Experience (Not Preceded By)

A belief is an opinion about the nature of reality based on a specific form of upbringing,
indoctrination, or reading of religious literature; it lacks direct experiential validation.

A completely different set of LSD sessions emerged when it became obvious that the
drug experiences could enhance creative potential in certain individuals.

A new experiential language and perhaps even new metaphors for the great plan will
develop.

A reality is experienced that exposes a gleam of the transcendental reality in which
universe and self are one.

A short time interval is experienced as being much longer. In the extreme case, minutes
can be experienced as centuries or millennia.

A subject may “feel” the interior of his body, experiencing his internal structure and
processes as he understands them or as altered in some way.

A subject may have a euphoria-inducing experience of empathy with a chair, a painting, a
person or a shoe (or anything).

A walk in nature with its variety of sensory experiences, seems to be conducive to
positive or even ecstatic emotional states.

After completing the process of the ego-death, individuals consider human experience in
a much broader, spiritual network.

All of our experiences are stored in the mind and under certain favorable circumstances,
may be completely recalled.

Almost always, the subject is introduced to such increased awareness that this experience
remains one of the outstanding events of his life.

Although the experiences have been fulfilling in hundreds of ways, by far the most
meaningful have been the religious insights and feelings of spirituality.

An extreme in the experience of changed time and space is the awareness of infinity and
eternity.

An individual who has experienced transcendental states has a strong feeling of cosmic
identity.

Anxiety in the therapist about “inducing psychosis” seems likely to render the experience
anxiety-ridden for the subject.

As a result of experiences of this kind, subjects can develop accurate understanding of
various complex esoteric teachings.

As domains of experience become more alien to us, we need greater and greater open-
mindedness even to conceive of their existence.

As drugs entered the scene, songwriters and musicians became interested in interior
experience, outer space and the Meaning of Reality.

As everything in the field of consciousness assumes unusual importance, feelings become
magnified to a degree of intensity and purity almost never experienced in daily life.

“Authoritative” articles appeared authored by those who had had no direct experience
with the drug.

Because of the unique nature of the psychedelic state it is impossible to reach a real
understanding of its quality and dimensions unless one directly experiences it.

Because the teaching of the Buddha was a way of liberation, it had no other object than
the experience of nirvana.

Brain-activating drugs expose people to powerful, mind-blowing experiences that shatter
conventional ideas about reality.

Certain people are increasingly changing interests, from possessions to states of mind or
from endurance to intensity of experience.

Certainly, any view that there are grave risks to normal persons, is not borne out by the
experience of most researchers working with volunteer experimental subjects.

Clean water in any form seems to have a particularly powerful impact. A swim, shower
or bath can frequently dispel negative experiences and facilitate ecstatic reentry.

Clinical data suggested that these experiences had a unique therapeutic potential in the
treatment of various emotional disorders.

Consciousness can be expanded or deepened so as to include vast areas of experience
entirely ignored or “screened-out” by conscious attention.

consciousness of the Universal Mind—This is one of the most profound and total
experiences observed in LSD sessions.

Death and rebirth experiences are very complex and have biological, emotional and
intellectual, as well as philosophical and spiritual facets.

Death is just one episode, one transitional experience within this magnificent perennial
drama.

Deep experiences of cosmic unity have a universal healing potential of extraordinary
power.

Deep experiential work requires a vastly extended cartography of the psyche that includes
important domains uncharted by traditional science.

Deep personal experiences may be significant in shaping the inner landscape of the
future. Today that landscape appears dismally flat, largely a featureless plain.

Deep self-exploration of the individual unconscious turns into a process of experiential
adventure in the universe-at-large which involves cosmic consciousness.

Don’t do what “they” say; do what you want to. Deprogram the stigma and experience
the joy.

Drugs do not merely duplicate or stimulate theologically sponsored experiences but
generate or shape theologies themselves.

During a deep ecstatic experience, the subject will accept enthusiastically just about any
piece of music.

During any profound emotional experience, religious or otherwise, chemical or hormonal
bodily changes occur.

During several minutes of objective time, persons under the influence of LSD can
subjectively experience entire lifetimes, centuries, millennia, or even eons.

Eternity should not be confused with an infinitely long period of historical time. It is a
state where linear time is experientially transcended and ceases to exist.

Even some of the moving expressions of the Bible and religion pale in my attempts to
describe the experience.

Events from the recent and remote past can be experienced with vividness and
complexity.

Every person should have the experience to see what potential lies within himself. (First,
the person must be well prepared.)

Every process in the universe that one can observe objectively in the ordinary state of
consciousness also has a subjective experiential counterpart.

Everything we experience is stored in our brains with photographic details. (So is
everything that has ever been experienced by anyone or anything.)

Experience life as it actually is, as beyond the ways in which it is merely measured and
described and calculated.

Experiencing one’s self as one with the universe or with God is the hallmark of the
mystic experience, regardless of its cultural context.

Experiences and values which we had believed to be contrary and distinct are, after all,
aspects of the same thing.

Experiences encountered in the process of in-depth self-exploration have intrinsic healing
potential.

Experiences from the past connected with a strong emotional charge are activated,
brought forth from the unconscious and relived in a complex way.

Experiences of cosmic consciousness has been described in many religious scriptures
throughout history.

Experiences of oceanic ecstasy and cosmic union seem to be deeply related to the
undifferentiated state of consciousness that an infant experiences.

Experiences of the consciousness of particular, stable, immutable and durable substances
are perceived as being high spiritual states involving an element of sacredness.

Experiences of this kind can bring instant intuitive knowledge that by far exceeds the
intellectual capacity and educational background of the individual.

Experiences with the sun and wind lend themselves to creation of rich mythological
fantasies.

Experiential identification with inorganic matter is often accompanied by fascinating
insights of a philosophical, mythological, religious and mystical nature.

Experiential identification with the inorganic world is not limited to the secular aspects,
but has often distinct numinous or spiritual qualities.

Experiential sequences of death and rebirth typically open the gate to a transbiographical
domain in the human psyche that can best be referred to as transpersonal.

Facing the drug state once it sets in is usually easier than dealing with all the fantasies as
to what the experience will be.

Far more people in our time experience neither the presence of God nor the presence of
his absence, but the absence of his presence.

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

For psychedelic drugs to be administered by doctors on a “Now take this” basis defeats
the whole purpose of the experience.

Greater access to unconscious resources is a cardinal feature of psychedelic, creative, and
other novel perceptual experiences.

He (Leary) knew how important it was to have a warm supporting setting to experience
the ego-shattering revelations of the mushroom.

His experience of nonordinary reality is no less real for being unverifiable in the realm of
ordinary experience.

How many of the current ideas of eternity, of heaven, of supernatural states are ultimately
derived from the experiences of drug-takers?

Human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of
its senses as by external objects whose presence the mind reveals.

Huxley described the experience at its best as a “gratuitous grace,” providing access to
what he called “Mind-at-Large,” beyond the “reducing valve” of the ordinary egoic mind.

Huxley was fascinated by the potential in drugs such as mescaline, LSD and psilocybin to
provide a learning experience normally denied us within our educational system.

I know from first-hand experience that the LSD-type drugs in the right hands are superb
psychiatric tools.

I never really felt that school was my true place or any type of ultimately enriching
experience for me. (That’s what LSD is.)

If there is no distinct ego, the stream of experience can simply flow on, unobstructed, by
itself, a spontaneous, unforced and unblocked flowing of life.

If we could translate the modern Western theory of relativity into experience, we should
have what the Chinese and Indians call the Absolute.

If one talks about experiences for which the listener has no concepts, then he is defined
(at best) as a mystic.

In American Indian societies, what we might call psychotic experience in adolescence, is
a sign that the individual is chosen as a future shaman.

In general, others have little idea of the significance of your experiences. (That’s unless
they have taken LSD themselves.)

In most instances, a dramatic negative experience, if properly handled, will result in a
beneficial resolution.

In principle, every individual seems to have experiential access to mythological themes
of all things and all creatures. (eyes closed)

In psychedelic sessions, all of the elements in the universe in its present form and
throughout its history can be consciously experienced by the individual.

In the case of the psychedelics, the conditions under which they are tried deeply influence
the direction of the experience.

In the extreme form of transpersonal perception, we can experience ourselves as the
whole hemisphere of our planet or the entire material universe.

In the heart of each of us, a greater potential exists for realizing truth, for experiencing
wholeness, for going beyond the shell of the ego.

In the past, experiences of this kind were considered valuable and those who had them
were looked up to.

Individuals experience feelings of getting to the essence of things—of the external world,
of others, and of themselves.

Individuals might have profound experiences, yet they give the impression to an external
observer that nothing is happening or that they are sleeping.

Individuals talk about experiencing themselves as reborn and purified; a deep sense of
being in tune with nature and the universe replaces their previous feelings of alienation.

Insightful knowledge or illumination about being or existence in general that is felt at an
intuitive, nonratonal level and gained by direct experience.

Intense and impressive psychic experiences make possible the sudden unlearning of
ineffective ways of performing.

Intuitive flashes are transient, spontaneous altered states of consciousness consisting of
particular sensory experiences or thoughts coupled with strong emotional reactions.

Irrational, senile legislation preventing people from pursuing private, intimate
experiences—sexual or spiritual—cannot and will not be obeyed.

Is it not strange that an experience which is regarded with such fear and distrust by those
who have not had it, is so highly regarded by those who have?

It is an experience which people have when they are, as it were, reborn into the world and
suddenly, with this kind of visionary sight, they perceive its miraculous beauty.

It is difficult to realize its intensity unless one has been through the experience. (It’s not
only difficult, but impossible.)

It is possible to experience the consciousness of all creation, of our planet, of the entire
material universe.

It is possible to experience the history of the Universe before the origin of life on earth.
(eyes closed)

It is possible to zoom in and selectively focus on different levels and planes of the
experiential continuum and to perceive or reconstruct fine textures.

It is through the experience of the sacred that the ideas of reality, truth and significance
first dawn.

It is through experience of the sacred that the idea of reality, truth, and significance first
dawn, to be later elaborated and systemized by metaphysical speculations.

It makes sense to experience and study altered states of awareness to learn about the
nature of our world by directing attention to aspects of it that usually remain peripheral.

It offers one the chance to experience a true expansion of consciousness, an increase in
awareness, a general improvement and heightening of perception of all kinds.

It was not goals that stimulated us, it was the experience of being and becoming, the
journey there rather than the end haul.

It was puzzling how a single drug can produce such an enormous range of different
experiences, appearing in various combinations and seemingly on the same continuum.

It was these experiences that convinced me of the existence of a miraculous,
unfathomable reality that is hidden from everyday sight.

It would appear that everybody who experiences these levels develop convincing insights
into the utmost relevance of the spiritual dimensions in the universal scheme of things.

It’s an unclassified experience and only a very secure society can tolerate an unclassified
experience.

It’s called a “transporting” experience. It transports you, takes you out of this world, puts
you into the Other World.

Learning from a physics textbook about the wave structure of matter is one thing.
Experiencing it, being in it, is quite another matter.

Liberating ourselves from the tyranny of words, conditioned reflexes and social
conventions, we establish direct, unmediated contact with experience.

Liberation while living is considered to be the highest experience, a fusion of the
individual with the universal.

Like a microscope, LSD magnifies. Instead of magnifying things outside the body, it
magnifies inner experience.

Living experience of man’s inescapable union with the infinite abolishes the fear,
insecurity and pride underlying all evil action.

Looking at flowers or trees, sitting in the grass, smelling hay or watching the sunset can
be powerful experiences long to be remembered.

Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge toward a kind of insight to
which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.

LSD activates deep repositories of unconscious material and brings their content to the
surface, making it available for direct experience.

LSD can temporarily bring back the vividness of newness, the novelty of the first sensory
experience after repeated exposures.

LSD encapulates an enormous amount of experience into a relatively short period.
Insights that might normally take years to acquire can burst forth in an awesome flurry.

LSD might be the brain’s experience of itself when all the electrical circuits are turned on
at once.

LSD subjects frequently experience contact with water as being not only physically
cleansing but also emotionally and spiritually purifying.

LSD subjects frequently report that the flow of music helps them to let go of their
psychological defenses and surrender fully to the experience.

LSD subjects in this state experience powerful currents of energy streaming through their
bodies.

LSD subjects report experiences in which they identify with various animal ancestors in
the evolutionary pedigree.

LSD will change biochemical balances inside our nervous system and you can experience
directly some of the things which we externally view through the lens of the microscope.

Magnificent revelations, both spiritual and philosophical can occur marking the highest
union of experience and intellect.

Making full allowance for cultural variations, it appears that men’s experiences of “the
ultimate” are peculiarly alike. (Experiences of “the ultimate” are universal.)

Many individuals become intensely interested in nature and find a capacity for ecstatic
experiencing of natural beauty, frequently for the first time in their lives.

Many people discover a deep connection with an inner source, higher self, or God, and
they might experience the world as an expression of the Divine.

Many people have had the experience of a unifying vision in which the whole creation
seems to come together in unity.

Many people report visions of brilliant light with a supernatural quality radiating divine
intelligence or experience God as pure spiritual energy permeating all.

Many persons claim to experience a new sense of hope, rejuvenation, renaissance, or
rebirth.

Many persons have taken LSD and have experienced remarkable enhancement of their
sense of well-being.

Maslow suggested that such experiences might be supernormal, rather than subnormal or
abnormal and laid the foundation of a new psychology reflecting this fact.

Men have pursued, down the centuries, certain experiences that they considered valuable
above all others.

Metaphysical doctrines are propositions which cannot be operationally verified on the
level of ordinary experience.

metaphysical knowledge—It is impossible for one who experiences it to entertain the
slightest doubt of its truth.

Modern psychopharmacology is written and practiced by scientists who do not take drugs
and who therefore write textbooks about events they never experienced.

Most art springs from intense inner experiences. Passionate religious feelings, for
instance, has inspired artists to produce their most deeply felt and moving works.

Most people who experience these inner domains recognize them as part of the
boundless, expansive essence of each human being.

My attitude toward the experience of a future life has become much more richly
rewarding.

My most interesting intellectually stimulating experiences have been psychedelic
sessions. Psychedelics open wide the doors of learning.

My own belief is that these experiences really tell us something about the nature of the
universe, that they are valuable in themselves.

Mystical transcendence of time and space involves an experience described as eternity or
infinity.

Mysticism in the broadest sense is “the experience of communion with Ultimate Reality,”
a communion that has no limits.

Mystics emphasize the direct experience of cosmic consciousness that goes beyond the
scientific approach.

Mythology, the repository of a culture’s sacred history, reveals the relevance and
universal nature of the experience of death and rebirth.

No longer need man wonder with Job about God’s mysterious ways. LSD has the
answers and more. It is The Truth, The Experience, The Godhead.

No matter how much mental training and psychological exploration had been done,
further realms of experience could be revealed by the psychedelics.

Nonordinary reality can be experienced even though it cannot be understood
intellectually.

Not LSD, but mishandling of the session, is with few exceptions the key factor when a
normal subject experiences an LSD “psychosis”.

Now I know what Blake and St John of the Cross were talking about. This experience is
what I was seeking when I became a Catholic.

Old destructive patterns of behavior may suddenly be abandoned after an overpowering
emotional experience. The learning of new attitudes and techniques may become easier.

On occasion, LSD subjects have stated that they experienced themselves as neurons in
their own brains.

On the threshold of the most profound and ultimate depths, we are faced with the
revelation that our experience is contained within the depths of the Divine life itself.

Once you’ve seen it all, experienced the divine flame, how can you play out a role in the
silly TV drama of American society?

One can transcend the limits of the specifically human experience and tune into what
appears to be the consciousness of animals, plants or even inanimate objects.

One can undergo an experience of total annihilation, and emerge from this process
renewed and reborn. The learning here is profound.

One finds, again and again, in the reports written by subjects after the event, the
statement that “this is the most wonderful experience I have ever had”.

One is completely suspended and truly living in one’s experiences much more so than
ever before. (That’s with LSD.)

One of the top overriding values of these altered states is that they bestow direct
experience of phenomena usually apprehended only in abstraction.

Our conventional words and thoughts are reconstructions of experience in terms of
abstract signs.

Our Judeo-Christian heritage has denied the connection between sensuous life-affirming
wildness and the experience of the sacred.

Our neglect of these experiences of great value has rendered psychology stale and
savorless.

Our perceptions of visionary objects possesses all the freshness, all the naked intensity of
experience which have never been verbalized, never assimilated to lifeless abstractions.

Our subconscious memory registers, preserves and recalls every past impression and
experience.

Painful experiences can be as personally revealing and permanently beneficial as
experiences of great joy and beauty.

People may see lights or visions or they may hear different kinds of inner sounds. They
may experience inner fragrances or tastes.

Plunge into the whitewater of this new experience and reach the calm mystic pools
downstream.

Powerful experiential sequences of dying and being born can result in dramatic
alleviation of a variety of emotional problems.

Primitive and “modern” man alike experience the same thing once the barriers of
attachments and shams are stripped away. (The inner being of all people is universal.)

Psychedelic drugs allow us to study—directly, experientially, empirically—the problems
which have perplexed philosophers for millennia.

Psychedelic drugs have enabled them to attain significant experiences otherwise
unavailable to them.

Psychedelic drugs manifest universal native capacities of the mind and permanent
possibilities of human experience.

Psychedelic substances can induce without any specific programming, profound death-
rebirth experiences and facilitate spiritual opening.

Psychedelics bring normally unconscious, subliminal under-the-threshold experiences
into awareness.

Reading and preparing are useful, but no words can communicate experience. You are
going to be surprised, startled and delighted.

Religion has become to a large extent externalized and has lost connection with its
original experiential sources.

St. Augustine wrote volumes of treatises basic to Catholic theology, toward the end of his
life had the experience of Pure Light and never wrote a word again.

Seemingly bizarre and unexplained experiences sometimes have a dramatic impact on
certain clinical symptoms and problems.

Sexual energies will be unimaginably intensified and it will lead to a deeper experience
than ever thought possible.

Sexual intercourse on the session day can become the most powerful experience of this
sort in the subject’s life.

Significant aspects of mystical consciousness are felt by the experiencer to be true, in
spite of the fact that they violate the laws of Aristotelian logic.

Since it can be the most profound and moving experience of your life, no one should ever
enter it, in my opinion, without the most careful preparation.

Some female subjects have experienced the penetration by the sun as sexual, speaking of
the sun as a “cosmic lover” or using other words to that effect.

Some psychiatrists very early saw the remarkable potential of LSD for telescoping many
weary hours of psychotherapy into a brief, intense experience.

Some subjects have reported that as a result of such experiences, they have developed a
new understanding of some of their personal problems and conflicts.

Specialized training of the therapist, which includes first-hand experiences of psychedelic
states of consciousness, is an important element in LSD psychotherapy.

Stay calm, let the experience take you where it will, don’t hold on, let the stream carry
you along.

Subjects frequently talk about timelessness of the present moment and say that they are in
touch with infinity. They refer to this experience as ineffable.

Subjects often experience themselves as fetuses and can relive various aspects of their
biological birth with very specific and verifiable details.

Subjects underwent highly intense and unusual experiences which may change perception
of life experiences.

The ability to experience reality in unconventional ways may be an unrealized talent in
most of us and may explain the empirical correlation between psychosis and genius.

The Absolute or the Ultimate would be the experience of the Suchness of all the levels
and consciousness in its original condition.

The activated human brain experiences the world the way it’s described by the equations
of Einstein and quantum mechanics.

The actual experience of a hallucination adds dimensionality to one’s understanding of a
patient who is attempting to describe his.

The actual experience of gratitude has an uplifting and joyous quality which is beyond all
words.

The archetypal figures are endowed with great energy and numinous power. When we
encounter them, the experience is usually associated with strong emotion. (eyes closed)

The archetypal visions accompanying the experience of cosmic unity are of heavens,
celestial cities, paradisiacal gardens, and radiant divine beings. (eyes closed)

The atomic structure of matter is known intellectually but never experienced by the adult
except in states of altered consciousness.

The average person may pass through new dimensions of awareness and self-knowledge
to a “transporting experience.”

The basic structure of experience is given by our sense of space and passage of time.
Both are profoundly altered in psychedelic mystical states.

The Chinese have more than a hundred words expressing nuances of aesthetic experience
for which we have absolutely no equivalents.

The choice of music has a strong structuring influence on the experience, even if we try
to adjust the music to the nature of the experience.

The claim that drugs “expand consciousness” refers to changes in several dimensions of
experience.

The content and nature of the experiences are authentic expressions of the psyche,
revealing its functioning on levels ordinarily not available for observation and study.

The content of the experience is self-validating and known with absolute certainty to be
true.

The death-rebirth experience can seem to have transcended all boundaries and become a
drama involving all of mankind.

The degree to which he can allow himself to be carried unresistingly by the tidal waves of
visions seems to determine the richness of the experiences.

The development and expansion of a direct emotional experience of reality, unobstructed
by words and concepts would be of evolutionary significance.

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive
thought, but susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being.

The doctrine will be paralyzing so long as it is doctrine only; but when it is a matter of
personal experience, it becomes impulse and energy and inspiration.

The dramatic experience of new dimensions of reality can be meaningfully integrated
into the world view (a new, better and more meaningful and realistic view of the world).

The drug-induced experience has been regarded by primitives and even by the highly
civilized as intrinsically divine.

The effects of these drugs result in an intensity of personal experience and emotion more
meaningful than the term “hallucinogenic” implies.

The energy fields and the streaming of energy can be experienced in a tangible way and
can even be visually perceived with the eyes closed.

The existence of the immanent and transcendent divine is not a matter of unfounded
belief but a fact based on direct experience.

The expansion of the subjective time sense is another factor contributing to the intensity
of the experience.

The experience can open one’s eyes and make them blessed and transform one’s whole
life.

The experience has shaped, at a deep level, my responses to dramatic changes that have
taken place in my life.

The experience is capable of giving intense visions and intense new awareness and
conviction of awareness of one’s own place in the universe.

The experience is often so deeply revealing and moving that one hesitates to approach it
again until it has been thoroughly “digested” and this may be a matter of months.

The experience may be chaotic, beautiful, thrilling, incomprehensible, magical, ever-
changing.

The experience of beauty is pure, self-manifested and compounded equally of joy and
consciousness.

The experience of cosmic consciousness is boundless, unfathomable, and beyond
expression.

The experience of cosmic unity has an unusual therapeutic potential and can have lasting
beneficial consequences for the individual.

The experience of cosmic unity is characterized by transcendence of the usual subject-
object dichotomy.

The experience of dying occurs in the context of the death-rebirth experience and total
surrender to it is always followed by feelings of liberation.

The experience of ego-death in psychedelic sessions is the most powerful remedy against
suicidal tendencies.

The experience of liberation from the tyranny of the ego is an experience so
extraordinary, so unique that it is never forgotten.

The experience of paradise combines feelings of transcendental happiness and joy with
delight in exquisite natural beauty of an earthly quality.

The experience of peaking on LSD is above all of an open horizon, a field of presence in
the wildest sense.

The experience of psychological and spiritual rebirth is typically associated with a sense
of joy, compassion and reverence for life.

The experience of rebirth is typically associated with a sense of love, compassion and
reverence for life.

The experience of the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, transcends all categories and eludes
description.

The experience will teach you what you need to know in order to grow and mature,
which is to gradually dissolve your over-protective defense structures.

The experiences of universal symbols are followed or accompanied by an intuitive
understanding of various levels of their esoteric meaning.

The experiences they produce are of an infinite variety. They might be aesthetic,
psychological, philosophical insights or emotional releases.

The extraordinary part is that Aldous is experiencing that which he has known for a long
time.

The fact that the experience was induced by drugs has no bearing on its validity (as a
religious experience).

The feeling of being the ego is itself part of the stream of experience and does not stand
outside it in a controlling position.

The full splendor of sexual experience does not reveal itself without a new mode of
attention to the world in general.

The high value, the meaningfulness, and the intensity reported of such experiences
suggest that the perception has a different scope from that of normal consciousness.

The human unconscious is a repository for a wide variety of experiences that constitute
the basic elements of the spiritual journey.

The idea of something happening without a tangible precedent, sufficient cause, or
initiating impulse simply is not questioned on this level of experience.

The increased sensitivity and awareness enhances the pleasurable aspects of sexual
experiences.

The individual experiences a deep sense of emotional and spiritual liberation, redemption
and salvation.

The individual gains experiential access to the unitive states. This tends to change the
way of being in the world and the basic approach to life.

The individual is freed or forced to experience a great outpouring of feeling often far
beyond his conception of his own emotional capabilities.

The individual leaves one mode of being and moves into another and totally new
experiential condition.

The intense drug experience permits an impact on the subject not obtainable by any other
means.

The intensity of these experiences transcends anything usually considered to be the
experiential limit of the individual.

The intimate relationship between the experiences of the inorganic world and spiritual
states can convey an entirely new understanding of ancient teachings.

The keynote of the experience is the tremendous sense of an intense metaphysical
illumination.

The last thing an institution of education wants to allow you to do is to expand your
consciousness, to use the untapped potential in your head, to experience directly.

The longing of my soul to experience the Reality of Oneness with the Absolute was my
paramount hope and motivation in taking LSD—that some breakthrough might be given.

The mind must stop trying to act upon its stream of experiences, from the standpoint of
the idea of itself which we call the ego.

The mysterious uprising of love is the experience of complete relationship with another,
transforming our vision not only of the beloved but of the whole world.

The mystical consciousness is so much more deeply rooted than any other human
impulse and is characterized by an experience that goes beyond death.

The mystical view of consciousness is based on the experience of reality in non-ordinary
modes of awareness.

The natural universe has been considered apart from and even opposed to God because it
has not been experienced as one body.

The problem of evil has its solution in the eternity which men can experience but can
never describe.

The psychedelic spectrum covers the entire range of experiences that are humanly
possible.

The question is not one of understanding transcendence; it’s of transcending, it’s
experiencing transcendence.

The range of experiences which occurred in daily living represented only a small slice of
a vast, unlimited spectrum.

The realization of the Supreme Identity, of the truth that the Self is the infinite and not the
ego, does not involve the obliteration of the ego or of finite experience.

The rediscovery of these experiences and the recognition of their heuristic relevance has
been one of the major incentives for the development of a new movement in psychology.

The rift between God and nature would vanish if we knew how to experience nature,
because what keeps them apart is not a difference of substance but a split in the mind.

The subject experiences in this state powerful currents of energy streaming through his or
her entire body.

The sage judges by the concrete content of the experience and not by its conformity with
purely theoretical standards.

The soul emerges into the radiance of the Divine Light and experiences spiritual rebirth,
salvation, redemption, resurrection, reunion.

The subject comes to experience himself in a totally new way and finds that the age-old
question “Who am I?” does have a significant answer.

The subject experiences a sequence set in another country and/or a different historical
period, usually with deep emotional involvement and dramatic abreaction. (eyes closed)

The subject may experience a profound and rewarding sense of continuity with
evolutionary and historic process.

The terms in which a man interprets this experience are naturally drawn from the
religious and philosophical ideas of his culture.

The therapeutic effects associated with the experience of death and rebirth are so
important.

The traditional scientific response to inner experiences is to declare them illegitimate
data.

The transformative power of such experiences has been appreciated throughout history in
the legacies of the ancient mysteries.

The true and deepest value of the experience is that it offers a “tangible vision” of a better
state. (It’s the highest or best state of being.)

The true essence of the experience can never be communicated. (That means with words.
People must experience it for themselves.)

The ultimate challenge to Newtonian science has been the discovery that clinically blind
people experiencing out of body experiences describe scenes that are visually accurate.

The ultimate measure of the standard of living is the quality of the experience and not the
quantity of material achievements.

The ultimate “proof” will have to be personal experience. Without it, much of what is
described will probably remain unconvincing.

The ultimate reconciliation with the universe comes from the insight that the totality of
existence forms a unified field or network which is experientially available to each of us.

The user observes what he is experiencing in the situation and realizes it is not how he
usually experiences the stimuli.

The user of LSD and marijuana is not running away from life, but looks for a fuller
experience.

The value of his experience will depend in large measure on his willingness to suspend or
abandon his ordinary everyday way of looking at things.

The vivid experiences of the mystics may be our only means of testing the truth of
religious and metaphysical hypotheses.

The wind is experienced as a tangible manifestation of the awesome power of the
universe, as “God’s breath” or nature’s exhalations.

There are billions of cellular processes in your body, each with its universe of experience,
an endless variety of ecstasies.

There are experiential-spiritual as well as secular-behavioral potentialities of the nervous
system.

There are realms of experience, modes of self, and states of consciousness far beyond
our day-to-day experience or our traditional cultural and psychological models.

There can be experiences of merging with another person in a state of dual unity, without
losing sense of identity.

There is no doubt that psychedelic drugs produce experiences regarded by those who
undergo them as religious in the fullest sense.

There is so much mystery in a psychedelic day, so much happens in the person who is
having the experience that he cannot express.

There’s a real difference in the way you look at the world if you’ve had the experience of
tripping.

There’s only personal experience, firsthand experience which counts. I always tell people
to disbelieve any hearsay.

These drugs intensify experience, transfiguring the way we normally regard objective
reality.

These experiences are often accompanied by intense sensations of a potent spiritual force
that floods the body.

These experiences changed my assumptions about how and why we become who we are,
and why we behave the way we do.

These experiences occur in a complex psychological, philosophical, mythological and
spiritual context.

These perceptions are permanent—any deep aesthetic experience leaves a trace, and an
idea of what to look for that can be checked back later.

They may experience eternity and infinity within a period lasting seconds or minutes of
actual clocktime.

This experience has considerably changed my view of reality. These are new experiences
of the world I want to explore.

This experience of death-rebirth is usually so realistic that it is perceived as experientially
identical with actual biological demise.

This experience was overt and conscious to people in the ancient cultures of 5000 years
ago, but today it is deeply unconscious and misunderstood.

This is a matter of immediate experience, a psychological fact which has been recorded
in folklore and the religious literature of every age and country.

This is the central experience Jesus sought for all people. This is the heart of Jesus’ life
and teaching, although it is now largely absent from the institutional Christian churches.

This is what Jesus taught and demonstrated—cosmic consciousness, the direct experience
of divinity dwelling in us and all things.

This other dimension of experience is understood to be of a higher order of reality than
the dualistic dimension.

This Other World could be experienced as the moment when one emerges from the
prison of “limited mind” and becomes identified with the “limitless mind”.

This profound experience may constitute a new and powerful means for eliciting
profound therapeutic changes and for facilitating reconstructuring of the personality.

Those “mythicizing” the wind experience feel “cleansed” and “inwardly purified” by the
wind’s “clean sweeps” through them.

Those who have approached the experience with a receptive mind have often found
meaning and liberation.

Those who have experienced most keenly their union with God are intensely real and
unique personalities.

Through the psychedelics, it is possible to experience the world as many of our great
writers have experienced it.

Throw off the grip of your learned mind, your conditioning and experience the message
contained in the computer you carry behind your forehead.

To adapt to the irrationalities of society requires a massive devastation of experience,
entailing constriction, repression, etc.

To be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be
incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full.

To experience directly, we must transcend the verbal-symbol imprint, experience energy-
flow directly, receive energy messages directly.

To label the experience as a symptom of illness is not accurate or helpful. (It is off the
wall to do that. Anyone using that label is revealing their ignorance.)

To reach a translogical form of knowledge or realm of wisdom, celestial beauty, and
spiritual essence is one of the most ancient experiential goals of mankind.

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.

To seek to condense any of my experiences into words is to distort them, rendering them
finite and impure.

To use music as a catalyst for deep self-exploration and experiential work, it is necessary
to learn a new way of listening to music and relating to it that is alien to our culture.

Traditional psychiatry has never adequately explained these forms of experience, their
universality, and their cultural as well as psychological importance.

True spirituality is based on personal experience and is an extremely important and vital
dimension of life.

Turn your attention to actual first-hand concrete experience and do not be misled by ideas
and conceptions about it.

Until recently, it was rarely seriously considered that the descriptions of the adventures of
the soul after death could reflect experiential reality.

Until you have experienced the effects of the drug, you cannot know how narrow your
previous ideas about the world were.

Various archetypal images of deities can accompany the birth experience, as individual
visions or in the context of entire mythological sequences. (eyes closed)

Visionaries insist on the impossibility of recalling in anything even faintly resembling its
original form and intensity, their transfiguring experiences.

We all need to find the source of wisdom in our own inner experience and then join
together to share it with each other.

We are exploring a mode of experience which does not recognize the distinctions of
analogic thought.

We are speaking about the very experience that shows us what is true, the experience
from which we take the standard for what we mean by “real.”

We each hold the potential for having direct and immediate experiential access to
virtually every aspect of the universe.

We believe the experience to be of enormous potential value, both to the subject and
researcher.

We do not need a new religion or a new Bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling
of what it is to be “I”.

We learn as children to see the function of objects, rather than experience them in all
possible ways.

We must learn how to be mentally silent, must cultivate the art of pure receptivity,
wordless experiencing.

We should not treat an experience as meaningless or just because our present explanatory
powers are inadequate to it.

Westerners see the ego-loss experience confused with schizophrenia because they can’t
label it and therefore it can’t be investigated.

What education does is put a series of filters over your awareness and you experience less
and less.

What guarantee is there that the five senses, taken together, do cover the whole of
possible experience?

When experiences are associated with a sense of personal memory from one’s spiritual
past rather than biological history, we can refer to them as past incarnation experiences.

When subjects share ego-shattering experiences together, they develop strong, positive,
emotional bonds.

When such experiences are taken seriously, prophets rise up, religious beliefs are
formulated, and religious institutions are founded.

When there is understanding, there is an experienced fusion of the Wisdom which is the
timeless realization of Suchness with the Compassion which is Wisdom in action.

When we have experiences of this kind, we feel that we have encountered dimensions of
reality that belong to a superior order.

When we step into nonordinary reality even for a moment, we experience things directly,
see inner contents rather than external forms.

Whereas the scientific comprehension of the relative universe is as yet largely theoretical,
these Eastern disciplines have made it a direct experience.

While it can give an ecstatic experience, at the same time, it lends an extraordinary
intensity of attention.

Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which symbols refer
belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

You become aware deep within you of ultimate communion, experiential awareness of
communion.

You may feel awed, filled with wonder by the scope, immensity and quality of your
experiences.

You must go out of your mind to reach that creative quietude which is open to enriched
experience.

A conception of the ultimate unity in being and consciousness of man and the universe is
common to all the main religious traditions and is based on the experience of the mystics
in each tradition.

A good experience with the drugs heightens and intensifies all experience and just as one
can enjoy music and art during the experience with a new and deeper appreciation, so one
can do the same with sex—it can be a beautiful experience under the drug.

A sacrament is something that engenders in those who use it certain spiritual resonances
which defy exact analysis and can’t be accurately described to one who does not
experience authenticity in himself.

A strange, qualitative leap seems to occur in which deep exploration of the individual
unconscious turns into a process of experiential adventures in the universe-at-large,
involving what can be best described as the superconscious mind.

According to Carl Jung, the main function of formalized religion is to protect people
against the direct experience of God. (That’s why formalized religion is a farce and a
fraud.)

After one sits gazing at a candle and feels that the flame and the hand and the music and
water running in the bathroom are the same “stuff” and after one experiences oneness
with all men, then one begins to understand the word “ineffable.”

After such experiences, contemplation may take on new meaning for the Western man
who finds little time to ponder the meaning of his own existence and the philosophical
presuppositions upon which his religious, political, scientific, and ethical convictions rest.

After the experience of ego death, abuse of alcohol or narcotics, as well as suicidal
tendencies, are seen as tragic mistakes due to an unrecognized and misunderstood
spiritual craving for transcendence.

Alcohol is a “down” experience. It narrows consciousness and makes you a rather sloppy,
a rather messy person in thought and action. The psychedelic drugs take you in the
opposite direction.

All questions about the mysteries of life seem to be answered and there is no need to go
any further. Communicating this to those who have not has this experience is neither
possible nor necessary. It becomes self-validating and deeply personal experience.

Almost all mystics and visionaries have experienced reality in terms of light—either of
light in its naked purity or of light infusing and radiating out of things and persons, seen
with the inner eye or in the external world.

An individual having a peak experience feels a sense of overcoming the usual divisions
and fragmentations of the body and mind and reaching a state of complete inner unity and
wholeness; this usually feels very healing and beneficial.

Ancestral experiences are multiform and complex. Sometimes, they involve actual
reliving of short episodes from the life of one’s ancestors or whole sequences that are
specific and rich in concrete detail. (eyes closed)

Any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and
should not be confused with the world itself. The map is not the territory. The menu is
not the meal.

Archetypal images and entire scenes from the mythology of various cultures often occur
in the experiences of individuals who have no intellectual knowledge of the mythic
figures and themes they are encountering. (eyes closed)

Aristotle is the author of the first explicit statement that full experience and release of
repressed emotions are an effective treatment of mental illness. (Full experience means
FULL experience, psychedelic experience, FULL psychedelic experience.)

Art and religion, philosophy and science, morals and politics—these are the instruments
by means of which men have tried to discover a coherence in the flux of events, to
impose an order on the chaos of experience.

Artistic and literary folks respond ecstatically and wisely to drug experience. They tell us
this is what they have been looking for: new, intense, direct confrontation with the world
about them.

At times, a subject may feel like laughing or crying without being able to explain why his
is experiencing these feelings. (There is no need to explain and the person is way beyond
explaining in words anyway.)

Awareness of all normal sense impressions and the empirical ego seems to die or fade
away while pure consciousness of what is being experienced paradoxically remains and
seems to expand as a vast inner world is encountered.

Before taking LSD, I never stayed in a state of sexual ecstasy for hours on end, but I have
done this under LSD. It heightens all of your senses and it means that you’re living the
sexual experience totally. Each caress or kiss is timeless.

Certain drugs can produce in otherwise normal individuals deep mystical and religious
states. Matrices for such experiences exist in the unconscious as a normal constituent of
the human personality.

clear consciousness, seeing the world just as it is—Such awareness is a lively attention to
one’s direct experience, to the world as immediately sensed, so as not to be misled by
names and labels.

Clients who experience psychological death-rebirth and/or feelings of cosmic unity tend
to develop a negative attitude toward the states of mind induced by alcohol and narcotics.
This has proved extremely useful in the treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction.

Common sense is not based on total awareness; it is a product of convention, or
organized memories of other people’s words, of personal experiences limited by passion
and value judgments, of hallowed notions and naked self-interest.

cosmological mysticism—It’s an ecstatic experience of Nature and Process which leaves
the subject with a sense of having acquired important insight into, as well as identity
with, the fundamental nature and structure of the universe.

Creative or revelatory experiences involve a temporary and voluntary breaking up of
perceptual constancies, permitting one “to shake free from dead literalism, to re-combine
the old familiar elements into, new, imaginative, amusing, or beautiful patterns.”

Each human being contains the information about the entire universe or all of existence,
has potential experiential access to all its parts, and in a sense is the whole cosmic
network.

Even the uneducated layman can experience directly what is slowly deduced by
scientists. (Actually, the scientists are poking at straws. They have to take the LSD
themselves to understand what they’re working on or studying.)

Experiences of this kind suggest that there is a constant interplay between the inanimate
objects we generally associate with the material world, the world of consciousness, and
creative intelligence.

Experiencing the profound psychological changes induced by LSD is a unique and
valuable learning experience for all clinicians and theoreticians studying abnormal mental
states.

Hallucinogenic drugs give people who lack the gift of spontaneous perception the
potential to experience this extraordinary state of consciousness and thereby to attain
insight into the spiritual world.

Hallucinogens could lead to deepened understanding of religious and mystical content
and to a new and fresh experience of the great works of art. (Actually, with LSD,
whatever you look at becomes a great work of art, even if it’s dust or garbage.)

High dosages and internalization of the process lead to greater depth, intensity and
spontaneous flow of the experience; this results in a better chance for a positive
breakthrough.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted
musical instruments as the ears and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can
experience itself as anything less than a God?

I, as an experienced student of the psychology of religion, can no longer pursue research
in the field. This is a barbarous restriction of spiritual and intellectual freedom. (That was
Alan Watts.)

I can gain insight into the nature of consciousness or experience, the meaning and
essence of being and the experience of harmony, the mystery of life, communion and
sharing, the delight of ecstasy. (Anyone can gain that insight. LSD is the best way.)

I have used the symbolic expression “awakening” because it clearly suggests the
becoming aware of a new area of experience, the opening of hitherto closed eyes to an
inner reality previously unknown.

I think that religion will neglect the consequences of this powerful instrument and its
implications at its own peril. The experience recalls Otto’s mysterium tremendum. It was
awesome.

I unlock the secret not by hypothesis, not by processes of reasoning, but by journeying
through self-same fields of weird experience which are dinted by the sandals of the
glorious old dreamers of the East.

I’m eternally grateful for this experience. LSD changed my life. I’ve lived more, felt
more, enjoyed life more in the last few years than I had dreamed possible. LSD gave me
that treasure. (That was actor Cary Grant.)

If the therapist views the experience as a psychosis, he unwittingly helps the patient
develop a psychosis, not through suggestion alone, but also because he cannot offer the
patient a framework to handle the new experience.

If we can even start to move in the direction of relying on intuition and experience to
discover the positive potential of drugs, the drug problem will automatically begin to
recede. (The fight against drugs is what creates, causes or is the “drug problem”.)

If you can throw off the grip of your learned mind and experience the message contained
in the computer which you carry behind your forehead, you would know the awe-ful
truth.

Immediate experience of reality unites men. Conceptualized beliefs, including even the
belief in a God of love and righteousness, divide them and as the dismal record of
religious history bears witness, set them for centuries on end at each other’s throats.

Important emotional experiences from the past are relived with all the physiological,
sensory, emotional and ideational characteristics of the original reaction and frequently
with a detailed, realistic representation of the setting. (eyes closed)

Important emotional, psychosomatic or interpersonal difficulties that have plagued the
client for many years and have resisted conventional therapeutic approaches can
sometimes disappear after a full experience of a transpersonal nature.

In advanced industrial societies, “paranormal” states of consciousness are readily
disparaged as “abnormal” or pathological, indicative of a deeply ingrained prejudice
against certain varieties of experience.

In deep experiential psychotherapy, biographical material is not remembered or
reconstructed; it can actually be fully relived. This involves not only emotions, but also
physical sensations, visual perceptions, as well as vivid data from all the other senses.

In developing systems of communicating experience, how can we transmit energy
patterns to “turn on” the receiver—i.e., directly stimulate the nervous system, bypassing
the receiver’s symbol system?

In experiences that have transpersonal dimensions, the individual has the sense of having
transcended his or her own identity and ego boundaries as they are defined in the
ordinary state of consciousness.

In Jung’s model, many experiences that do not make sense as derivatives of biological
events, such as visions of deities, can be seen as the emergence of contents from the
collective unconscious. (eyes closed)

In many places of the world and in different historical periods, mythological figures and
stories became the central focus of sacred mysteries in which neophytes experienced
ritual death and rebirth.

In order to become directly acquainted with God, rather than merely to know about God,
one must go beyond symbols and concepts, which are obstacles to the immediate
experience of the divine.

In the past, experiences of this kind were considered valuable and those who had them
were looked up to. That’s one reason why there were more visionaries in earlier
centuries.

In this state of mind, it becomes clear that the ultimate measure of one’s living standard is
the quality of one’s life experience and not the quantity of achievements or material
possessions.

In this strange experience, one has the sense that there is this fundamental sanity in spite
of the preposterous nonsense. (The “nonsense” is the nonsense of the world or society as
it is, not as it could or should be.)

In this type of experience, the subject has the feeling of encountering the Creator of the
universe or even of full identification with him. This can be accompanied by
extraordinary insights into the process of creation.

Individuals can feel that prior to the experience they had never really seen colors, smelled
the variety of fragrances and odors, tasted the infinite nuances of food, or experienced the
sensual potential of their bodies.

Individuals experience a new sense of empathy and warmth toward other people and
perceive the world as a fascinating and basically friendly place. Everything in the
universe appears perfect, exactly as it should be.

Individuals who transcend the boundaries of ordinary reality and embark on the spiritual
journey, typically experience a dramatic change in their concepts of the dimensions of
existence.

Instead of straining toward a future which one hopes to be different, the mind opens and
admits a whole experience in which and by which the problem of what is the “good” of
life is answered.

Institutional Christianity has hardly contemplated the possibility that the whole point of
the Gospel is that everyone may experience union with God in the same way and to the
same degree as Jesus himself.

It doesn’t concern me that young people are taking time out from the educational and
occupational assembly lines to experiment with consciousness, to dabble with new forms
of experience and artistic expression. (That was Timothy Leary.)

It is a very misleading confusion of words with reality to assume that what cannot be
thought cannot be experienced or to put it the other way around, whatever can be
experienced can be expressed in thought.

It is important to prepare the client for the fact that the dimensions of the experience will
probably be beyond anything that he or she has ever faced before or could even imagine
in the usual state of consciousness.

It may be that the fear of dying is in part a projected memory of birth and that what Freud
called the death instinct is also related to a desire to return to the womb. If the birth agony
is experienced as a death agony, this life is in a sense already life after death.

It opens access to most extraordinary realms of experience, offers remarkable
philosophical and spiritual revelations and mediates fascinating insights into the cosmic
processes by which reality itself is created.

It seems that everyone who experientially reaches these levels develop convincing
insights into the total relevance of the spiritual dimension to the universal scheme of
things.

Jung observed that there are certain primordial patterns of experience in the collective
unconscious which he termed the archetype. Archetypes are the templates from which the
individual variations of experience are drawn.

Language must never be taken seriously when it is used as being in any way the
equivalent of unmediated experience or as being a source of true knowledge about the
nature of things.

Leary felt that LSD’s significance lay beyond all social analysis and all psychological
categories and since the drug experience was completely unique, a new model was
needed, a new structure.

Long “forgotten” memories may become accessible and meaningful, with the subject
“going back in time” to very vividly experience the emotional as well as the other
contents of important forgotten or repressed events.

LSD patients who had experienced profound feelings of cosmic unity frequently
developed a negative attitude toward the states of mind produced by intoxication with
alcohol and narcotics.

Mathematicians and physicists reported remarkable experiential insights into various
problems related to astronomy and astrophysics that can be expressed in mathematical
equations, but cannot be fully intuited in the ordinary state of consciousness.

Memory never captures the essence, the present intensity, the concrete reality of an
experience. (That’s wrong. Alan Watts wrote that before he knew better, before he had
ever taken LSD.)

Most people, it seems, who relax and “let go” have the universal experience of
discovering a single Reality, a oneness with all things, an identity with God, with the
Supreme Being, with the Higher Self, or whatever you wish to call it.

Most people who experience these inner domains recognize them as part of the
boundless, expansive essence of each human being, which is usually obscured by the
problems and concerns of daily life.

My experiences with these substances have been the most strange, most awesome and
among the most beautiful things in a varied and fortunate life. (I’m surprised he indicates
that he has experienced beauty of this magnitude before trying psychedelics.)

Observations from LSD research clearly indicate that in various states of mind, the bliss
of paradise, and ecstatic raptures of salvation can be experienced with a degree of
vividness and a sense of reality that surpass our everyday perceptions.

Observations indicating an urgent need to transcend the limitations of mechanistic
science come not only from modern consciousness research and new experiential
techniques of psychotherapy, but also from quantum-relativistic physics.

Occasionally, the subjects can lose awareness of the actual physical setting altogether and
their consciousness moves into experiential realms and subjective realities that appear to
be entirely independent of the material world.

One of the most important changes most people experience through non-ordinary states
of consciousness involves a new appreciation for the role of spirituality in the universal
scheme of things.

One transcends the dichotomy set up in one’s mind between “inner” and “outer” worlds
of experience and sees reality only from the standpoint of the mystical vision and many
experience life beyond all dualities.

One transcends the ordinary distinctions between subject and object and experiences a
state of ecstatic union with humanity, nature, the cosmos and God. This is associated with
strong feelings of joy, bliss, serenity, and peace.

Our models of “reality” are very small and tidy, the universe of experience is huge and
untidy, and no model can ever include all the huge untidiness perceived by uncensored
consciousness.

Our society and our intellectuals and our scientists externalize the psychology of
behaviorism. Neurology today is poking at the brains of other people. You have to
experience what you are symbolizing.

Past-incarnation experiences consist of fragments of scenes, individual events or entire,
rather clear and logical sequences occurring at another place and time in history. (eyes
closed)

People who have had such experiences usually agree that deep within each of us lie
goodness unimagined, wisdom, music, talents of every variety, joy, peace, humility, love
and spirituality, to mention only a few.

Perennial philosophy offers a rich spectrum of spiritual techniques through which it is
possible to recognize and experience one’s own divinity and achieve liberation from
suffering.

Perhaps they reveal the “normal” state. To many people, the states of awareness that are
experienced are not “abnormal,” but rather, familiar territory that had been lost in some
primal amnesia. These states are the human heritage.

Phenomena perceivable directly by our senses appear on the same experiential continuum
with those that ordinarily require such complicated technology as microscopes and
telescopes to be accessible to human senses.

Psychiatrists should listen to what their patients say about drug experiences; patients
often know more about the workings of the unconscious mind from direct experience
than doctors do from their intellects.

Realization of the fundamental identity of the individual consciousness with the creative
principle of the universe is one of the most profound experiences a human being can
have.

Realms that are ordinarily inaccessible to the unaided human senses, such as physical and
biological microworld and astrophysical objects and processes, become available for
direct experience.

Researchers who have seriously studied and/or experienced these fascinating phenomena
realize that the attempts of traditional psychiatry to dismiss them as irrelevant products of
imagination in the brain are superficial and inadequate.

Since experiences with psychoactive plants have traditionally been described in mystical
or mythical language, Leary may have been the first person to recognize and identify
them as evolutionary visions or genetic memories.

Shop-worn theological and devotional cliches are not only not the same as experience of
life in its immanent and transcendent fullness; they are actually obstacles in the way of
such experience.

Since LSD is a non-specific amplifier of mental processes, the LSD phenomena cover an
extremely broad range, extending potentially to all aspects of human experience and
behavior.

Since psychedelic drugs expose us to different levels of perception and experience, use of
them is ultimately a philosophic enterprise, compelling us to confront the nature of
reality.

Some of their disturbed subjects handled the experience well; some of those with the
best-put-together structure had trouble. (Maybe LSD should determine who really is
disturbed and who’s best-put-together.)

Some of these persons report that the death-rebirth process seems to have removed a
subtle film from their senses which previously prevented them from experiencing reality
fully.

Sometimes the general character of the room, specific pieces of furniture and trivial
objects or certain aspects of the view from the window can function as powerful selective
triggers of experiences.

Studies have indicated that when the experience is interpreted transcendentally or
religiously, chances are improved for the rehabilitation of hopeless alcoholics and
hardened criminals.

Suddenly, the familiar view of our surroundings is transformed in a strange, delightful
way: it appears to us in a new light, takes on a special meaning. Such an experience can
be as light and fleeting as a breath of air, or it can imprint itself deeply upon our minds.

Take LSD in a nuthouse and you’ll get a nuthouse experience. These poor patients are
usually not even told what drugs they’re given; they’re not prepared. I consider this
psychological rape. (That was Timothy Leary.)

That Plato had some kind of profound ecstatic experience is indicated by the famous
Parable of the Cave, found in the Seventh Book of the Republic. Ingesters of LSD have
had no trouble in recognizing and understanding the metaphysical dimensions.

That transpersonal experiences can mediate access to accurate information about various
aspects of the universe previously unknown to the subject requires in itself a fundamental
revision of our concepts about the nature of reality.

The argument that the person who has taken the psychedelic drugs thereby disqualifies
himself as a person able to objectively view and evaluate the experience, must strike most
seasoned researchers as simply ludicrous.

The brain replaced the genitals as the forbidden organ that must not be touched or turned
on by the owner. The only way in which consciousness-change experiences could be
discussed was in terms of philosophic-religious.

The challenge of the complete human life will be for each person to recapitulate and
experientially explore every aspect and vicissitude of this ancient and majestic
wilderness.

The content of LSD visions could be influenced by thoughts and feelings immediately
preceding the experience. (Where your head is at, coming into the experience, is a key
factor.)

The detailed complexity of the genetic code and the astonishing design of intracellular
communication should caution us against labeling experiences outside of our current
tribal cliches as “psychotic” or abnormal.

The difficulty of making equations and comparisons between Eastern and Western ideas
is that the two worlds do not start with the same assumptions and premises. They do not
have the same basic categorizations of experience.

The empathy with nature seems to be especially abetted by the warming rays of the sun,
the playing of the breezes over the subject’s body, his contact with the earth below him
and various other types of tactile experiencing of the environment.

The enlightened person is, so to speak, after the rise of language; he lives in language and
then goes beyond it. But what sort of world is there before language is introduced? What
sort of world is the world of non-verbalized experience?

The entirety of one’s personal history from pre-birth to the present moment can be
brought into the conscious mind and fully re-experienced. (This is also true for the
entirety of all of history and existence.)

The experience of confronting the various areas in one’s own unconscious is absolutely
necessary for developing the ability to assist other people with competence and
equanimity in their process of self-exploration.

The experience of fundamental oneness with the rest of creation increases the tolerance
and patience toward others, lowers the level of aggression, and improves the capacity for
synergy and cooperation.

The experience of the phenomenal world and what we call usual states of consciousness
appear to be only very limited idiosyncratic and partial aspects of the over-all
consciousness of the Universal Mind.

The experience quite regularly has a definite spiritual and mystical emphasis and this
typically takes the form of enchantment with the mysteries of nature and the creative
forces of the Universe.

The experiencer and the experience become a single, ever-changing, self-forming
process, complete and fulfilled at every moment of its unfolding and of infinite
complexity and subtlety.

The experiencer, when he opens his eyes, sees the outer world transfigured, sees it as
glowing with an intensity of light and significance and life, which is something he simply
does not see at all in his ordinary state.

The experiences have been described as waking dreams. But to me, the visions are far
more colored and vivid than any dream can possibly be. With LSD, you see with striking
and unforgettable clarity.

The experiences of the collective and racial unconscious frequently mediate a great
amount of accurate information that far transcends the educational background and
training of the individual involved.

The experiential insights from unusual states of consciousness suggest the existence of
intangible and unfathomable creative intelligence aware of itself that permeates all realms
of reality.

The “experts” are forbidden to do research in this area, while those who have done
research are criminals and hence, regarded as untrustworthy, yet they must know things
that the experts do not, since they have had the experience.

The fact that we could not explain part of our human experience in the existing paradigm
seemed to indicate that the paradigm needed re-examination rather than to justify
dismissal of the evidence.

The guide should have considerable experience in psychedelic sessions. To administer
psychedelics without personal experience is unethical and dangerous. (That was Timothy
Leary.)

The highest point of the experience is a moment of transcendence in which the user
passes out of the everyday world into a paradisiacal egoless state in which he believes he
has attained some ultimate revelation about the nature of mind and the universe.

The impression is that external time must have slowed down, while the internal
experience continues at the same rate. There is not the impression of speed or rapidity,
but that the time available to the user is magnified.

The individual can be flooded with feelings of love and mystical connection to other
people, nature, the entire cosmos and God. Experiences of this kind are extremely
healing.

The linearity of temporal experiences is transcended in unusual states of consciousness.
Scenes from different historical contexts can occur simultaneously and appear to be
meaningfully connected by their experiential characteristics. (eyes closed)

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the source of all true
art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger is as good as dead. (That was
Albert Einstein. That’s right, Albert Einstein.)

The mystic’s subjective experience of his identity with “the All” is the scientist’s
objective description of ecological relationship, of the organism/environment as a unified
field.

The nature of the experience and of the process seemed to be incompatible with the
Freudian technique and required a more human approach, genuine support and personal
involvement.

The participation of archetypal elements in the death-rebirth process reflects the fact that
deep experiential confrontation with the phenomena of death and birth typically results in
a spiritual and mystical opening and mediates access to the transpersonal realm.

The possibility of transcending the limitations of matter, time, space and linear causality
is experienced so many times and in so many different ways that it has to be integrated
into a new world-view.

The psychedelic mystical experience can lead to a profound sense of inspiration,
reverential awe and humility, perhaps correlated with the feeling that the experience is
essentially a gift from a transcendent source.

The purpose of the whole experience is for the person to learn to experience himself and
the things around him with fulfillment and joy. Having a good time and experiencing
beauty is therapeutic.

The religion of direct experience of the divine has been regarded as the privilege of a
very few people. I personally don’t think this is necessarily true at all. I think that
practically everyone is capable of this immediate experience.

The sensations fill the person’s attention, which is passive but absorbed in what is
occurring, which is usually experienced as intense and immediate. Pure awareness is
experiencing without associations to what is there.

The sense of the vast gulf between the ego and the world disappears and one’s subjective,
inner life seems no longer to be separate from everything else, from one’s total
experience of the stream of nature.

The spiritual leadership of a stable and unified society must have access to metaphysical
knowledge, i.e., to an effective realization and immediate experience of the ultimate
reality.

The spirituality revealed in the process of focused self-exploration sees God as the Divine
Within. Here the individual uses various techniques that mediate direct experiential
access to transpersonal realities and discovers his or her own divinity.

The subject is made to understand that the value of his experience will depend, in large
measure, on his willingness to suspend or abandon his ordinary, everyday ways of
thinking and “looking at things.”

The variability of response to the drugs is enormous, largely because what is most
important for a particular person to learn at a particular time will vary tremendously and
thus the experience will differ accordingly.

The veil which made you see duality drops away and you experience the world as a
blissful sport of God’s energy. You see the universe as supremely blissful light,
undifferentiated from yourself and you remain unshakable in this awareness.

The wonder of LSD is that it can bring within the capabilities of ordinary people the
experience of universal love and the reality of our divine nature which was once possible
only to the mystics.

Theologians and intellectuals often deprecate “experience” in favor of fact and concept.
(What they don’t understand is that fact and concept mean nothing without experience or
experience of what the facts and concepts are about.)

There are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The
experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and
distance in space—it’s the first fundamental religious experience.

There is a need for dedicated scientists willing to take the calculated risk of ingesting the
psychedelics themselves, for the sake of the understanding that such an experience will
give them.

There is a state of consciousness in which the erotic no longer has to be sought or
pursued because it is always present in its totality. In this state all relationship and all
experience is erotic.

There is no doubt that a genuine comprehension of religion, mysticism, shamanism, rites
of passage or mythology is impossible without intimate knowledge of the death
experience and the death-rebirth process.

There is often an experience of passing through a purifying fire; its flames destroy
whatever is corrupt in the individual, preparing him or her for the experience of spiritual
rebirth.

There is probably not one major rock group that has not been influenced, directly or
indirectly, by LSD and paid homage to the ecstatic experience in one or more of their
songs. (That was written in 1968.)

These are unusual manifestations of human mental function, ordinarily inaccessible. The
ability to produce them chemically clarifies similar obscure and puzzling experiences
found in religious, historical and mystical literature.

They induce “levels of consciousness which are vast extensions and enlargements of
normal experience” and thus “open to conscious awareness a wider, clearer, more
complete view of the world.”

This euphoric feeling includes elements of profound peace and steadfastness, surging like
a spring from a depth of my being which has rarely, if ever, been tapped prior to the drug
experience.

Time and space cease to be limits. One can experience various historically and
geographically remote events as vividly as if they were happening here and now. (eyes
closed)

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours
the outer and inner world as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally, by Mind
at Large— this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.

To cure the junkie and the alcoholic, you must admit that he is a deeply spiritual person
and accept the cosmic validity of his search to transcend the game and you help him see
that the way is through psychedelic rather than anesthetic experience.

Traditional medicine denies that the child has the capacity to record the experiences of
birth in its memory. (Do they also deny that an infant has the capacity to circulate its
blood or digest its food?)

Transformative experiences associated with positive emotions such as feelings of oneness
with humanity and nature, states of cosmic unity, encounters with blissful deities, and
union with God, have a special role in the healing and transformative process.

Unlike the verbal approaches, deep experiential therapy has the potential to take the client
in a very short time to the original traumatic situations and thus to the roots of the
problem. (“Deep experiential therapy” means LSD therapy.)

Various aspects of the universe from which we would expect to be separated by an
impenetrable spacial barrier can suddenly become easily experientially available and in a
sense appear to be parts or extensions of ourselves.

Vivid experiential encounters with elements of the deep unconscious made it possible to
relate to spiritual and psychic dimensions that were beyond their previous conceptual
frameworks.

We are liberated and enlightened by perceiving the hitherto unexperienced good that is
already within us, by returning to our eternal Ground and remaining where, without
knowing it, we have always been.

We came to believe, as a result of our own experiences and those reported to us by others
using psychedelics, that they had the potential to facilitate for the individual the
experience of major insights and problem solutions of an intellectual-emotional nature.

We can experience ourselves as a play of energy or a field of consciousness that is not
confined to a physical container. (In other words, we are far more than an ego enclosed
by the skin.)

We can literally relive early events from our lives. We can be two months old or even
younger, once again experiencing all the sensory, emotional and physical qualities as we
first knew them.

We can perhaps see the whole course of a psychedelic experience as an effort of
consciousness to rid itself of false identifications and experience its own everchanging
identity.

We can see rites of passage as structured events in which individuals can confront,
experience and express powerful energies associated with matrices deep in the
unconscious. (eyes closed)

We cannot just talk about spirituality; it needs to be an experiential realization.
Enlightenment does not come simply from following the wisdom teachings. It comes
through direct experience.

We do not know what we want because we are only dimly aware of anything wantable.
We have taught ourselves to pursue goals but we have more words than experience for
what we mean.

We must come to understand the value of nonordinary experience—to feel grateful for it
rather than guilty about it—so that we can encourage our children to express it rather than
hide it.

We were getting turned on in so many ways, lit up to new experiences, discoveries,
adventures, music, all of which had something very tangibly related to the drugs
available.

What can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of
common day? How can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their
capacity for intense nonverbal experience?

What is needed today is a fundamental reexperience of the oneness of all living things, a
comprehensive reality consciousness. (All living things means all things because all
things are alive, even inanimate objects.)

What we call “normal” is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection
and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the
structure of being.

What we ordinarily take in and respond to is a curious mixture of immediate experience
with culturally conditioned symbol, of sense impressions with preconceived ideas about
the nature of things.

Whoever attempts the awesome task of deliberately coming into the presence of God
takes the risk, calculated or uncalculated, of experiencing madness. (Rudolf Otto called it
the mysterium tremendum.)

Without self-knowledge, what you say is not true. Truth repeated is no longer truth; it
becomes truth again only when it has been realized by the speaker as an immediate
experience.

Words such as joy, ecstasy, grace, beauty, just don’t exist in the psychiatric vocabulary.
The poor psychiatrist has been given the sad task of looking for pathology and is usually
bewildered when he comes face-to-face with the more meaningful experiences of life.

You can relive former incidents in your life—not just imagining these incidents, but
believing that you are actually there—smelling, hearing, feeling, every little thing seems
more real than when you actually did experience it.

You can’t tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind
of music. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions
than sound.

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”—a part limited in time and
space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the
rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. (That’s Albert Einstein. The delusion is
thinking we are limited and separate.)

A single high-dose LSD session can frequently be of extraordinary value for those
persons who do not have any serious clinical problems. The quality of their lives can be
considerably enhanced and the experience can move them in the direction of self-
realization and self-actualization.

All the arts, though they speak about us in our relationship to the immediate experience,
at the same time, tell us something about the nature of the world, about the mysterious
forces which we feel to be around us and about the cosmic order of which we seem to
have glimpses.

An important characteristic of collective and racial memories is the fact that the subject
experiences them as insights into the diversity of cultural groups within the human race,
illustrations of the history of mankind or manifestations of the cosmic drama and divine
play. (eyes closed)

An LSD trip will show the subject the manifold aspects of reality—a reality that does not
unfold upon a single level or within a single event, but involves a great variety of events
on a number of levels. As the experience becomes more profound, the spectrum of
sensations and feelings becomes almost infinite.

As many began to experience the kinds of images and symbols Jung ascribed to the
collective unconscious, as well as episodes of a classic mystical nature, this wave brought
strong supportive evidence for Jungian ideas and a powerful validation of the mystical
traditions of the world, Eastern as well as Western.

collective and racial experiences—Subjects tuned in to these realms of the unconscious
can go through brief episodes or long elaborate sequences that take place in different
countries and/or different cultures and depict various historical or contemporary cultures.
(eyes closed)

Drug experiences, like all novel experiences, can provide themes and material for the
artists’ imagination to work on. And it has also been suggested that psychedelic drug
experiences can subtly affect the faculty of insight, providing original solutions to artistic
and intellectual problems through new combinations of ideas and feelings.

Every human being is born with an innate drive to experience altered states of
consciousness periodically, in particular to learn how to get away from ordinary ego-
centered consciousness. This drive is a most important factor in our evolution, both as
individuals and as a species.

Evolutionary memories have specific experiential characteristics; they are distinctly
different from human experiences and often seem to transcend the scope and limits of
human fantasy and imagination. The individual can have, for example, an illuminating
insight into what it feels like when a snake is hungry, when a turtle is sexually excited.

Experiences from various periods of history and from different cultures are often
associated with a vivid sense of a personal memory of our spiritual rather than biological
history. (This refers to experiencing, remembering and reliving things from long before
the person was born, even from billions of years ago.)

experiences of other universes—The strange and alien worlds that LSD subjects discover
and explore in this type of experience seems to have a reality of their own, although not
within the range of our cosmos; they appear to exist in other dimensions, in universes
coexistent with ours. (eyes closed)

Experiences of plant identification often mediate deep understanding as to why certain
plants have been considered sacred by some cultures. (Plant identification doesn’t mean
what the name of the plant is, but experiencing plant consciousness or what it is to be a
plant. Psychedelic plants are the most sacred.)

Here, the individual feels that he is experiencing the innermost divine core of his being.
His individual self is losing its seemingly separate identity and is reuniting with what is
perceived as its divine source, the Universal Self. This results in feelings of immediate
contact or identity with the Beyond Within, with God.

How can we Westerners see that our own potentials are much greater than the social-hive
games in which we are so blindly trapped? Once the game structure of behavior is seen,
change in behavior can occur with dramatic spontaneity. The visionary brain-change,
consciousness-altering experience is the key to behavior change.

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

Identifying with the consciousness of the Universal Mind, the individual senses that he
has experientially encompassed the totality of existence. He feels that he has reached the
reality underlying all realities and is confronted with the supreme and ultimate principle
that represents all Being.

In exceptional cases the individual may have a complex and vivid experience of moving
to a specific place in the physical world and give a detailed description of a remote locale
or event. Attempts to verify such extrasensory perceptions can sometimes result in
amazing corroborations.

In the midst of our emotional turmoil about the drug problem, many fail to notice that
most of the authorities who are supported by public funds, quoted extensively in the
scientific and lay press, and sought out for advice by policy makers have never
themselves experienced highs associated with drugs.

In this type of experience, subjects get involved in wild adventures in strange, alien
worlds that have reality of their own, although not within the range of our cosmos. These
universes seem to exist on other levels of reality or in other dimensions, parallel with and
coexistent with ours. (eyes closed)

Individuals experiencing mystical consciousness of this type have a sense of leaving
ordinary reality, where space has three dimensions and time is linear, and entering a
timeless, mythical realm where these categories no longer apply. In this state, eternity and
infinity can be experienced within seconds of clock time.

It does help you to look at the world in a new way. And you come to understand very
clearly the way that certain specially gifted people have seen the world. You are actually
introduced into the kind of world that Van Goth or Blake lived in. You begin to have a
direct experience of this kind of world while you’re under the drug.

It is clear that psychedelics have the potential to cut through whatever blocks stand
between us and higher experiences, magically letting us enjoy, if only temporarily,
transcendent states. I hope it is not necessary to belabor the point that this potential is
realized if only set and setting support it.

It is important to realize that the subjective experience of time is radically changed in
nonordinary states of consciousness. Within seconds of clocktime, one can experience a
rich and complex sequence of events that lasts subjectively a very long time, or even
seems to involve eternity.

It is not uncommon for subjects reporting evolutionary experiences to manifest a detailed
knowledge of the animals with whom they have identified—of their physical
characteristics, habits and behavior patterns—that far exceeds their education in the
natural sciences.

It is not unusual in psychedelic sessions to experience quite concrete and realistic
episodes identified as fetal and embryonic memories. Many subjects report vivid
sequences on the level of cellular consciousness which seem to reflect their existence in
the form of a sperm or ovum at the moment of conception. (eyes closed)

It is one of the oldest and most universal practices for the initiate to go through the
experience of death before he can be spiritually reborn. Symbolically he must die to his
past, and to his old ego, before he can take his place in the new spiritual life into which
he has been initiated.

Large numbers of professionals have had the chance to experience transpersonal
phenomena in their own training sessions and have recognized their unusual and specific
nature. This set of data was one of the major heuristic streams that converged into
transpersonal psychology as a new and separate discipline.

LSD subjects sophisticated in mathematics and physics have occasionally reported that
many of the concepts of these disciplines that transcend rational consciousness can
become more easily comprehensible and be actually experienced in altered states of
consciousness.

Many of the experiences and observations from psychedelic sessions seemed to seriously
challenge the image of the human psyche and of the universe developed by Newtonian-
Cartesian science and considered to be accurate and definitive descriptions of “objective
reality”.

My own experiences leads me to believe that with LSD as a vehicle of transport, many
addicts could find the determination to carry them through the remainder of the journey
to freedom. (The “remainder” isn’t the rest of the LSD trip, but what happens with the
addict after the trip or as a result of it.)

Often, there is an actual experience of truths, they are KNOWN to be truths, which, when
presented in conceptual terms to the mind in its normal state, seem incomprehensible and
absurd. Such propositions as “God is love” are realized with the totality of one’s being
and their truth seems self-evident in spite of pain and death.

Once a person has experienced a visionary state of mind, one can no longer confuse the
lie with the truth. One had seen where one comes from and who one is, and one no longer
doubts what one is. There is no emotion or external influence that can divert one from
this reality.

One can experience and tune in to what appears to be the consciousness of animals,
plants or even inanimate objects and processes, to experience the consciousness of the
entire universe or experience the consciousness of certain parts of the body—various
organs, tissues or individual cells.

One can experience himself in a specific situation in his childhood, in the birth canal
and/or ancient Egypt. While aware of his everyday identity, he can identify experientially
with another person, another life form or a mythological being. He can also experience
himself in a different location in the world or in a mythical reality. (eyes closed)

One can transcend the limits of the specifically human experience and identify with the
consciousness of animals, plants or even inanimate objects and processes. In the
extremes, it is possible to experience the consciousness of the entire biosphere, of our
planet, or of the entire material universe.

One of the experiences most impressive to the subject is synesthesia—the response by
one of the senses to a stimulus ordinarily responded to be another of the senses. For
example, the subject may find himself able to taste colors or smell sounds. Occasionally
the experiencing of synthesias may prove to be a gateway.

Only when the ordinary perception of the material world is transcended can
consciousness connect with the heavenly regions. For those who have had the privilege of
such experience, the existence of Heaven, God and celestial beings ceases to be a matter
of belief and becomes self-evident reality.

One traumatic event can shape a life, one therapeutic event can reshape it. Psychedelic
therapy has an analogue in Abraham Maslow’s idea of the peak experience. The drug
taker feels that the self is part of a much larger pattern, and the sense of cleansing,
release, and joy makes old woes seem trivial.

Organized religion had little offer. Faith in an invisible divinity was not enough. What
LSD promised was the direct, unmediated experience of self-transcendence—the
mystical enlightenment where we KNOW what the philosophers and the prophets talk
about.

Our true nature is an aspect of a universal consciousness, Self, Being, Mind, or God. The
awakening to this true nature is the direct awareness that you are more than this puny
body or limited mind. It is the realization that the universe is not external to you. It is
experiencing the universe as yourself.

Our vision, and consequently our comprehension of our selves, is blocked out in many
areas by repression. Even where the aspects of the self are open to our scrutiny, our past
experience keeps our observations and interpretations bound in the ruts of conditioned
response. (LSD allows you to break through.)

People have experienced episodes occurring long before their own conceptions. Many
report being able to enter the consciousness of their parents during their mother’s or
father’s childhoods and to experience through their parents’ consciousness events from
that time.

People not capable of coping with a drug experience of their own are not likely to be able
to cope with the experience of a subject either; and thus the sessions of the guide-to-be
may serve the additional purpose of helping to eliminate from a training program
candidates too disturbed or anxious about the psychedelic state.

Physicists and mathematicians report that after using LSD they have developed “a
feeling” for such concepts as the photon, the hypercube or imaginary numbers. Similarly,
philosophers have reported they have “understood” the meaning of existentialism, and
theologians report having “experienced” that which they had been preaching for years.

Psychedelic subjects regularly report experiencing events that seem to harmonize with
quantum mechanics. They speak of participating in and emerging with pure energy, of
witnessing the breakdown of objects into vibratory patterns, the awareness that
everything is a dance of particles.

Religion, I will be thinking of as the inner experience of the individual when he senses
Ultimate Reality, whether as God, a Beyond, transcendent cosmic process, a wholly
different and profound dimension to life, nirvana or however one chooses to name and
interpret this ultimate reality.

Repeated experiences of the transpersonal domain can have a profound impact on the
individual involved. They tend to dissolve the narrow and limited perspective
characterizing the average Westerner and make one see the problems of everyday life
from a cosmic perspective.

Researchers who have seriously studied and/or experienced these fascinating phenomena
realize that the attempts of traditional psychiatry to dismiss them as irrelevant products of
imagination or as erratic fantasmagoria generated by pathological processes in the brain,
are superficial and inadequate.

Spiritual literature and traditions of the world over validate the healing and
transformative power of such extraordinary states for those who undergo them. Why,
then, are people who have had such experiences in today’s world almost invariably
dismissed as mentally ill?

Subjects were advised to “turn off” their analytic faculties, to relax and accept whatever
form of experience came their way, to refrain from attempting to control the sequence or
nature of the events. The declared aim was to stop using one’s cognitive and perceptual
processes in the familiar way and to heighten the likelihood of discovering new ways.

The basic rule is to respond sensitively to the phase, intensity and content of the
experience, rather than try to impose a specific pattern on it. (This is a basic rule for the
guide or therapist, in general. In this case, it was a reference about how to choose what
music to listen to.)

The death-rebirth cycle has been recognized as a natural and lawful pattern throughout
our history by many cultures. Just as spring reliably follows winter year after year, so the
development of a new life automatically follows a full experience of the destruction of
the old.

The drug can mediate access to vast repositories of concrete and valid information in the
collective unconscious and make them available to the experient. The revealed
knowledge can be very specific, accurate and detailed; the data obtained in this way can
be related to many different fields.

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, unconditioned behavior and unconditioned experience were
considered ipso facto schizophrenic.

The experiences were too positive to not want to share them with everybody. It would
appear that the time had come when this kind of experience should be made available to
large numbers of searchers, so that “the doors of perception” could be opened, so that
expanded consciousness was no longer something attainable only by rare individuals.

The guide possesses enormous power to shape the experience, move consciousness with
the slightest gesture or reaction. The key issue here is the guide’s ability to turn off his
own ego and social games, to muffle his own power needs and fears. The guide must
never be bored, talkative, intellectualizing.

The height of sexual love, coming upon us of itself, is one of the most total experiences
of relationship to the other of which we are capable, but prejudice and insensitivity have
prevented us from seeing that in any other circumstances such delight would be called
mystical ecstasy.

The historic role of states of consciousness in the humanities, arts, and sciences is
neglected in current education. A truly liberal education should teach students about this
part of themselves and our civilizations, and should also give them rudimentary
experience with selected states and their resident capacities.

The individual has become relaxed, has begun to enjoy the increased sense perceptions
and has become fascinated with the world of awareness that is beginning to open to him.
The deep and profound experiences released by the LSD then flow uninterrupted in an
ever widening scope.

The inner experience of the spiritual Self and its intimate association with the personal
self, gives a sense of internal expansion, of universality and the conviction of
participating in some way in the divine nature. In the religious traditions and spiritual
doctrines of every epoch one finds numerous attestations on this subject.

The language of cultures with ancient spiritual traditions that are based on experiential
self-exploration have a rich and sophisticated vocabulary describing various mystical
states of consciousness. However, even then the terms adequately convey the meaning
only if we can relate them to a personal experience.

The modern term for the direct experience of spiritual realities is transpersonal, meaning
transcending the usual way of perceiving and interpreting the world from the position of a
separate individual or body-ego. There exists an entirely new discipline, transpersonal
psychology, that specializes in experiences of this kind and their implications.

The most lasting value of the drug experience for me appears to be a number of
convictions, most of them religious in nature, which are so strong that it makes not one
iota of difference whether anyone agrees with them or not. (When you know the truth, no
one can talk you out of it. The truth is the truth.)

The mythological image is what gives sense and organization to experience. Myth
embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words because the
poetic, mythical or mystical mode of vision perceives orders and relationships which
escape factual description.

The reports of LSD subjects who have experienced episodes of embryonal existence, the
moment of conception and elements of cellular, tissue and organ consciousness abound in
medically accurate insights into the anatomical, physiological and biochemical aspects of
the processes involved.

The sensation of leaving one’s body is quite common in drug-produced states and can
have various forms and degrees. Some persons experience themselves as completely
detached from their physical bodies, hovering above them or observing them from
another part of the room.

The term spirituality should be reserved for situations that involve personal experiences
of certain dimensions of reality that give one’s life and existence in general a numinous
quality. C. G. Jung used the word numinous to describe an experience that feels sacred,
holy, or out of the ordinary.

The therapeutic results transcended anything I had ever witnessed. Difficult symptoms
that had resisted months and even years of conventional treatment often disappeared after
experiences such as psychological death and rebirth, feelings of cosmic unity and
sequences that clients described as past-life memories.

The world is now seen as an infinite diversity that is yet a unity and the beholder
experiences himself as being at one with the infinite Oneness that manifests itself, totally
present, at every point of space, at every instant in the flux of perpetual perishing and
perpetual renewal.

Theoretical speculations in Western academic psychology and psychiatry are based
exclusively on experiences and observations made in the ordinary states of
consciousness. The evidence from the study of non-ordinary states of any kind are
systematically ignored or pathologized.

These experiences clearly suggest that, in a yet unexplained way, each of us contains the
information about the entire universe or all of existence, has potential experiential access
to all its parts and in a sense, is the whole cosmic network, as much as he or she is just an
infinitesimal part of it, a separate and insignificant biological entity.

These experiences have been known for millennia. Descriptions of them can be found in
the holy scriptures of all the great religions of the world, as well as in written documents
of countless minor sects, factions and religious movements. They have also played a
crucial role in the visionary states of individual saints, mystics and religious teachers.

This journey is experienced as going further “in,” as going back through one’s personal
life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal
man, of Adam and perhaps even further into the beings of animals, vegetables and
minerals.

Those who prior to these experiences had various forms and degrees of emotional and
psychosomatic discomfort usually feel greatly relieved. Depression dissolves, anxiety and
tension are reduced, guilt feelings are lifted, and self-image as well as self-acceptance
improve considerably.

To discard the extraordinary features of these experiences and the conceptual challenges
associated with them just because they do not fit the current paradigms in science
certainly is not the best example of a scientific approach. We must accept the universe as
it is, rather than imposing on it what we believe it is or think it should be.

To men and women who have had direct experience of self-transcendence into the mind’s
Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is
not likely to be very satisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully
written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner.

To normal waking consciousness, things are the strictly finite and insulated embodiments
of verbal labels. How can we break the habit of automatically imposing our prejudices
and the memory of culture-hallowed words upon immediate experience? Answer: by the
practice of pure receptivity and mental silence.

To say that the blessed shall rejoice and the damned shall be tormented “forever” refers
not to chronological measure but to the degree of intensity of an experience. (The Bible’s
language is poetic and shouldn’t be taken literally. Nothing good or bad goes on
“forever” without end or change.)

Transpersonal experiences can involve conscious experience of other humans and
members of other species, plant life, elements of inorganic nature, microscopic and
astronomic realms not accessible to the unaided senses, history and prehistory, remote
locations or other dimensions of existence.

Under appropriate conditions the psychedelics could considerably speed and facilitate the
process of working through psychological blocks. Material inaccessible in an ordinary
state could be brought into awareness, sometimes producing dramatic transformations
including death/rebirth experiences and alleviation of symptoms.

We are going to have to develop, as chemistry has developed, a language that will pay
respect to the fact that our experience, our behavior, our social forms are flowing all the
time and if your language isn’t equipped to change and flow with them, then you are in
trouble, you’re hooked. You’re drugged by the educational system.

We are living simultaneously in the world of experience and the world of notions, in the
world of direct apprehension of Nature, God and ourselves and the world of abstract,
verbalized knowledge about these primary facts. Our business as human beings is to
make the best of both these worlds.

We can mention the Jungian archetypes—the world of deities, demigods, superheroes
and complex mythological, legendary and fairy-tale sequences. These experiences can
impart accurate new information about religious symbolism previously unknown to the
subject. (eyes closed)

We may encounter entities, situations, and places that bear little or no resemblance to the
realities we know in our day-to-day lives. It is here that we go beyond more familiar
experiences and enter the world known to shamans and seers, the world of deities and
superhuman beings known from myths and fairy tales. (eyes closed)

We must achieve “freedom from the known”—freedom from the unanalyzed postulates
in terms of which we do our second-hand experiencing, freedom from our conventional
thoughts and sentiments, freedom from our stereotyped notions about inner and outer
reality.

We should re-evaluate our attitude toward mythology. Instead of representing bizarre and
ultimately useless pieces of knowledge, the data can prove to be invaluable cartographies
of strange experiential worlds which each of us will have to enter at some point in the
future.

When the non-ordinary states are opened up to them, even scientifically cautious and
highly intelligent people of our own time and culture find these experiences deeply
moving and personally meaningful, providing them with dramatic breakthroughs in their
beliefs.

When we enter the transpersonal arena, we can experience historically or geographically
remote events as vividly as if they were happening here and now. We can participate in
sequences that involve our ancestors, animal predecessors, or even people in other
centuries and other cultures who have no ancestral relationship to us. (eyes closed)

Within the new world-view, the very creative principle of the universe is experientially
available to the individual and, in a certain sense, is commensurate and identical with him
or her. This is a drastic change of perspective and it has far-reaching consequences for
every aspect of life.

Work done by those who refused to take drugs does not demonstrate greater objectivity
than that of persons who have had the drug experience; and doubtless, refusal to
experience the psychedelic state is a product, in some cases, of anxiety about the person’s
ability to cope with that state.

A person is likely to become increasingly sensitive to color and to form. Colors often
grow richer and deeper, while the contours of objects in the room may stand out in sharp
relief. The whole experience may seem to come into sharper focus, as though the person
had just discarded a dirty, incorrectly ground pair of glasses for a clean, perfectly ground
pair.

According to Laing, psychiatrists do not pay proper attention to the inner experience of
psychotics, because they see them as pathological and incomprehensible. However,
careful observation and study show that these experiences have profound meaning and
that the psychotic process can be healing. Laing believes that psychotics have in many
respects more to teach psychiatrists than psychiatrists do their patients.

Altered states of consciousness enrich man’s experiences in many areas of life. The
intense aesthetic experience gained while absorbed in some majestic scene, a work of art,
or music may broaden man’s subjective experiences and serve as a source of creative
inspiration. There are also numerous instances of sudden illumination, creative insights,
and problem solving occurring while man has lapsed into altered states of consciousness.

America was experiencing a quantum leap in intelligence. For the first time in our
history, a large and influential sector of the populace was coming to disrespect
institutional authority, not as members of organized dissident groups but as intelligent
individuals, highly selective political consumers who demanded responsive and effective
leadership, which no existing party, no religion, no labor union seemed able to provide.

An individual can experience scenes from famous red-light and night-club districts of the
world, participate in the most ingenious strip shows and group orgies, become part of
Babylonian religious ceremonies involving indiscriminate promiscuous sex or witness
and partake of wild primitive rituals with sensual rhythmic dances and a strong sexual
undertone. (eyes closed)

As an educational psychologist, I’m interested in the implications of LSD research for the
study of human learning and further human development. Through the LSD experiences I
have learned to look at myself and society in a new way. These experiences have been, in
effect, an additional higher education for me, equal in impact, effort, knowledge, beauty,
and scope to obtaining a doctorate at Stanford.

As in the case of other transpersonal experiences, episodes of organ, tissue and cellular
consciousness can be associated with many concrete insights; various details concerning
anatomy, histology, physiology and chemistry of the body found in the accounts of such
experiences often reveal a level of information that the subjects did not have before the
sessions.

Changes in point of view cannot happen overnight, for they require acceptance of painful
truths: that children daydreaming in class, for example, might be using their minds much
more profitably than children paying attention; that psychotic patients may be in a better
position to understand and experience reality than the psychiatric authorities who dose
them with tranquilizers.

Exploration of the human psyche with these powerful catalyzing agents has shown
beyond any doubt that the biographical model developed by Freud’s “depth” psychology
barely scratches the surface of mental dynamics. To account for all the extraordinary
experiences and observations in psychedelic states, it was necessary to develop a vastly
expanded cartography of the human mind.

Exploration of the potential of these substances for the study of schizophrenia, for
didactic purposes, for a deeper understanding of art and religion, for personality
diagnostics and the therapy of emotional disorders and for altering the experience of
dying has been my major professional interest throughout these years and has consumed
most of the time I have spent in psychiatric research. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

I doubt whether artists will have much power to shape public policy on psychedelics, but
I also doubt whether illegality will ever dissuade artists from exploring all sources of
stimulation and inspiration. I hope to see a day when artists, and indeed anyone else who
wishes to explore all the possibilities of mental experience, will have the legal option to
use substances having such power and promise.

If an experience could not be expressed in words, he told the class, it could not exist. He
was very sure of himself and obviously unwilling to be contradicted. But a few weeks
before, when I had tried mescaline for the second time, I had an experience that certainly
felt ineffable to me. There seemed to be no point in trying to convey anything of its
nature to Professor Whatnough. (That was Andrew Weil, about a Harvard professor.)

If mystical experiences are integrated into the personality, they are highly therapeutic.
Single-state scholars and theoreticians are hard-pressed to explain this therapeutic value.
Denial is easier. But if an enlarged map of reality includes altered states of consciousness,
then experiencing such states logically leads to a fuller view of reality, and therapists tell
us that a fuller view of reality is therapeutic.

In many traditions, the notion of “dying before dying” is essential to spiritual
advancement. Coming to terms with the fact of death as part of the continuity of life is
seen as tremendously liberating, releasing one from the fear of death and opening one to
the experience of immortality. As the 17th century Christian monk, Abraham a Santa
Clara wrote: “A man who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.”

In most preindustrial societies and ancient civilizations, there have existed powerful
rituals designed to transform and consecrate individuals, groups, or even entire cultures.
These transformative events, termed rites of passage by anthropologists, are of
fundamental importance to the discussion of the experience of symbolic death and
rebirth.

In nonordinary states of consciousness, visions of various universal symbols can play a
significant role even in experiences of individuals who previously had no interest in
mysticism or were strongly opposed to anything esoteric. These visions tend to convey
instant intuitive understanding of the various levels of meaning of these symbols and
generate a deep interest in the spiritual path. (visions seen with eyes closed)

In the transpersonal realm, we experience an extension of our consciousness far beyond
the usual boundaries of both our bodies and our egos, as well as beyond the physical
limits of our everyday lives. The more I have explored this realm in my own research, the
more I am convinced that these experiences in transpersonal consciousness can include
the entire spectrum of existence itself.

Indians experience the collective unconscious as an immediate reality, not just as an
intellectual construct. It is significant that this experience of shared consciousness holds a
most important place in the society. In fact, as a sacramental ritual, it is the basis of tribal
unity because it proves and confirms the supposition that every person in the tribe is the
same as every other person in the most fundamental way.

Individuals in nonordinary states of consciousness who tune into these experiential
realms participate in dramatic, usually brief, but occasionally complex and elaborate,
sequences that take place in more or less remote historical periods and in various
countries and cultures. These scenes can be experienced from the position of an observer
but more frequently from experiential identification with the protagonists. (eyes closed)

Liberal principles demand free speech, freedom of worship, and the right to privacy. The
government does not claim to know what sorts of experiences and thoughts its subjects
should and should not cultivate. But drugs are a special case. We do not admit, even to
ourselves, that outlawing psychedelic drugs could be in part an attempt to eliminate
certain kinds of experience and thinking.

Loss of self may be experienced as an actual death and rebirth, undergone with anguish
and joy of overwhelming intensity. In some cases, the culmination is a mystical ecstasy in
which for an eternal moment all contradictions seem reconciled, all questions answered,
all wants irrelevant or satisfied, all existence encompassed by an experience that is felt to
define the ultimate reality, boundless, timeless, and ineffable.

Many psychiatrists, even though they talk constantly of the unconscious mind and are
always speculating on the unconscious thoughts of their patients, appear to know this part
of the mind only as an intellectual construct and not as a direct experience. Furthermore,
many of them appear to be quite frightened of patients who actually live in their
unconscious minds, particularly if patients have made this contact by using drugs.

Myth is obviously a kind of non-logical philosophy; it expresses in the form of a story or,
very often, in the form of some visual image, or even in the form of a dance or a
complicated ritual, some generalized feeling about the nature of the world and of man’s
experience in regard to it. Myth is unpretentious, in the sense that it doesn’t claim to be
strictly true. It is merely expressive of our feelings about experience.

Myths do not come from a concept system; they come from a life system; they come out
of a deeper center. We must not confuse mythology with ideology. Myths come from
where the heart is, and where the experience is, even as the mind may wonder why
people believe these things. The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond
facts to something that informs the fact.

Nonordinary experiences are vital to us because they are expressions of our unconscious
minds, and the integration of conscious and unconscious experience is the key to life,
health, spiritual development, and fullest use of our nervous systems. By instilling fear
and guilt about altered states of consciousness into our children, we force this drive
underground, guaranteeing that it will be expressed in antisocial ways.

Once people have experienced the spiritual dimensions growing in their lives, they often
learn that their lives without it were futile and impoverished. Previously, they may have
managed adequately but unhappily, unaware of the seemingly endless realms that have
since enormously enriched their existence. They discover that spirituality is a necessary
element that enhances their lives and sense of well-being.

One can raise the question whether depriving the investigator of experience is not
tantamount to blinding him to the very area that will mediate therapeutic results. (Are
little kids the only people “objective” enough to judge sex? Any adult will say that kids
know nothing about it. It’s the same with LSD. The investigator or therapist has to take
the LSD himself in order to know what it’s all about.)

One thing had become clear in their research with LSD. The beneficial results of the
experience were almost entirely dependent upon the person’s willingness to accept the
experience for whatever it might be. This willingness was dependent to a large extent
upon how much you trusted yourself, and how much you trusted the people administering
the program.

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.

Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in
supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited:
our capacity to even see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of
mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one
can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.

Our personal boundaries may appear to melt and we can become identified with other
people, groups of people, or all of humanity. We can actually feel that we have become
things that we ordinarily perceive as objects outside of ourselves, such as other people,
animals, or trees. Very accurate and realistic experiences of identification with various
forms of life and even inorganic processes can occur in transpersonal states.

Perceptions of encompassing light, infinite energy, ineffable visions, and
incommunicable knowledge are remarkable in their seeming distinction from perceptions
of the phenomena of the “natural world.” According to mystics, these experiences are
different because they pertain to a higher transcendent reality. What is perceived is said
to come from another world, or at least another dimension.

Psychiatrists use their diagnostic jargon of mental pathology for states of consciousness
which many of them have never even bothered to experience. (They are no more
enlightened than the theologians who refused to look into Galileo’s telescope claiming
that they already know how the universe is ordered and that if the telescope showed
anything different, it would be the doings of the Devil.)

Science could make no sense of certain evidence about the world or the mind that had
been considered central in older traditions, and therefore paid as little attention as
possible to that evidence. Whole areas of experience and fields of intellectual endeavor
were relegated to the domain of religious faith or consigned to the categories of fraud,
folly, and disease.

Since the psychedelic experience includes so many elements that are not part of nondrug
experience, the guide never will be able to understand the subject or communicate with
him adequately unless the guide himself has first-hand knowledge of the drug state and
its phenomena. The point has become controversial but we see no sound reason why it
should be.

Squeeze the stone until it becomes soft as cotton. The guide then may induce an empathic
relationship, telling the subject to “Let yourself go into the stone, let yourself dissolve
into the stone. Be one with the stone, so that you understand it and so that it understands
you”. By such means, experiences of empathy are made possible for persons who never
have had even remotely similar experiences before.

The argument that the person who has taken psychedelic drugs thereby disqualifies
himself as a person able to objectively view and evaluate the experience must strike most
seasoned researchers as simply ludicrous. It is also unanswerable since all who might
reply to it on the basis of real knowledge are declared in advance unfit to deal with the
question.

The average Westerner is naive about nonordinary states of consciousness and has many
misconceptions and prejudices about some of the experiences that are potentially the
most healing. We try to convey a clear message that such phenomena as death-rebirth
sequences, archetypal visions and states of cosmic unity are absolutely normal and that
having them in no way implies pathology.

The experience from LSD therapy and the new experiential psychotherapies clearly
indicates that exposure to another person’s deep emotional material tends to shatter
psychological defenses and to activate corresponding areas in the unconscious of the
persons assisting and witnessing the process, unless they have confronted and worked
through these levels in themselves.

The experience must come from the drug itself and the training must be specialized. No
present medical or psychological degree qualifies for the job. (A medical or
psychological degree doesn’t qualify someone to be an airplane pilot and nothing
qualifies someone to be an LSD guide if they don’t have direct, personal tripping
experience with LSD.)

The experience of cosmic consciousness provides important insights for deepening our
understanding of the highest forms of creativity. The literature on creativity is filled with
examples of extraordinary artistic, scientific, philosophical, and religious inspiration that
came from a transpersonal source and that occurred in non-ordinary states of
consciousness.

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.

The individual tuned into this experiential area usually discovers within himself or herself
genuinely positive values, such as a sense of justice, appreciation of beauty, feelings of
love and self-respect as well as respect for others. These values, as well as the
motivations to pursue them and live in accordance with them, appear on this level to be
intrinsic to human nature.

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 immobolize your brain and your behavior for the rest of your lives.

The mystical experience was not a band-aid for my unfulfilled dreams. What I longed to
catch a glimpse of was a dimension that includes, yet far exceeds, the human world. I
hungered for the experience of the MORE without which life, to me, was not worth
living. I believed the words of the mystics and poets, but I wanted to experience them
myself.

The opportunity to vividly experience specific memories from different periods of one’s
life makes it possible to see their interrelations and discover chains of unconscious
neurotic patterns underlying specific emotional problems. This can be an important
transforming experience that results in profound changes in the personality structure,
emotional dynamics, and behavior of the individual.

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

The reality and concrete nature of these experiences, as well as their convincing quality,
presented for a while a very serious conflict for the “scientist” in me. Then, all of a
sudden, the resolution of this dilemma emerged; it became clear to me that it was more
appropriate to consider the necessity of revising present scientific beliefs than to question
the relevance of my own experience. (That was Stanislav Grof.)

The reduction of ideational barriers by LSD permits certain kinds of creative activity. A
direct connection exists between the ability to experience prelogical, primitive-archaic
thinking and artistic creativity. (This writer, Sidney Cohen, was wrong to use the term
“primitive-archaic thinking”. The thinking of the ego is what’s primitive and archaic, not
what’s beyond the ego.)

The subject may experience slight or drastic changes in the size, configuration, substance,
weight and other attributes contributing to definition of the body. He may seem to
himself to assume the form of some animal or even some inanimate object and he may be
reduced to a sub-atomic particle or expanded to the proportion of a galaxy. He may
experience his body’s dissolution and the sense of having no body at all.

The world of myths, legends, and fairy tales literally comes to life. The subject can
witness numerous scenes from the mythology and folklore of any culture in the world and
visit any mythical landscapes. He or she can also experientially identify with legendary
and mythical heroes and heroines or fantastic mythological creatures. Such sequences can
emerge in meaningful connection with personal problems of the subject. (eyes closed)

This transcendence of space and time is a key concept in all mystical experience. In our
present mode of mental consciousness, we experience the world in terms of space and
time; we experience everything separated in space and going from point to point in time.
It is well known that modern physics calls the whole space-time system in question, and
the transcendence of the space-time dimension is central in mystical experience.

To be able to face all of the challenges of psychedelic therapy, the therapist has to have
special training that involves personal experiences with the drug. Because of the
extraordinary nature of the LSD states and the limitations of our language in describing
them, it is impossible for the future LSD therapist to acquire deeper understanding of the
process without first-hand exposure.

Transpersonal experiences, especially in psychedelic experiences, do not always occur in
a pure form. Embryonal experiences can occur simultaneously with phylogenetic
memories and with the experience of cosmic unity. These associations are rather constant
and they reflect deep intrinsic interrelations between various types of psychedelic
phenomena as well as the multileveled nature of the LSD experience.

Transpersonal psychology has emerged as that branch of psychology specifically
concerned with the study of human consciousness. It attempts to expand the field of
psychological inquiry to include such human experiences as those induced by
psychedelics, as well as similar states attained through the practice of meditation or other
disciplines.

We find drug subjects with little or no scientific training describing evolutionary
processes in some detail, spelling out the scenery of microcosm and macrocosm in terms
roughly equivalent to those used by the modern physicist, empathizing with primal states
of matter and energy and then recounting this experience in terms more reminiscent of
Heisenberg than of a hallucinatory state.

We forgot that for thousands of years the psychedelic vision has been the rite of passage
of the teen-ager—the Dakota Indian boy who sits on the mountaintop fasting and
sleepless, waiting for the revelation. The threshold of adult game life is the ancient and
natural time for the rebirth experience, the flip-out trip from which you come back as a
man.

We were convinced that drug effects were almost entirely determined by what people
around the tripper did. If the environment radiated safety, beauty, wisdom, then even
neurotic subjects would have experiences that were safe, aesthetic and revelatory. The
theory held that all “bad trips” could be converted to “good trips” if the environment was
intelligently managed to provide support. (That was Timothy Leary.)

Western scientists view their own particular approach to reality and psychological
phenomena as superior and “proven beyond a shadow of doubt,” while judging the
perspectives of other cultures as inferior, naive, and primitive. The traditional academic
approach takes into consideration only those observations and experiences that are
mediated by the five senses in an ordinary state of consciousness.

What we ordinarily take in and respond to is a curious mixture of immediate experience
with culturally conditioned symbol, of sense impressions with preconceived ideas about
the nature of things. And by most people the symbolic elements in this cocktail of
awareness are felt to be more important than the elements contributed by immediate
experience.

When I started taking LSD, I just saw that the academic thing was more or less a socio-
political game more than a true learning experience, in that the things that I really felt I
was learning were when I was just purely being or purely experiencing something and not
trying to read it from a stilted textbook or hearing it from some superintellectual
professor.

When someone asks me to describe an experience of LSD, I try to explain: “Well, say
one has a pie of many pieces and each is of a different flavor. Someone asks you what
kind of pie it is. Because of the nature of speech, you can only speak of one flavor at a
time. To give a list of the flavors doesn’t capture the essence of the pie, which can be said
only it you could say all the different pieces at once”.

When we experience identification with the cosmic consciousness, we have the feeling of
enfolding the totality of existence within us, and of comprehending the Reality that
underlies all realities. We have a profound sense that we are in connection with the
supreme and ultimate principle of all Being. In this state, it is absolutely clear that this
principle is the ultimate and the only mystery.

When we set out to study consciousness and such elusive altered states as ecstasy, there is
the observer’s “subject matter” and there is the subject’s “reality” and usually these have
no relation. The psychiatrist may see psychosis, while the subject may be experiencing
hedonic ecstasy. The outside observer has an entirely different view from the
experiencing person. (The psychiatrist must be experienced with LSD or it’s a joke.)

With the advent of modern science, the notion of acceptable reality was narrowed to
include only those aspects of existence that are material, tangible, and measurable.
Spirituality in any form was exiled from the modern scientific worldview. Western
cultures adopted a restricted and rigid interpretation of what is “normal” in human
experience and behavior and rarely accepted those who sought to go beyond these limits.

Without special training and sophistication in archeology or mythology, knowledge of the
cultural heritage involved or even adequate general intellectual background, an individual
may experience mythological and symbolic experiences from ancient Greece, Africa,
India, Tibet, China, Japan, Australia or Pre-Columbian countries (or other cultures, seen
with eyes closed).

You are holding in your hand a great human document. But unless you are one of the few
Westerners who have experienced a mystical minute of expanded consciousness, you will
probably not understand what the author is saying. Too bad, but still not a cause for
surprise. The history of ideas reminds us that new concepts and new visions have always
been non-understood. We cannot understand that for which we have no words.

You have to take it with your patient or at least have taken it yourself in order to
empathize with and follow him as he goes from one level to another. If the therapist has
never taken it, he’s sitting there with his sticky molasses Freudian psychiatric chessboard
attempting to explain experiences that are far beyond the narrow limits of that particular
system.

If the human potential that Jesus demonstrated is understood to be within us, if the
capacity to grow to godlike stature is directly experienced by all Christendom as the key
to the Kingdom, then Christianity will fulfill its purpose by encouraging people to evolve,
to transform themselves, to rise to a higher state. (That means the LSD state of cosmic
consciousness. Do phony idiots such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson understand
that?)

If the potential exists for the upheaval of a person’s “change of life flow,” then it is
unprofessional, if not criminal, to fail to advise him of this potential outcome. And if you,
yourself, as the investigator, are uncertain of the potential ramifications of such an
experiment, then you are remiss in exposing others to that which you are not personally
familiar. One must personally know the experience to understand properly another’s
experience.

In addition to the Freudian “individual unconscious,” there is also the “collective
unconscious,” which contains the memories and the cultural heritage of all of humanity.
According to Jung, the universal and primordial patterns in the collective unconscious, or
“archetypes,” are mythological in nature. Experiences that involve the archetypal
dimensions of the psyche convey the sense of sacredness—or numinosity”, in Jung’s
terms.

Our attitudes towards psychedelic drugs involve response to certain kinds of experience
as well as certain substances. We have a mysticism problem as well as a drug problem,
and its historical causes are older and more complicated than the causes of the drug
controversy. Mystical, messianic, and shamanistic religion always comes into conflict
with established authority after social evolution has reached the stage of hierarchal state
systems.

The richness of the experiential content is augmented by the fact that the process involves
an endless variety of illustrative material from biology, zoology, anthropology, history,
mythology and religion. Psychedelic sessions focusing on the death-rebirth process not
only have great therapeutic potential, but are a source of invaluable scientific,
sociopolitical, philosophical and spiritual insights. (That material is seen with the eyes
closed.)

The thing that most aroused my interest was the tone and contents of what my classmates
who had taken the drug were saying. They talked to each other in stunned, excited voices
about love, sharing, identity, unity, death, ecstasy—topics not generally discussed by
psychology students except with cynical flippancy or heavy academic seriousness—but
certainly never from experienced confrontation, as was happening now. (That was Ralph
Metzner.)

When subjects were given a psychedelic drug without knowing what to expect or how to
respond, being left alone in a dark room or threatened by unfamiliar researchers
demanding cooperation in psychological testing, it is easy to understand why so many
experiences became psychotic. If nonpsychotic experiences are desired, subjects must be
prepared, feel secure in a friendly environment, and above be willing and able to trust in a
reality greater than themselves.

A new language will develop to communicate the new aspect of experience.
A productive session usually involved total psychological surrender to the experience.
A whole new world of experience opens up.
An individual comes to experience himself in a totally new way.
An over-awing type of beauty is seen that makes people experience mystical revelations.
An overwhelming conviction in the value of the experience is felt.
Artists sought the experience as a means of expanding their vision.
At peak experience, our being is filled with love, radiance, joy and ecstasy.
Avoid imposing the ego game on the experience.
Blissful divinity accompanies the ecstatic experience.
Concepts are not experiences.
Cosmological mysticism is an experience of really illuminated from within.
Dogma divorced from experience often leads to absurd and rational excesses.
Don’t worry about external logic when you are metaphorically describing experience.
Drugs dramatically alter the manner in which reality is experienced.
Duality arises only when we classify, when we sort our experiences into mental boxes.
Each experience opens up new worlds of discovery.
Each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety.
Even a bad experience can be beneficial.
Experience the ancient cosmic myths of creation and manifestation.
Experiences of this kind are not bound by the usual special or temporal limitations.
Experiences under LSD can be overwhelmingly rich and emotionally kaleidoscopic.
Experiential self-exploration is an important tool for a spiritual and philosophical quest.
For most people, it’s an extremely significant experience.
For that kind of experience, it is worth being alive.
I know I could never have understood this experience had I not lived it myself.
I must praise and glorify this experience and all its wonder.
I think it’s healthy that people should have this experience.
I will understand the mystics much better having had the experience.
I would describe the experience as a conversion experience of the most radical nature.
I’ve had the greatest experience of my life.
Immediate experience is timeless.
In its essence the experience is a liberation from conventions.
In many cultures, such experiences are seen as a vital source of creative inspiration.
In order to change behavior, it is necessary to change your inner experience.
Individuals differ widely in their inner experiences and reactions.
It cannot be known, only experienced.
It is clear that the promise of LSD may be as infinite as the experience itself.
It is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience.
It’s absolutely true that the experience is in a class by itself, especially on a visual level.
It’s the very heart of human experience, the center that gives understanding to the whole.
Let your brain become a receiving set for the experience.
LSD can provide very therapeutic experiences.
Man and his present experience are one (not separate).
Many of us are profoundly grateful for the vistas opened up by the drug experience.
Many people have never experienced full spontaneity.
Modern society is founded on denial of self and of experience; it is dangerously insane.
Most subjects find the experience valuable.
Most subjects find the experience valuable and many say that it is uniquely lovely.
Music can develop into a euphoric experience.
Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge.
Mysticism is a frontier of experience.
Mystics have declared their experience ineffable.
New forms of sexual experience are reported.
No camera can show this experience because it is inside the nervous system.
No matter how universal the experience, it is unique for each individual.
One experiences the bliss of Consciousness.
One often experiences the Divine as eternal and timeless.
Our sensory experiences are states of our nervous system.
Patients who have had vivid experiences of this type have tended to value them highly.
People can greatly expand their experiential horizons.
People did not first “believe in” God: they experienced His Presence.
People experience a rich spectrum of emotional and bodily manifestations.
Psychedelic drugs provide creative experience.
Respect the psychological space of the experient.
Some subjects can experience a total and complete relaxation of all muscles in the body.
Spicing up the chemistry of the cortex will alter the entire nature of human experience.
Subjects experienced religious exultation and sensations of being one with God.
Such an experience can be felt as a turning point in the life of one who experiences it.
Such experiences have a great healing potential and therapeutic value.
Such experiences may enrich and illuminate theological concepts.
Such real experiences, being nonordinary, challenge the logic of ordinary consciousness.
Taking of the drug is in fact essential to a true understanding of the experience.
The actual experience of this state is not of nothingness but of everythingness.
The chicken-in-the-egg transformation is one variety of the experience of rebirth.
The depth, scope and intensity of these experiences can reach extraordinary proportions.
The drug induced experience has been regarded as intrinsically divine.
The eternal is experienced.
The experience called hallucinogenic will play a role in leading us into the future.
The experience can be intensely gratifying.
The experience can be very liberating and widening.
The experience can be wonderful, insightful, enlightening and life-changing.
The experience goes “beyond the conflict of the opposites.”
The experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, music.
The experience holds out the promise of rewards of incalculable value.
The experience is emotional and deeply felt.
The experience is multidimensional.
The experience is one of accelerated un-learning and re-learning.
The experience is powerful, intense and meaningful.
The experience is profoundly significant.
The experience is so fantastic in both its novelty and power.
The experience is somehow a grace.
The experience of awakening is timeless and universal.
The experience of the organism/environment field is a revelation.
The experience transcends our ordinary concepts of causality.
The experiencer may live through the whole spectrum of human feelings.
The experiences cover a wide spectrum of depth and intensity.
The experiences emerging from the unconscious are valid, important and meaningful.
The experiences make him much more open emotionally.
The experiences of death and rebirth are very rich and complex.
The experiential spectrum of nonordinary states of consciousness is extremely rich.
The external world doesn’t change, but your experience of it becomes drastically altered.
The extraordinary experience allows the patient a new look at his old values.
The feeling of reality and truth in such experiences can dominate a whole life.
The final term I would apply to the experience is enriching.
The fullest kind of maturity has its core in the experience of personal transcendence.
The general understanding of the effects of LSD is poor, even among experienced users.
The glimpse of a larger reality that such experience affords may change a person’s life.
The gold of the alchemists is not money but that golden experience of unity and totality.
The immediate experience of the One and the Holy is the supreme gift.
The individual transcends himself and experiences spontaneity.
The intense reality experienced by the person under LSD is often overwhelming.
The LSD session is an overwhelming awakening of experience.
The most important experiences are those I am at least able to talk about.
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
The normally unconscious backdrop of experience emerges into the foreground.
The outside world may be experienced in a highly intensified manner.
The patient remains intellectually alert and remembers the experience vividly.
The peak experience is a view of the whole and words can’t express the whole.
The perceptual experience would be outside of customary verbal or sensory reference.
The person has had what he regards as an enormously impressive experience.
The scope and content of the experience is limitless.
The state of mind associated with dying can be experienced during life.
The subject experiences a deep sense of spiritual liberation, redemption and salvation.
The subject experiences the world as transfigured and unified.
The subject experiences various degrees of loosening and losing of his ego boundaries.
The subject listening to music may become completely absorbed in the experience.
The trip becomes introspective, past experiences “lived through” with emotion.
The true Self is not an idea, but an experience.
The ultimate Experience is the Self.
The ultimate reason for human experience is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.
The uncluttered intellect can experience what astrophysics confirms.
The unconscious content is experienced consciously in its original form and full intensity.
The universe becomes a mystery to be experienced, not a riddle to be solved.
The world is experienced as a physical extension of oneself or one’s own nervous system.
Theological controversies and their dualities are far removed from experience.
Theory is the articulated vision of experience.
There is a central experience which alters all other experiences.
There is a central human experience which alters all other experiences.
There is nothing intrinsically pathological in the experience of ego-loss.
These drugs increase society’s range of human experience and human knowledge.
These experiences can get extraordinarily powerful.
These experiences can mediate accurate information about various aspects of nature.
These experiences seem more direct and immediate, more real than ordinary reality.
This experience gave his life purpose.
This experience is boundless, unfathomable and ineffable.
This ineffable experience cannot be described, being at other than the verbal level.
This is definitely an “end-in-itself” experience and phenomenon.
This is the extraordinary experience.
This return to the source is a matter of immediate experience.
Two seemingly incompatible feelings may be experienced at once.
Ultimately, I hope, all religious dogma will be replaced by direct, personal experience.
Understanding is primarily direct awareness, an immediate experience.
We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.
We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory.
We don’t have an experiential vocabulary.
What is important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself.
What the initiate experienced was “new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition”.
Whatever you see, just accept it. Don’t stop your experience to try to understand things.
When sex and LSD converge, the experience is said to be indescribably ecstatic.
With the experience of rebirth, all our sensory pathways are suddenly wide open.
Words are far removed from the speed and flow of experience.
Words are the meshes of the net and the experience is of the water that slips through.
Words can only fail to fully reflect the essence of the experience.
You can experience what you feel is the consciousness of inanimate objects.
You can learn how to alter your brain function to experience in novel ways.
You experience a glimpse of the pure truth.
You will experience the harmony and beauty of nature as deity.

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

He experiences a rightness, a rightness of extraordinary scope, a rightness of which he
had no idea.

He experiences himself as a far greater being than he had ever imagined, with his
conscious self a far smaller fraction of the whole than he had realized.

He sees that his ego is his persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary selection of
experiences with which he has been taught to identify himself.

He experiences a cosmic vision.

He experiences himself in complete harmony with a total absence of anxiety.

He sees in his experience a glimpse of reality.

His center of experience moves from ego to Self.

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

Acid allowed me to experience my soul. Ego, ambition, defenses, critical faculties are
sloughed off or suspended.

After experiencing LSD, he went to be with his wife and found “It was like discovering
her all over again. Her body suddenly became new and fresh and exciting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He felt that during the experience that he “knew” the other as he had never known her
before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In all of his “relations to externals” he experienced a heightened sense of “unity and
harmony.”

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

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

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

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

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

It reveals the soul. My own experience under LSD was the revelation of my soul to me.
There can be no deeper experience, or more profound revelation.

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

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

It was without question the most extraordinary and significant experience available to
human beings this side of the Beatific Vision.

LSD allowed you an objective look at your own conditioning, at all the categories you
had been taught to filter experience into.

Many LSD subjects reported unusual aesthetic experiences and insights into the nature of
the creative process; they frequently developed a new understanding of art.

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

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

Sensitivity to others and their problems was stimulated by the drug. It grows naturally out
of the experience of unity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most impressive characteristic of the experience was an enormous and for me,
unique sense of freedom.

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

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

They felt that the experience had improved their capacity to deal with their problems and
had enormously stimulated their psychological growth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

After they had discovered and experienced feelings of cosmic unity in their sessions, they
realized that the state they had really been craving for was transcendence and not drug
intoxication. (Drug intoxication means narcotics and alcohol, not psychedelics.)

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

As you returned from these experiences of pure contentless energy, the world of images
and categories in which we live our normal lives did indeed seem like a “plastic doll
world.”

For many professional artists as well as laymen, the LSD session represented a profound
aesthetic experience that gave them a new understanding of modern art movements and
art in general.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Individuals who experienced the phenomenon of ego death followed by the experience of
rebirth and cosmic unity seemed to show radical and lasting changes in their fundamental
understanding of human nature and its relation to the universe.

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

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

Psychedelic subjects reported experiential identification with other people, animals and
various aspects of nature during which they gained access to new information about areas
which they previously had no intellectual knowledge.

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

Subjects had not only past-incarnation experiences but also complex and detailed insights
into this area that were strikingly similar to those described in various religious and
occult scriptures.

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

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

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

The following day, he 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.

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

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

When I read about such visionary states later, I felt especially grateful for my experience
because it seemed that much more authentic and because it gave me a window on the
knowledge of the sages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People came out of these sessions reeling with awe, overwhelmed by experiences of
oneness with God and all other beings, shaken to the depths of their nature by the
grandeur and power of the divine life-energy processes going on within their own
consciousness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously, I had forgotten the childish joy of simply being alive. Tripping makes you
feel the way an infant must feel, in the absence of discomfort, simply being: energetic,
open, interested. Tripping lent to my life the grace of fairy tales, where everything is
right and appropriate and satisfying. Psychedelic drugs engender storybook experiences:
one is tremendously cozy, delighted, enchanted, lucky.

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

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

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

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

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. (eyes closed)

All patients, said Grof, apparently moved through similar levels during their sessions.
They passed first through aspects of their own life experiences—birth, childhood,
adulthood—and then into experiential realms described in mystical traditions,
experiences of ego-death and rebirth followed by “satori”—the dissolution of ego-
boundaries and the loss of duality, an unfolding awareness of cosmic unity, a sense of
Oneness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterwards, I felt I had gone through a powerful experience.
Differentiation between interior and exterior experience seemed to cease.
Everything was experienced as completely real.
Feelings were those of absolute awe, reverence, and sacredness.
He had transcended time and space and experienced “Heaven.”
He mentioned a slight tremor experienced as running through his whole body.
He seemed to experience directly his brotherhood with all of mankind.
He was far and deep into experience and sensation.
His experience had brought first deliverance and then meaning into his life.
I am grateful to have been able to learn that I am capable of such experiences.
I became Cleopatra, sensuous, beautiful, experiencing orgasmic ecstasy. (eyes closed)
I don’t really fear death because I feel like I experienced it.
I emerged from this experience moved to the core.
I experienced an ever greater sense of an eternal dimension to life.
I experienced dimensions of being usually inaccessible to consciousness.
I experienced the awe and mystery of the creation of life.
I experienced the euphoric effects of LSD, a celestial transformation of reality.
I felt there was a fundamental validity and reality to the experience.
I had a powerful experience of mystical rapture.
I had experienced enough to realize there was much remaining to be explored.
I had experienced unexpected, impressive things.
I had ideas and experienced feelings entirely new to me.
I had uncovered forgotten emotions and experiences of unbelievable reality.
I knew that the rich emotions I had experienced held some deeper meaning.
I never experienced anything quite so overwhelming in my whole life.
I regarded the experience as a personal “shaking to the foundations”.
I saw colors I never experienced before.
I started to experience a most fantastic happiness.
I wanted not to speak, only to experience it silently.
I was back at the beginning of creation. I experienced what the myths of creation tell us.
I was experiencing a state of inner peace and serenity.
I was immensely grateful that I was able to have this experience.
I was literally experiencing the world as a child would and I loved it.
I was ready. But not for what I experienced! It was awesome!
It was a profoundly moving, real and deeply meaningful experience.
It was an experience of self-recognition which opened my eyes.
It was the most satisfying experience of my life.
It was total experience, with all the senses opened wide.
It’s an experience of great beauty. I cried for joy.
My experience seemed to acquire incredible depth and breadth.
She experienced a beautiful, warm, nourishing, golden glow.
She experienced the stages of species evolution.
She had experienced the unity of all existence.
She was experiencing ecstasy and transcendental bliss.
Sights and sounds possessed a keenness that he had never experienced before.
The deepest level of the experience was purely spiritual.
The emphasis was on experience and feeling (not verbal talk).
The entire experience seemed charged with value and significance.
The entire experience was exceedingly interesting.
The essence of the experience was the encounter with the divinity within.
The experience had enhanced their appreciation of life.
The experience had genuine mystical features.
The experience opened up into an experience of oceanic bliss.
The experience seemed to satisfy every human want, physical or spiritual.
The experience unfolded range upon range of reality I hadn’t known existed.
The experience was fantastically extraordinary.
The experience was genuine, a view of what was possible.
The experience was intense and highly emotional.
The experience was so tremendously blissful and enlightening.
The music seemed to take over the direction of the experience.
The sensation I now experienced was new.
The universe was experienced as living and not a dead machine.
Their minds were enlightened in an immediate experience of eternal life.
There was a sense of totality in the experience.
They experienced a deep inward change in their spiritual awareness.
This incredibly rich and complex experience lasted for what seemed to be eternity.
Throughout everything, the music seemed an intrinsic part of the experience.
Under LSD, I relived the strongest, most intense emotional experiences conceivable.
Visions of Paradise, universal truths and enormous insights were all experienced.
What I was experiencing now was new and very exciting.
When the experience ended, he felt that some of his conflicts had been resolved.

a convincing sense of personally remembering and reliving something that one had
experienced previously

a dream-like state marked by extreme alterations in consciousness of self, in the
understanding of reality, in the sphere of experience and marked changes in perception

a process of experiencing Essence in such a way that it illuminated all of existence, a
kind of flight TOWARDS reality

a radical conversion experience, a transformation of self based on a new state of
awareness, a new state of consciousness— higher consciousness

a realm of experience which is nonlogical and meaningless in the sense that it doesn’t
symbolize or signify anything other than itself

a sense of boundless freedom and he who experiences it has not the slightest doubt as to
the completeness of his release

a single overwhelming experience that produces a drastic and permanent change in the
way a person sees himself and the world

a single undifferentiated state of mind containing all possible dimensions of human
experience

a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own
scientists know to be true in theory

a state of mind which is experiential rather than intellectual—a kind of sensation rather
than a set of ideas

a substance with such fantastic effects on mental perception and on the experience of the
outer and inner world

an altered state of consciousness in which the ordinary structures of experience are
broken down

an ecstatic experience of an ascent into the celestial regions and the acquisition of
supernormal knowledge

an effect of heightened interest and fascination with the panorama of experiences that
begin to come into consciousness

an experience, a vision, a revelation which will explain, without words, why there is a
universe

an experience in which old forms and points of view are being destroyed in order for new
ones to emerge

an experience, nonverbal in character which is simply inaccessible to the purely literary
and scholarly approach

an experience of ecstatic connection with nature, with the cosmic order, and with the
creative energy of the universe

an experience of intense emotional release, the ending of an artificial and absurd use of
the mind

an experience of merging with the environment and a sense of unity with perceived
objects

an experience or state of consciousness called moksha or “liberation”—Indian philosophy
is primarily this experience.

an increased attentiveness to immediate experience in contrast to memories of the past or
plans for the future

an intense experience of cosmic consciousness, of the vivid realization that oneself is a
manifestation of the eternal energy of the universe

an intimate, personal experience of the reality to which most forms of religion and
philosophy come no nearer than an intellectual or emotional description

an ontological experience infinitely more direct and real than any truth, however
profound, that could be mediated by an established creed or ritual

an order of experience radically different from that which discursive thinking professes to
explain

an overwhelming reaction in which an individual comes to experience himself in a totally
new way, a transcendental feeling of being united with the world

an undifferentiated unity wherein the knower, the knowledge and the known are
experienced as a single reality

animal and plant consciousness, past-incarnation experience, ancestral and racial
memories

become capable of experiencing consciously something of that which unconsciously is
always with us

breaks down the solid world of Newtonian objects into a system of subjective
experiences related to different senses

can mediate experiential connection with any aspect of the phenomenal world and with
various mythological and archetypal domains (eyes closed)

can open access to areas of experience for which our culture does not have an adequate
conceptual framework

can relive a forgotten or repressed experience with all its original emotional intensity,
emotion which has remained bottled up inside him without his knowledge

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

dramatic changes in human consciousness and our experience of the inner and outer
world

emerging from the experience with the understanding that they are divine and so is
everyone and everything else

ever more complex and more personally significant realms of symbolic experience (eyes
closed)

everyday experience, that narrow, utilitarian world that our self-centered consciousness
selects from out of the infinite wealth of cosmic potentialities

experience himself as made of wood, metal, glass or whatever, but doesn’t interfere with
the flexibility of his body

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

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

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

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

experiences accompanied with such a powerful sense of authenticity and reality (more
real than reality a common description.)

experiences of a mythological, mystical, archetypal, historical, sociopolitical,
anthropological, or phylogenetic nature

experiences of sequences taking place in other historical periods and other countries (eyes
closed)

experiences that underlie and yet are beyond our everyday perception of the world and
outside the reach of traditional scientific method

experiences visits to other realms of reality, many of which are fantastic and
mythological in nature (eyes closed)

experiences which point toward the ultimate evolutionary potential of human
consciousness

experiencing consciousness freed from the cardboard social games that comprise
“personality”

experiencing emotions and physical sensations of great intensity, often surpassing
anything we might consider humanly possible

experiential adventures in the universe-at-large, which involves what can best be
described as cosmic consciousness or the superconscious mind

experiential confrontation with artistic creations of high aesthetic value—visions of
beautiful temples, sculptures or paintings (eyes closed)

experiential dimensions that are clearly beyond the confines of what is agreed upon in the
West as objective reality

experiential expansion of the individual to the consciousness of all mankind (or the entire
universe)

experiential identification with the primordial Emptiness, Nothingness, and Silence,
which seems to be the ultimate cradle of all existence

extraordinary intensification and broadening of all types of sensory experience, including
the sexual

feelings of joy, peace, love, blessedness. Such high-intensity emotion is far removed from
everyday experience

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

glimpses something so profound that certain “facts of life” prior to the experience are no
longer exclusively true

great moments of rapture, bliss and ecstasy, flashes of beauty, love, sexual experience,
perfection, awe, aesthetic or creative wonder or insight

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

how real, definite and memorable an event of sudden conversion may be to him who has
the experience

hypnotized into experiencing himself as an ego—as an isolated center of consciousness
and will inside a bag of skin, confronting an external and alien world

immediate perception of the eternal Unity, the experience which mystics universally
testify

in closest touch with that point of experience where reality can alone be discovered: this
moment—Here, life is alive.

increased perceptual sensitivity and portentousness, intensification of interpersonal
experience, feelings of unique insight into life

increased powers of concentration and introspection and experiences deep religious
emotion

insightful knowledge or illumination about being or existence in general that is felt at an
intuitive, nonrational level and gained by direct experience

intense and often rapidly shifting emotional experiences or concurrent emotions (having
opposite emotions at the same time)

Leary’s model for “transcendental communities” where family members could maintain a
level of experience which cuts beyond routine ego and social games

leaves behind one mode of being and moves into another and totally new experiential
condition

letting in a free flow of comprehension beyond the everyday threshold of experience
while keeping the mind clear

letting in a free flow of consciousness beyond the everyday threshold of experience while
keeping the mind clear

like internal cosmographers charting new internal seas of experience and perhaps
pointing out sensory landmarks

memories from the lives of the individual’s ancestors or experiences of various
phylogenetic crises (eyes closed)

more real than the phenomenal world as it is experienced in a more usual state of
consciousness

our being born with a drive to experiment with other ways of experiencing our
perceptions

out of her head with sensations of pleasure that she literally had not experienced since
childhood

out of the everyday world of common conceptualized experience into the magical Other
World of nonverbal visionary awareness

permits the entry into consciousness of experiences, visionary or mystical, from “out
there”

powerful corrective emotional experiences on very deep levels that are not easy to reach
by conventional psychotherapy

psychedelics, that they had the potential to facilitate for the individual the experience of
major insights and problem solutions of an intellectual-emotional nature

psychedelics—the potential to facilitate for the individual the experience of major
insights and problem solutions of an intellectual-emotional nature

realistic and authentic experiences related to individual stages of the biological birth
process

realizing through an out-of-body experience that you are not this physical body (You are
the entire universe.)

realness of experience and forms of thinking now unknown (That’s unknown to most
people, not everyone.)

seeks to attain in his most valued moments escape from the boundaries imposed on him
by his 5 senses, to break through into another order of experience

seems to allow detours from the customary channels of experience and permit
transcendence of some of our peculiar social inhibitions

socialization, getting each new recruit to the human race to behave and experience in
substantially the same way

that all his experience of the world, together with the world itself, subsists in some kind
of unifying and intelligent continuum

that Jesus was a man like ourselves who had an overwhelming experience of cosmic
consciousness in which it became completely clear to him that “I and the Father are one”

that one should be concerned about the quality of the experience of life rather than the
quantity of external possessions and achievements

the abstract world of so-called facts and events and the concrete world of immediate
experience

the awe and wonder one experiences when confronted with the creative forces of nature
and the many mysteries of the universal design

the beneficial potential of mystical experience in stimulating the ability to feel and
experience deeply and genuinely with the full harmony of both emotion and intellect

the capacity to experience the physical world with some of the freshness and excitement
of childhood

the characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the
experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience

the confusion of our perceptions of reality with reality itself, the formulation of erroneous
hypotheses that do not conform to our own direct experience

the conscious experience of unity behind the diversity of phenomena—said by sages and
mystics of all centuries to be the most blissful and uplifting of human experiences

the direct experience of the concrete, natural world in its nonverbal and nonconceptual
state

the ecstatic experience of a mystical nature—the ultimate source from which the strength
of religion flows

the ego-loss experience being a temporary ending of game life, a passing from one state
of consciousness into another

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

the error of understanding eternity as an interval of clock time rather than an experience
of timelessness, that is, of having escaped the boundaries of time entirely

the existence of these elements in the human unconscious and the possibility of
experiencing them consciously in a vivid and realistic way

the existing absurd situation in which almost no serious professional research is being
conducted in an area where millions of people have been experiencing on their own

the experience of having been pure consciousness, unadulterated by the small temporal
self

the experience of incredible acceleration and intensification of all senses and of all
mental processes

the experience of oneself as a potentially unlimited field of consciousness that has access
to all aspects of reality

the experience of transcendence and union with that which is apprehended as lying
beyond the multiplicity of the world

the failure of the rational approach to grasp the many mysteries of nature and the awe and
wonder experienced in confrontation with the creative forces of the universe

the fear that death will take us into everlasting nothingness, like being buried alive
forever, darkness without end—as if that could be some sort of experience

the feeling that this present experience would remain with me and bring about deep
changes

the greatest cosmic adventure—an experiential journey of the expansion of human
consciousness

the habit of automatically imposing our prejudices and the memory of culture-hallowed
words upon immediate experience

the law against LSD a violation of a people’s god-given right to experience their own
divinity

the leap across entangling thickets of the verbal, to identify with the totality of the
experienced

the liberated and transfigured consciousness which experiences the paradox of the
absoluteness of relationships, the infinity and universality of particulars

the parallels between LSD sessions and esoteric procedures focusing on the death
experience

the potentialities of the human cortex to create images and experiences far beyond the
narrow limits of words and concepts

the potentials—social, creative, psychological, cultural and ontological—which may be
experienced by means of the consciousness-expansion drugs

the rediscovery within ourselves of a virgin not-mind capable of non-verbally, not-
thinking in response to immediate experience

the rich and comprehensive nature of emotions and sensations involved in these
experiences

the rich mental experiences that are normally ruled out of bounds by the rational nine-to-
five mind

the right to achieve euphoria, the right to get “high”, the right to experience new
sensations, the right to expand and change one’s consciousness

the sensation, the experience of things and events in relationship, as distinct from the
partial experience of things and events in separation

the “straight” society of limited experience, to whom the expanded consciousness spells
anathema and fear

the subconscious minds of people which LSD is able to penetrate and to bring to life as
experienced reality

the tendency of long forgotten or suppressed contents of experience to appear again in
consciousness

the tremendous opportunity such experiences may offer for personal growth and the
development of new levels of awareness

the value of the drug experience for the purpose of both therapy and personal growth and
fulfillment

the value of the transcendental aspect of such experiences and the utmost importance of
the spiritual dimensions in human life

the very heart of human experience—It is the center that gives understanding to the
whole.

the world of miracle and beauty and divine mystery when experience is what it always
ought to be

this experience of encounter with what is felt to be a divine dimension deep within a
person

this immediate sense on the part of almost everyone concerned that there was something
intrinsically valuable and important in this kind of experience

this unique and most wonderful of experiences which transcends everything, even the
imaginable.

to allow themselves to experience whatever is emerging in the LSD sessions in order to
find the roots of their emotional problems

to be aware of life, of experience as it is at this moment, without any judgments or ideas
about it

to experience a new mode of existence and consciousness as far beyond our present mode
of existence as ours is beyond that of an animal

to experience a state of egoless freedom, freedom from compulsive ego-centered passions
and desires

to experience more fully the bliss of pure being, just being present to my experience of
the moment

to experience the infinite joy of rediscovering the original and blissful state of Universal
Consciousness

to go beyond what we generally consider our rational minds in order to experience new
levels of consciousness

to move experientially from a personal, psychologically-oriented frame of reference into
a wider, spiritual one

to realize that the universe is profoundly different from what, on their ordinary,
conditioned level of experience it had seemed to be

to revise his present scientific beliefs rather than to question the relevance of his own
experience

to take them higher, to a new realm, to a psychic state they’d never experienced before, a
new land of intensity and passion

to transport the beholder out of the old world of his everyday experience, far away,
toward the visionary antipodes of the human psyche

to utilize powerful experiences for healing, the healing and transformative potential of
powerful experience

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

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

unique shifts in their subjective experience of perceptual processes which they held to be
an integral part of their creative gifts

various types and levels of experience that have become available in certain special states
of mind and that seem to be normal expressions of the psyche

vivid and colorful memories of experiences from the period of infancy and early
childhood

a deep unconscious association between oceanic ecstasy and the experiences of natural
beauty, inspired artistic creations, spiritual feelings and highly satisfying human
relationships

an area of human experience accessible through the intervention of a sacrament which is
whatever it is that helps make God present in man (God is in man. The LSD sacrament
makes it possible to realize that.)

an experience extraordinarily satisfying in terms of emotions, sensations and fantasy,
complete with technicolor and sound-track, creativity and productively loaded with valid
insights

awakening of a spirituality that is quite independent of the individual’s childhood
experience, religious programming, church affiliation and even cultural and racial
background

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

experiences of a world transfigured into unimaginable loveliness, charged with intrinsic
significance and manifesting, in spite of pain and death, an essential and divine All-
Rightness

Jung’s assertion that our psyches are deeply affected by a collective unconscious that
gives us access to a vast warehouse of memories encompassing all of human experience
from the beginning of time

persecuting men who are merely attempting to experience that part of their nature that
they feel most entitles them to regard themselves as human, namely, their encounter with
Ultimate Reality or what they call God

science—the systematic attempt to record and measure the energy process-data,
religion—the systematic attempt to provide answers to the same questions by direct
personal experience

the art of abandoning all conceptions of how one should feel in order to discover how one
actually does feel—to get down to pure experience, free from all prejudices and
preconceptions of what it is “supposed” to be

the experience of the Void, of the primordial emptiness, nothingness and silence which is
the ultimate source and cradle of all existence, the “uncreated and ineffable Supreme” (It
can’t be described, so they call it the Void.)

the retrospective impressiveness of the drug experience (If one has an impressive
experience, they don’t forget about it. If they do forget, then it wasn’t that much of an
impressive experience for them.)

the rich and accurate historical information that we can assemble from some ancestral
experiences, providing us with valuable insights concerning periods that might otherwise
be lost to history (eyes closed)

the subject “going back in time” to very vividly experience the emotional as well as the
other contents of important forgotten or repressed events (while, however, retaining his
link with the present time)

the subject so totally re-experiencing events from his past as to lose all contact with the
present and relive, as child or even infant, the significant occurrences most relevant and
crucial to his present (nondrug-state) situation

to go outside routine modes of experience, beyond learned or familiar concepts so that
one was no longer aware of oneself as a social figure, but as another entity, outside
parochial worlds of experience

assertions of having known the origin and goal of history, of having found the answer to
the ancient query, “What am I?”, of having intuited the harmonious structure of the
universe, of having experienced the primacy of love and the brotherhood of man, or of
having realized the reality of life that transcends temporal death

greater spontaneity of emotional expression, reduction in depression and anxiety, less
distance in interpersonal relations, more openness to experience, increased aesthetic
appreciation, deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life, and an enhanced sense of unity
with nature and humanity

originating in the transpersonal realm of the human psyche: the interest in ontological and
cosmological problems; an abundance of archetypal themes and mythological sequences;
encounters with deities of different cultures; ancestral, phylogenetic memories; the
experiential world of extrasensory perception and other paranormal phenomena (These
things are seen with the eyes closed.)

through into another dimension…billions-of-protein-file-cards, flicking through,
confronting me with endless library of events, forms, visual perceptions, memories, not
abstract, but pulsing…now…experiential…a billion years of coded experience, classified,
preserved in brilliant, living clarity that makes ordinary reality seem like an out-of-focus,
tattered, jerky, fluttering of peep-show cards, tawdy and worn. (eyes closed)

a beneficial, educational and growth-enhancing experience
a captivating experience
a contemplative or open-sensed attitude to experience
a conversion experience of the most radical nature
a corrective experience
a deep comforting experience
a deep out-of-the-mind experience
a deep personal experience of the transcendental realms
a deep trans-ego experience
a deeper experience than just looking at the thing
a direct experience of the Self
a direct experience of the whole man at every level of his being
a direct, immediate, incontrovertible experience of the Mysterium, the sacred
a dramatic mind-opening experience
a great experience, the most beautiful experience
a great intensification of light and color experienced with eyes opened or closed
a journey to the inner world, the endless possibilities of the experience
a level of reality which he had never experienced before
a life-changing experience
a major transformative experience
a more comprehensive level of experience marked by a cleansing process
a mysterious, wondrous experience
a mystical or conversion experience
a mystical state, the unification of all immediate experience with “God”
a mystical totality experience
a new and exciting experience
a new dimension of experience
a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and feeling
a new domain of experience
a new experience which will enlarge our horizon and give new meaning to life
a new idea based on a new experience
a new kind of experience to offer an answer to man’s ills
a new perceptual experience
a non-conceptual, experiential philosophy
a potentially valuable personal experience
a powerful means of mediating experiences of other realities
a profound aesthetic experience contemplating a bowl of cherry jello
a profound and meaningful experience of certain realities that are alien to our culture
a profound experience of “cosmic consciousness”
a profound transformative experience of a transcendental nature
a progressive deepening of the emotional tone of the experience
a reality that is beyond human knowledge but nevertheless can be experienced directly
a religion of immediate experience
a rich and rewarding experience
a sense of reality beyond anything ever experienced or imagined previously
a sense of rebirth beyond anything ever experienced or imagined previously
a single experience which is so profound and impressive
a soul shattering experience
a state of intenser, more significant experience
a transforming experience, one that profoundly and beneficially changes the person
a translation of everyday experience into something of the same as music
a transpersonal state that transcends ordinary limits of human experience
a tremendous experience
a universal experience free from culturally determined interpretations
a very profound and liberating experience
a whole experience, a true fulfillment
a wonderfully rewarding experience
a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas
accelerated-brain experience
aesthetic experience very beautiful and inspiring
aesthetic experiences on philosophical issues
aesthetic realms of experience
alterations in visual experience
amazed at the whole religious content of his experience
an adventure, an exploration of new dimensions of experience
an adventurous journey into new worlds of mental and physical experience
an ecstatic conversion experience
an enhancement of the relationship with the person who is conducting the experience
an exceptionally powerful sexual experience
an experience beyond time, of union with the divine Ground
an experience in the totality of living
an experience in which consciousness itself undergoes a remarkable change
an experience, not a set of ideas. No one’s mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.
an experience of a deeper, duality-surmounting reality
an experience of exceptional clarity
an experience of God or the Godhead
an experience of great beauty
an experience of intense self-knowledge
an experience of mystical being
an experience of overwhelming cosmic ecstasy
an experience of psychic integration
an experience of radical liberation
an experience of rebirth
an experience of significant value
an experience of the divine
an experience of the most enlightening kind
an experience of the present
an experience of transcendental beauty
an experience that can be appreciated regardless of intellectual or intelligence level
an experience that is felt to define ultimate reality: boundless, timeless and ineffable
an experience vividly real
an experience which occurs almost universally
an experiential knowledge of a tradition
an experiential phenomenon
an extremely powerful and moving experience
an extremely profound and important experience
an immediate intuitive experience
an increase in the range of experience
an indescribably joyous experience
an innate human drive to experience periodic episodes of nonordinary consciousness
an inner experience of the beauty and the joy of God
an intense and glorious experience
an intense experience of cosmic unity
an opportunity to experience oneself and the world in a new way—and to learn from it
an ultimately enriching experience
an unprecedented experience of unimaginable intensity
archetypal experiences (eyes closed)
are tripping and having fantastically beautiful experiences
areas of experiencing capable of revealing the true basis of our earthly existence
authentic experience
authentic experiential truth
awesome and luminous experience
bathing oneself in sensuous experience, a beautiful warm sea of feeling
beauty and truth being the wholeness, the Suchness of all deeply realized experience
being one with the body and with the whole realm of natural experience
beyond anything ever experienced or imagined
beyond the periphery of normal human experience
biochemical keys which unlock experiences shatteringly new to most Westerners
called this experience the most interesting and thought-provoking of his life
can be a very profound and valuable experience
can enjoy music and art during the experience with a new and deeper appreciation
can enlarge our experience greatly
can experience a wide spectrum of extreme emotions and behave in most unusual ways
can experience overwhelming streams of energy
can modify the experience of physical pain in many different ways
can open possibilities of enriched experience
chemically triggered conversion experiences or ecstasies
completely experiencing his senses
complex experiential pattern of oceanic ecstasy
complex inner experience
death a continuation of what had been the hidden aspect of the experience of life
deep experiential self-exploration
deep, profound and moving experience
deep, shattering, spiritual conversion experiences
deepened experience
deeply positive and liberating experiences
different experiential realms and aspects of reality
different types and levels of experiences
dimensions of human experience and the human mind
direct and immediate experience we usually cloud over with game-playing
direct experience of the basic energy of life
direct experience of the Beyond
direct experiential knowledge of the evolutionary process
direct, uninhibited experiencing
discovered and experienced feelings of cosmic unity
discovers a different way of experiencing the world
drug-induced, brain-change experiences
each time, awed by religious revelations as shattering as the first experience
ecstatic experience
ecstatic experiences of the here and now
emphasizing concrete experience rather than theoretical construction or belief
energized from his experience (being energized as a result of his experience)
existential experience of a deeper, self-encompassing reality
experience a deep reverential attitude to the divine
experience a flood of new worlds
experience a glimpse of the pure truth
experience as “knowledgeless understanding, luminous bliss”
experience of awakening to our “original inseparability” with the universe
experience of having no body
experience of profound transcendence
experience of that which belongs to a different order
experience revelations about the life process
experience some of the wealth and reservoirs which lie within him
experience that special epic-mystery excitement
experience the “inner identity” between ourselves and the world
experience the source level of reality
experience their own divinity and attain profound insights into the nature of reality
experienced a deep level of enlightenment
experienced a deep reverential attitude to the divine
experienced a glimpse of the pure truth
experienced a psychic rebirth
experienced a surge of energy, closely followed by a feeling of intense mental acuity
experienced an intense awareness of God’s presence, a conversation with God
experienced that expansion of feeling
experienced this heightening of intrinsic significance
experiences a tension-free, oceanic ecstasy
experiences deep religious emotion
experiences direct sensation, the raw “is-ness”
experiences eternal bliss
experiences far beyond the narrow limits of words and concepts
experiences for which our language has no vocabulary
experiences involving archetypal realms of different cultures in the world (eyes closed)
experiences of “cosmic consciousness” in which the sense of life becomes perfectly clear
experiences of divine inspiration
experiences of higher values
experiences of merging with another person into a state of dual unity
experiences of mythical heroes and landscapes (eyes closed)
experiences of other realities
experiences of rebirth and cosmic unity
experiences of the divine that are the living fount of all religion
experiences of the quality and intensity typical of early childhood
experiences of the “transcendent divine”
experiences of the world as a system of total harmony and glory
experiences sensations more intense than any he has known
experiences so overwhelming, so incomprehensible to normal waking consciousness
experiences so rich and complex in physical sensations and emotions
experiences that do not conform to everyday reality and defy rational explanation
experiences that elude rational comprehension altogether
experiencing an important revelation
experiencing divine truths
experiencing insights that resulted in positive changes in their lives
experiencing of historical events and evolutionary processes (eyes closed)
experiencing that full force of grand joyousness
experiencing the emotions aroused by music
experiencing the “inner light”
experiencing the magical dimensions of the here and now, the ever-widening Present
experiencing the mystical unity of all creation
experiential contact with the Divine Process
experiential identification with the Universal Mind
experiential journeys into the underworld, the otherworld
experiential religion
exploring and mapping new realms of internal experience
exploring and mapping new realities of internal experience
exploring new areas of experience
extremely intense and unusual experiences
facilitating a deep transformative experience of a transcendental nature
fantastic visions of radiant sources of light experienced as divine, heavenly, magnificent
far beyond the limits of ordinary human experience
fascinating inner experiences
felt immersed in a warm, golden glow and experienced herself as loving and being loved
free experiential flow
free the brain to experience direct-raw-naked-nerve-ending sensation
full experience of the present moment and present location
full, unselected experiencing of whatever surfaces during the drug sessions
fully liberating experiences
God, the ultimate reality, not an idea conceived but a reality experienced
had an experience that completely turned his life around
has experienced the unity of all things in mystical vision
has greatly enriched our experience
have declared it to be the most significant experience of their lives
heightened attention to immediate sensory experience
his experience of the range and intensity of light and color perception
his experiencing of universal harmony
immediate experiences which in fact are the only experiences of beauty
immensely exciting experience of infancy—the age of the non-talker
important experiential quality
infinite combinations of experiential images
inspirational experiences
intense and dramatic emotional experiences
intense conviction that the experience will be highly meaningful and highly therapeutic
intensely realized experience
intensification of aesthetic experience
intensifications of present experience and abolition of perceptual and sensual inhibitions
intensities of experience
internal travel to new experiences
intuitive experiential evidence
life-changing growth experiences
like a glimpse beyond the boundary of human experience
LSD a new experience, a new beginning
LSD an enhancer of experience
LSD, the universal experience
may reveal possibilities of experience which the subject did not know existed at all
meaningful whole experiences
metaphysical knowledge the most immediate kind of experience
mixture of senses, sounds experienced as colors
mystery that can only be experienced directly
neurologic or neurophysics, the “scientizing” of internal experiences
new, beautiful and significant experiences
new dimensions of experience
new experiences of the reaches of consciousness
new experiences which were not like anything they had ever imagined before
new experiential realms
new insights provided by consciousness expanding experiences
new modes of awareness, new modes of experiencing and perceiving
new modes of experiencing
new ways of being and experiencing
night and day sessions—some say night experiences richer and deeper
nourishing experiences
novel experiences which “break through” stereotypes
of such unimaginable experiential dimensions
one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers
opening more and more realms of experience and revelation
our strong cultural programming against such experiences
peak-experiences of everlasting value
personal experiences of spiritual realities
potential for experiencing more widely and richly
powerful mind-blowing experiences that shatter conventional ideas about reality
profound and deeply moving experiences
profound healing and life-transforming experiences
progressive deepening of the emotional tone of the experience
psychic realities experienced during altered states of consciousness
pure experience, pure awareness
remains alertly conscious during the experience
rich and dramatic experiences
rich drug experiences
rich experiences
richer creative experience
richly rewarding experiences
richness of experience
soar off into these new sensory realms of human experience
spirituality a matter of personal experience rather than something heard or read about
spontaneous insights in new experiences
strange experiential territory
such a fabulous experience
such extraordinary experiential domains
taught me experientially what awe is
that altered states of consciousness included the highest forms of human experience
that rare, deep experience which men have sought for thousands of years
that Universal Reality is pure consciousness which is experienced in perfect bliss
the authenticity of the experience
the awareness of feelings which surpass your normal experience
the awesome and amazing experience of LSD
the blissful egoless states a child experiences during the early period of its life
the blissful experience of self-transcendence
the central experience of reality from which religions originally arose
the “central experience that alters all others”
the changing flux of experience
the concept of religion as mysticism or vivid inner experience of Ultimate Reality
the consciousness-expansion experience—the pre-mortem death and rebirth rite
the conversion experience
the cosmic sensation I experienced
the creative transcendental nature of the experience
the crucial importance of drug-induced “far-reaching insight experiences”
the culminating experience of a lifetime, man’s redemption from death
the deep and profound experiences released by LSD
the depth and intensity of the experiences
the depths of such experience
the direct experience of the spiritual Ground of things
the direct experience of their own inner life (or your inner life)
the discovery of this ancient and universal experience
the discovery of this apparently ancient and universal experience
the drug experience a means to a fuller existence, to a life more innately human
the ecstasy, elation and joy characteristic of such experiences
the ecstatic death-and-rebirth experience
the ecstatic experience
the ecstatic experience of a mystical nature
the ego, standing apart from the immediate feeling or experience
the emotional power and meaningfulness of the experience
the endless possibilities of the experience
the enhancement of immediate experience
the enhancement of inner experience
the enormous expansion of his or her experiential world
the enormous expansion of the experiential world
the enormous range of potential experiences
the enormous significance of the experience for one who undergoes it
the enormous spiritual force that is active during an awakening experience
the enormously rich and varied range of experience open to the psychedelic subject
the essentially religious nature of the experience
the experience in which eternity takes root in the waking state
the experience of awakening or enlightenment (insight)
the experience of awakening, timeless and universal
the experience of being liberated from themselves
the experience of beyond ego
the experience of boundless being
the experience of consciousness located in some part of the body, like in a fingertip
the experience of cosmic unity
the experience of death and rebirth, union with the universe or God
the experience of direct energy
the experience of God
the experience of our own existence as living organisms rather than as personalities
the experience of psychological death
the experience of revelation
the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the universe
the experience of such totally comprehensive wisdom
the experience of the other side (Break on through to the other side.)
the experience of the spiritual
the experience of total ecstasy
the experience of tremendous light
the experience of true insight
the experience of union with the Great Mother
the experience of unusual realities
the experience, the immediate knowledge of its being so
the experience which, I find, has thrown a great deal of light on all kinds of things
the experience with its richness and transformative potency
the “experiencing of reality”
the experiential reality behind the many myths
the experiential territories that were made available through the catalyzing action of LSD
the fantastic experiential explosions induced by psychedelics
the flavor and dimensions of such experiences
the flood of inner experience
the flow of direct sensation-experience
the flux of experience
the full power of the experience
the fullness of experience of a single minute
the great experience, a value experience
the immediacy and “ultimate truth” of the experience
the immediate experience of the world as beauty, mystery and unity
the immediate experience of the world as beauty, as mystery and as unity
the immensity of the experience
the importance of a true experience of the Divine
the incomparable uniqueness of the experience
the increase in intensity of sensory experience
the incredible amount of experience a few minutes could contain
the insight that suspension of defenses is a liberating experience
the inspiration of direct experience
the intensely clear experience
the intensification of aesthetic experience
the intensification of sexual experience and the potentiation of sexual ecstasy by LSD
the intensity of my experience of the state of love
the leap from three-dimensional to multidimensional perception and experience
the learning experience when high
the liberation experience
the life-changing therapeutic effects of the psilocybin experience
the living reality, knowable only by personal experience
the magic of this spectacular experience
the magnificence, splendor and grandeur of this experience
the miracle he has experienced
the most astounding experience of my life
the most creative and the most satisfying experience possible
the most enlightening of all human experience
the most exciting educational experience of your life
the most important experience of his life
the most important, profound and intense experience of his life
the most profound and moving experience of my life
the most profound educational experience in my life
the most profound human experiences
the most profoundly consuming aesthetic experience I have ever had
the most remarkable experience of my life
the mysterious center of experience
the mystical nature of many experiences in nonordinary states of consciousness
the mythological roots of these experiences and their connection to human history
the new insights provided by consciousness-expanding experiences
the newness and uniqueness of the experience
the novel and immensely exciting experience of infancy—the age of the non-talker
the opportunity to experience death without actually dying
the overwhelming experience of his senses
the overwhelming immediate nature of the experience
the positive nature and potential of peak experiences
the potency of the drugs and the range of the experiences they afford
the potential therapeutic value of these transformative experiences
the powerful experience which is religious in its essence
the prismatic, climactic, revealing experience which LSD promises and fulfills
the pure experience of the present moment
the pure experience of the present moment in this world here and now
the pure flame of unified experience
the quality of the experience
the range and individual variability of the experience
the realm of nonverbal experience, reality as we perceive it directly
the richness and variety of the experience
the richness of our perceptual experience
the richness of sensory experiences
the richness of the aesthetic experience
the sensory experience more vivid and more detailed
the special experience
the spectrum of experiences induced by psychedelic compounds
the speed, breadth and shuttling flow of the experience
the spiritual intensity and emotional power of the experiences
the stream of experience
the superior truth of the “cosmic” experience
the therapeutic potential of experiences of mystical consciousness
the therapeutic significance of the ego death and rebirth experience
the total experiential fusion of mystic unity
the transcendent experience
the translation of symbol into living experience
the ultimate experience
the ultimate liberation experience
the ultimate meanings of the experience
the ultimate of all experiences
the ultimate sexual-sensual experience
the unique experience of “looking inside” himself
the unique quality of the experience
the uniqueness of the experiences which occur
the unitive experience
the “unitive” experience of the mystic, the transformed sense of the self
the unity of inner experience
the universality of this experience
the various levels and types of experience manifested in psychedelic sessions
the vastness of the experience
the whole range of possible experience
the world of unlimited experience
these new experiences
this awe-inspiring experience
this brave new world of sensory experience
this complicated experience
this ecstatic brain-opening experience
this experiential pattern
this extraordinary experience of self-discovery under LSD
this intensity of experiencing
this language-transcending experience
this sense of the supreme importance of a moment of heightened experience
those deeper levels where the more rewarding and transformative experiences occur
those unknown realms of experience opened up by psychedelic drugs
to enrich their religious life experientially
to experience a condensed replay of their entire lives
to experience a cosmic benevolence
to experience himself and the world about him in a positive, creative manner
to experience his body in a delightful way
to experience his sense modalities to their fullest possible limits
to experience intense touch-pleasure
to experience multiple realities
to experience new emotions
to experience reality in its fullness and wholeness
to experience something underlying all experiences
to experience the ecstatic unitive states that have the greatest therapeutic potential
to experience the phenomenal world in all its infinite richness
to experience the reality behind humanity’s religious beliefs
to experience the truth
to experience the world in terms of the Einsteinian exponential view of the universe
to experience this universal spirit
to explore a greater range of experience more intensely
to go beyond all symbols to a direct experience of the basic fact of the divine immanence
to heighten ecstatic experience
to see and feel what you are experiencing as it is and not as it is named
to understand the meaning not only intellectually, but organically, experimentally
Total Human Experience
true experience of the infinite within us
undifferentiated and intuitive experiences with a great potential for healing and integration
unusual exotic and stimulating experiences
unusual experiences of a spiritual nature
vast experiences and insights via LSD
vivid cosmic-consciousness experience
vividly experienced memories of his childhood
what lies beyond our experience
who live at a different level as the result of extraordinary internal experiences
will regard this experience as one of the most profoundly meaningful events of his life
will travel freely through many worlds of experience