it’s like the marines have arrived to rescue you. It’s all over for the ego and now your life can finally begin in earnest. The ego has as much of a chance against LSD as an infant has in the ring against Evander Holyfield. The baby has a better chance because Evander wouldn’t hit an innocent infant. The ego, however, is not innocent. It’s like the devil. LSD knows that and when it sees the ego, the ego better run for the hills like any other crook that has met its match, but the ego thinks that it’s so high and mighty that it will take on LSD. What a mistake because the ego will get mauled, destroyed and buried, just what it deserves for trying to steal your life.

Timothy Leary puts it this way on page 104 of David Solomon’s LSD: The Consciousness Expanding Drug:

“How can we Westerners come to see that our own consciousness is infinitely greater than our little egos and the ego games into which we are so blindly caught up? That the universe within our skulls is infinitely more than the flimsy game world which our words and minds create?

“Put in a sentence, the task is to see that the mind is a tiny fragment of the brain-body complex. It is the game-playing fragment. The process of getting beyond the game structure, beyond the subject-object commitments, the dualities, this process is called the mystic experience. The visionary experience is the nongame, metagame experience. Change in behavior can occur with dramatic spontaneity once the game structure of behavior is seen. The visionary experience is the key to behavior change.”

From the same book as the example above, Alan Watts said on page 118:

“Theologians said to Galileo, ‘We will not look through your telescope because we already know how the universe is ordered. If your telescope were to show us anything different, it would be an instrument of the devil’.

“Similarly, so many practitioners of the inexact sciences (e.g., psychology, anthropology, sociology) let it be known most clearly that they already know what reality is and therefore what sanity is. For these poor drudges reality is the world of nonpoetry: it is the reduction of the physical universe to the most banal and dissected terms conceivable, in accordance with the great Western myth that all nature outside the human skin is a stupid and unfeeling mechanism.”

Continuing on this point of how narrow and close-minded people are to new ideas, we return to Robert Anton Wilson and his book Sex and Drugs. On page 117-118 he gives examples of the absurd reasoning used by blind critics:

“The best that such people can do to rebut the obvious facts is to make a highly artificial distinction between experience and impression. If the hashish user says that he saw brighter colors, they correct this to ‘he imagined brighter colors’; should he say that his sense of touch was more acute, they will write that ‘he imagined his sense of touch was more acute’; if he experiences a cosmic vision, they become especially arch and tell us ‘he imagined he was having all sorts of mystical insights’.

“Is there any sense in saying that if red looks brighter to me, then I am only imagining that it looks brighter to me? Or that if my orgasm seems more intense to me, then I am only imagining that it is more intense? Or that I have a delusion that I’m happy or am hallucinating that I feel great?

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“If a man believes that he’s happy and hilarious and grooving on everything around him, the only sane description of his state is to say he’s euphoric, not to say that he imagines he is euphoric.

“What the skeptic really seems to be claiming is that he knows what the subject feels better than the subject knows, that the subject doesn’t feel what he feels but feels something else. This is the kind of verbal metaphysics that made the medieval theologians become the laughingstocks of Voltaire and other rationalist critics.”

This irrational type of thinking is part of the social conditioning process and the educational system. Timothy Leary gave a speech at a college just one week before he left Harvard. He knew that this would be his last speech as a college professor. Here is a small part of what he told those students. It’s from pages 244-245 of his book, The Politics of Ecstasy:

“We have to think about the university as a place which spawns new ideas or breaks through to new visions, a place where we can learn to use our neurological equipment. The university and, for that matter, every aspect of the educational system is paid for by adult society to train young people to keep the same game going, to be sure that you do not use your heads. Students, this institution and all educational institutions are set up to anesthetize you, to put you in step, to make sure that you will leave here and walk out into the bigger game and take your place in the line, a robot like your parents, an obedient, efficient, well-adapted social game player, a replaceable part of the machine.

“The last thing an institution of education wants to allow you to do is expand your consciousness, to use the untapped potential in your head, to experience directly. They don’t want you to take life seriously, they want you to take their game seriously. Education, dear students, is anesthetic, a narcotic procedure which is very likely to blunt your sensitivity and to immobilize your brain and your behavior for the rest of your lives.”

Leary was right on target with that, though few know what he meant. William Braden wrote a book, The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God. Braden was a newspaper reporter, hung up on the Western “religions.” He tried LSD  without adequate preparation and had to take a drug that would get him out of it. He didn’t understand LSD but did understand certain verbal, intellectual concepts coming from others and could repeat the ideas. This is from pages 205-206:

“The world beyond the world of appearances is this world seen in a different way. We have said that nirvana is realized in this world by living men, not in some other world by dead men. Nirvana is the pure experience of the present moment in this world here and now. To see the world as it really is means to understand that life is immortal. And thus the myth of the terrible wheel of death and rebirth. The wheel is caused by the intellect and it is nothing more than the rational way of looking at things. To escape from the wheel means to understand that death is false and that life is immortal. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free, from death as well as mechanism. If the intellect by nature cannot understand life, it follows that the intellect by nature cannot understand death. Its view of death results from the fact that it looks only at the parts, not the Whole. If  it would look at the Whole, it would see immediately that life is immortal. The esoteric doctrine would be that it is precisely our insistence on personal immortality which makes us blind to our actual immortality.”

There may be confusion about what the “wheel of death and rebirth” means. In Buddhism, there is a word, “karma.” Karma is the motivated activity of the ego, the ego games, the social conditioning, etc. This is based on thinking that things are separate which leads to the problem of how one thing causes another, when in reality, the two things are different parts of the same thing. All of this puts the person on the wrong track and this wrong track is the “wheel.” Just think of karma and the wheel as all of the nonsense that the ego is involved with. A person needs to get beyond the ego in order to live fully.

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Now we will return to a key point and elaborate on it. It was mentioned that with LSD, everything that you see, whether the eyes are open or closed, can seem to be shining and glowing like jewels. This is especially true with the eyes closed. It’s a big part of the special flavor of the LSD experience. Aldous Huxley was especially interested in this aspect and had very interesting theories about its meaning. He was saying that precious stones are considered precious, not because they are rare or pretty, but because they remind people of what they see in visionary, religious experiences involving changes in consciousness. On page 65 of Moksha, Huxley says:

“My own view is that an explanation for the preciousness of precious stones must be sought, first of all, in the facts of visionary experience. Gem-like objects, bright, self-luminous, glowing with preternatural color and significance, exist in the mind’s Antipodes, are seen by visionaries and are felt by all who see them to be of enormous significance. In the objective world, the things which most nearly resemble these self-luminous visionary objects are gems. Precious stones are held to be precious, because they remind human beings of the Other World at the mind’s Antipodes, the Other World of which visionaries are fully conscious and ordinary persons are obscurely and, as it were, subterraneously aware. There is a special kind of beauty, which we say is ‘transporting’. The adjective is well chosen; for it is literally true that certain spectacles do carry away the mind of the beholder, carry it out of the everyday world of common, conceptualized experience into the magical Other World of nonverbal visionary experience.”

Like with everything else about LSD, the gems that you see while tripping are infinitely richer, brighter, shinier and more dazzling than any gem that you will see during usual waking consciousness. This concept goes back to Socrates. In Moksha, Aldous Huxley mentions Socrates on p. 192:

“What Socrates says about this world, which he calls the other earth, is again that in this other earth, everything shines, that the very stones of the road and on the mountains have the quality of precious stones; and he ends up by saying that the precious stones of our earth, our highly valued emeralds, rubies, and so on, are but infinitesimal fragments of the stones which are to be seen in this other earth; and this other earth, where everything is brighter and clearer and more real than in our world is, he says, a vision of blessed beholders.”

Did Socrates deserve to be murdered by the authorities for talking like that? Huxley, in Moksha, says more on page 273:

“This richness of gem-like qualities, which is found in the visionary world, does explain many strange facts about certain types of art and many facts about the curious, uniform quality of religious traditions, folklore traditions, traditions of the nature of the Golden Age and After Life, which are found all over the world.”

Staying with Huxley and the book of his writings, letters and speeches about psychedelic drugs, Moksha, he says on page 203:

“There are all kinds of realistic, naturalistic visionary experiences, experiences of architectures, of landscapes, of figures. It is interesting to find that again and again in the accounts given by people of visionary experiences, we find the same elements described, for example, in Heinrich Kluver’s book on peyote where he sums up most of the material which had been published up to the time he wrote it. We find again and again this description of luminous landscapes and architectures encrusted with gems, the whole world of landscape is filled with what Ezekiel calls the stones of fire. These descriptions of course very closely parallel all the accounts of paradises, posthumous worlds and fairylands which are found in all the traditions of the world.”

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Religious and folklore traditions and myths and legends of paradises and fairylands are found all over the world and have something in common, symbolized by the gem-like qualities of visionary experience. The visionary experience is ancient and universal, regardless of one’s culture, educational background or anything else. Everyone in history has shared the same big brain and everyone has had access to it.

One of the most common and interesting myths and legends are those of the magic drug or potion. The legend of the magic potion was and is very real and it obviously stems from those who have had the magical, visionary experience. The witches of the Middle Ages weren’t crazy. They were tripping and just like now, in “modern” times, everyone thought that they were insane. When the ships sailed to the New World and the East to bring back “spices,” what do you think those “spices” were? They sure weren’t garlic powder and paprika. When Ponce de Leon sailed to Florida, looking for the “fountain of youth” or the “elixir of life,” what do you think he was looking for? In the Middle Ages, when alchemists were trying to change lead into gold, don’t take that literally. It means that they were trying to change consciousness from lead to gold. The different colors of the stained glass windows of medieval churches are psychedelic and surely were the result of visionary experiences. The heroic, mythological figures that are parts of religious art and architecture are manifestations of the figures seen with the eyes closed, when tripping and again, people from all cultures, backgrounds and time periods will see the same kind of figures, showing that it is a universal experience.

You won’t find any of this in the history books. Every historical writer has their own theory of history and then fits the facts into their theory. “Accepted” history is what’s in fashion at the time, regardless of whether it’s true or not. Are publishers and universities going to accept that the LSD type of experience has had a major, profound, positive effect on the history of the world? Stanislav Grof doesn’t need convincing. As he says on page 313 of his book, Beyond the Brain:

“The individual is flooded by light of supernatural beauty and experiences a state of divine epiphany. He or she has a deep sense of emotional, intellectual and spiritual liberation and gains access to breathtaking realms of cosmic inspiration and insight. This type of experience is clearly responsible for great achievements in the history of humanity in the area of science, art, religion and philosophy.”

Aldous Huxley, in Moksha, on page 208, in his own way, explains some of the value and goodness of an LSD experience:

“I suppose in a certain sense one can say the value is absolute. In a sense one can say that visionary experience is, so to say, a manifestation simultaneously of the beautiful and the true, of intense beauty and intense reality and as such it doesn’t have to be justified in any other way. After all, the Good, the True and the Beautiful are absolute values and in a certain sense one can say that visionary experience has always been regarded as an absolute value, that it has been always felt to be intrinsically of immense significance and importance and worth having at a very great price.”

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Huxley, of course, knew what it’s all about because this experience really is about the Good, the True and the Beautiful and an experience of immense significance and importance and worth having at a very great price. It’s too bad we know nothing about it. The Western world is advanced in technology, but sadly lacks in wisdom if the visionary experience is associated with insanity and if someone is in danger of going to jail for having such an experience or even encouraging others to do it. That is the mentality of this country and of course, it’s a fascist mentality. If someone is totally closed and has no interest in the LSD experience, that’s their business. If a person has to go to jail because they disagree, then there is a problem, a fascist problem and that is where this country is at. We aren’t any different today than the people who thought that Galileo was dangerous because of his telescope and in turn, refused to look into the telescope. Galileo was arrested. We are just as backward today. We have cars, TV’s and computers, but the wisdom level is still near zero and will stay there until people on a widespread scale become aware of the LSD visionary experience and what it means.

R. Gordon Wasson traveled the world studying mushrooms, the “magic mushrooms.” Timothy Leary’s first psychedelic experience was in Mexico with the mushrooms. John Cashman wrote a book, The LSD Story. Cashman knew nothing about LSD, but there is a quote from Wasson on page 24 worth mentioning:

“The visions were not blurred or uncertain. They were sharply focused, the lines and colors being so sharp that they seemed more real to me than anything I had seen with my own eyes. I felt that I was now seeing clearly, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view. I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret of the ancient Mysteries?…These reflections passed through my mind at the very time that I was seeing the visions, for the effect of the mushrooms is to bring about a fission of the spirit, a split in the person, a kind of schizophrenia, with the rational side continuing to reason and to observe the sensations that the other side is enjoying.”

That last sentence was just another way of saying that the person has their usual rational mind the whole time, no matter what is happening. There was a reference to the ancient Mysteries. We’ll get to what that is. What follows is another quote from R. Gordon Wasson. It’s from pages 35-37 of The Psychedelic Reader, a selection of writings that appeared in the Psychedelic Review. The book is edited by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Gunther Weil, all Harvard men. Here it is:

“It permits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards 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 with you 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 have 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 its beauty. Not unnaturally, what is happening to you seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdum events of everyday are trivial. 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’. (Plato tells us that beyond this ephemeral and imperfect existence here below, there is another Ideal world of Archetypes, where the original, the true, the beautiful Pattern of things exists for evermore. Poets and philosophers for millennia have pondered and discussed his conception. It is clear to me where Plato found his Ideas; it was clear to his contemporaries too. Plato had drunk of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the night seeing the great Vision.)

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“The bemushroomed person is the 5 senses disembodied, all of them keyed to the height of sensitivity and awareness, all of them blending into one another most strangely, until the person, utterly passive, becomes a pure receptor, infinitely delicate, of sensations. As your body lies there in its sleeping bag, your soul is free, loses all sense of time, living eternity in a night, seeing infinity in a grain of sand. What you have seen and heard is cut with a burin in your memory, never to be effaced. At last you know what the ineffable is and what ecstasy means. Ecstasy!”

There was a reference above about the Temple of Eleusis. This is related to the ancient Mysteries mentioned in the first quote from Wasson. All of this is something else that you won’t find in the regular history books because this was about an ancient tradition of tripping. In the book, Acid Dreams, by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain, they mention a book about this and make a comment on page 66:

“In Road to Eleusis authors Albert Hofmann, Gordon Wasson and Carl Ruck present convincing evidence that the Eleusinian Mysteries, the oldest religion in the West, centered around a mass tripping ritual. For 2 millennia pilgrims journeyed from all over the world to take part in the Mysteries and drink the sacred kykeon. Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles were among those who participated in this secret ritual.”

The rest of this chapter will be devoted to quotes from people describing aspects of their trips. In most cases, these are not quotes from well known people like Leary, Huxley, Watts, Grof, etc. If you have never taken LSD, try to get a feel for what these people are saying. If you are familiar with LSD, the quotes should be uplifting.

Sidney Cohen wrote a book, The Beyond Within. Cohen, himself, was quite negative about LSD, but some parts of the book were good, the parts where ordinary people tell of their experiences. Here are 3 quotes from nameless, ordinary people, the first from page 7, the next from page 126 and the last from page 169:

“The world looked to me like it must to a little child, all big and beautiful. And I was experiencing it without the imposed controls that we have to slap on the world in order to become adults. I think I was afraid that my hold on the difference between the child’s and the adult’s world wasn’t too firm and all those sights were just too overwhelming. As I was walking I was literally, experiencing the world as a child would and I loved it.”

“It was as if all the warm, sunny wonderful days of my childhood had been rolled into one and this was the day. I felt like a child looking out of the window at the beautiful, beautiful world. Never in all my life have I seen anything that looked as beautiful as this particular day.”

“We walked around the garden together. It was like walking in Paradise. Everything was composed and harmonized. I felt I had never really seen this garden before. I was enchanted with each plant, leaf, flower, tree trunk and the earth itself. Each blade of grass stood up separate and distinct, edged with light. Each was supremely important. The subtle colors of the loose earth and dead leaves were rich and wonderful. The vistas through the shrubbery were magically intriguing. Strangely enough I preferred the subtle colors to the bright flowers. They seemed more mysteriously beautiful.”

The next 2 quotes are from Masters and Houston’s, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. These quotes are from a businessman in his late twenties, on pages 94-95:

“The city, which had seemed from the window cold, grimy and slightly sinister, now was transformed into the wonderful world I had experienced when hearing fables as a child. The rich colors and textures of fantasy, more real than real, were pure enchantment. Walls of buildings had an added dimension to their surfaces. I felt I was walking in a waking dream. It was an all-consuming pleasure, just to see, touch, feel and smell.”

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

Also, from Masters and Houston’s, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, this what a housewife in her early thirties had to say about going outside and walking in a little forest just beyond her home. It’s from page. 261:

“I felt I was there with God on the day of Creation. Everything was so fresh and new. Every plant and tree and fern and bush had its own particular holiness. As I walked along the ground the smells of nature rose to greet me, sweeter and more sacred than any incense. Around me bees hummed and birds sang and crickets chirped a ravishing hymn to Creation. Between the trees I could see the sun sending down rays of warming benediction upon this Eden, this forest paradise. I continued to wander through this wood in a state of puzzled rapture, wondering how it could have been that I lived only a few steps from this place, walked in it several times a week, and yet had never really seen it before. I remembered having read in college Frazer’s Golden Bough in which one read of the sacred forests of the ancients. Here, just outside my door was such a forest and I swore I would never be blind to its enchantment again.”

Staying with Masters and Houston’s, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, this is what a recent university graduate said, from pages 153-154:

“I walked in the light of a full moon across a great meadow…I became aware of almost electrical surroundings…(and) there was also the sense of the body’s biochemical processes, rhythmically throbbing…My senses became extremely acute. I could see an ant upon a tree at a great distance away. I could hear the whispering of my companion, with whom I had shared the peyote, far off from me. Biting into an apple, I felt the granular surface of the chunk intensely magnified. I could rarely close my eyes because of my fascination with the external stimuli and so probably missed a number of ‘visions’ (eidetic images).

“…As dawn came, my heightened ability to organize caused each cloud to take on a recognizable shape. I felt a great peace. The pink sky was hyper-pink. A myriad of multicolored telephone wires hummed as they wiggled like serpents…When I closed my eyes there was an endless flow of dancing geometrical forms in the most magnificent combinations of color. I could not help thinking at this time how a man in advertising might make his fortune were he able to capture just a bit of this…

“As I watched a wooded section I was surprised to find the branches of the trees flapping as a bird does, only in harmonious slow motion. Distant scenery waved gently so as almost to resemble a tapestry gently swaying. I was amused to see the brick walls of a house tirelessly undulating. Fascinated, I drew near trees whose trunks heaved and whose bark flowed and pulsated in a manner suggesting organic growth. Close observation of the bark was astounding. I reminded myself of the mental patient one sees in films, on the lawn of the institution, drawn next to the inanimate in watchfulness and here I was, leaning against the brick house, bound by concentration on the microscopic growth and flow of the particles. A dandelion I glanced down at grew 2 feet high. Everything was magnified. As I strolled, my attention was wholly grasped by a small dewdrop on the grass. It was utterly captivating.”

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Continuing along with comments of people, here is what Aldous Huxley says on pages 10-11 of his book Heaven and Hell:

“I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it. Instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up of a perfect geometric pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow…The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless…Then suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.”

Alan Watts, in his book, This is It, has this to say on pages 143-144:

“As I stood on the lawn, I noticed that the rough patches where the grass was thin or mottled with weeds no longer seemed to be blemishes. Scattered at random as they were, they appeared to constitute an ordered design, giving the whole area the texture of velvet damask, the rough patches being the parts where the pile of velvet is cut. In sheer delight, I began to dance on this enchanted carpet and through the thin soles of my moccasins I could feel the ground becoming alive under my feet, connecting me with the earth and the trees and the sky in such a way that I seemed to become one body with my whole surroundings.

“Looking up, I saw the stars colored with the same reds, greens and blues that one sees in iridescent glass and passing across them was a single light of a jet plane taking forever to streak over the sky. At the same time, the trees, shrubs and flowers seemed to be living jewelry, inwardly luminous like intricate structures of jade, alabaster or corel and yet breathing and flowing with the same life that was in me. Every plant became a kind of musical utterance, a play of variations on a theme repeated from the main branches, through the stalks and twigs, to the leaves, the veins in the leaves and to the fine capillary network between the veins. Each new bursting of growth from a center repeated or amplified the basic design with increasing complexity and delight, finally exulting in a flower.”

Going back to The LSD Story by John Cashman, again, Cashman doesn’t know anything, but there is a quote from an ordinary, nameless person, describing their experience on pages 97-98:

“In one great crystal instant I realized that I was immortal. I asked the question: ‘Am I dead?’ But the question had no meaning. Meaning was meaningless. Suddenly there was white light and the shimmering beauty of unity. There was light everywhere, white light with a clarity beyond description. I was dead and I was born and the exultation was pure and holy. My lungs were bursting with the joyful song of being. There was unity and life and the exquisite love that filled my being was unbounded. My awareness was acute and complete. I saw God and the devil and all the saints and I knew the truth. I felt myself flowing into the cosmos, levitated beyond all restraint, liberated to swim in the blissful radiance of the heavenly visions.

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“I wanted to shout and sing of the miraculous new life and sense and form, of the joyous beauty and the whole mad ecstasy of loveliness. I knew and understood all there is to know and understand. I was immortal, wise beyond wisdom and capable of love of all loves. Every atom of my body and soul had seen and felt God. The world was warmth and goodness. There was no time, no place, no me. There was only cosmic harmony. It was all there in the white light. With every fiber of my being I knew it was so.”

One idea should be clarified. This person asked if they were dead and said that there was “no me.” Many people will say that they were gone or didn’t exist anymore, but at the same time, will say that if someone asked them a question, they could hear it and answer it, which means that they still existed and were not at all dead. What they really mean is that with LSD, they are so far beyond anything that they have ever known, imagined or dreamed of that it’s as if they are dead or don’t exist anymore. What is dead and nonexistent is the ego and all the social conditioning, not the person and not life. The person is infinitely more alive than ever because the ego is finally, blessedly out of the way.

In Robert Anton Wilson’s book, Sex and Drugs, a man from the mid 1800’s, as a result of a hashish experience (it must have been great hash) is quoted on pages 114-116 as saying:

“My eyelashes elongated indefinitely, unrolling themselves like threads of gold on ivory spindles which spun of their own accord with dazzling rapidity. Around me poured streams of gems of every color, in ever changing patterns like the play within a kaleidoscope. My comrades appeared to me disfigured, part men, part plants. So strange did they seem that I writhed with laughter and overcome by the absurdity of the spectacle, flung my cushions in the air.

“My hearing became prodigiously acute. I actually listened to the sound of the colors. From their blues, greens and yellows there reached me sound waves of perfect distinctness. A glass inverted, the creak of an armchair, a word pronounced with a deep voice vibrated and rumbled about me like the reverberations of thunder. My own voice seemed so loud that I dared not speak for fear of shattering the walls with its bomb-like explosion. More than 500 clocks seemed to announce the time in voices. Each object touched gave off a note.

“Never has greater beauty immersed me in its flood. I was so lost in its waves, so separated from myself, so disembarrassed of my ego, that odious appendage that accompanies us everywhere, that for the first time I understood the nature of existence of elementals of angels and spirits separated from the body. I hung like a sponge in the midst of a warm sea; at each moment waves of happiness traversed me, entering and emerging by my pores.

“Sounds, lights, perfumes reached me through tendrils fine as hairs in which I heard magnetic currents vibrating. By my calculation, the state lasted about 300 years, for the sensations which followed one another were so numerous and pressing that any real appreciation of time was impossible. The rapture passed…I saw that it had lasted just a quarter of an hour.”

I said it before and I’ll say it again: LSD is an electrifying, fascinating, beautiful, sparkling, dazzling, radiant, glowing, glorious, awesome, divine, heavenly, joyous, sensuous, euphoric, ecstatic, majestic, magical, magnificent, miraculous, sensational, spectacular, exciting, intense, dramatic, overwhelming awakening of experience.

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Revelations of the Mind

LSD Experience