Music

A particular tune (music) may have a specific biographical meaning that can elicit quite
unexpected responses from the subject.

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

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

Frequently, music seems to resonate in different parts of the body and to trigger powerful
emotions.

It appears to be possible to listen to music with one’s whole being and with a completely
new approach.

It is as though all previous hearing of music had been deafness. The music seems to play
in you.

It is often possible to facilitate the emergence of a certain emotional quality by a specific
choice of music.

Just as any object can become the essence of all energy, any note of music can be sensed
as naked energy trembling in space, timeless.

Like breathing, music and other forms of sound technology have been used for millennia
as powerful mind-altering tools.

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

Many LSD subjects discover in their sessions new dimensions in music and new ways of
listening to it.

Men long ago, in ages however primeval, realized Beauty, and answered back its thrill
with gladness and hymns.

Music, dancing, rhythm—all these are art forms which have no goal other than
themselves.

Music has several important functions and adds more dimensions to the psychedelic
experience.

Music is often helpful in establishing certain emotional moods and thereby aids the
subject in letting his feelings come out.

music played on an organ—As leaves seem to gesture, the organ seems quite literally to
speak.

Not infrequently, LSD subjects discover dimensions in music that they were unable to
perceive before.

Ordinary language refers to life, but music is living. Live in the mode of music instead of
the mode of language.

Pieces of music with which I thought I was thoroughly familiar, having heard them
hundreds of times before, I hear as if for the first time during an LSD trip.

Rock musicians are consciously and deliberately attempting by music to raise the
spiritual level of their listeners. (That was written in 1968.)

Some of the highest spirits of the West have spoken through music, expressing through
sound something of the upper reaches of consciousness.

The archives of cultural anthropology contains countless examples of extraordinary
trance-inducing instrumental music, chanting and dancing.

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 processes of nature are like the arts of music and dancing, which unfold themselves
without aiming at future destinations.

The psychedelic style involves a resolution in our concepts of art and creativity, the new
music, the new poetry, the new visual art, the new film.

The singing is good, but under the influence of the mushroom, you think it is infinitely
tender and sweet. It is as though you were hearing it with your mind’s ear.

The unique perception of color and forms, as well as the overwhelming influence of
music, frequently mediate a new understanding of art and artistic movement.

They shouldn’t be considered drugs at all, but should be classed with poetry, music,
literature and art.

Through music, I am aware of an occasional surge of inspiration and insight that has
become a dynamic element in whatever creativity I may possess.

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.

You hear music way off in a cavern and suddenly it is you who is way down in the
cavern.

A child sees his first bright red ball, tastes his first piece of chocolate, smells his first
flower, touches his first piece of velvet and hears his first few notes of music in a manner
not unlike that of the individual under LSD.

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.

Aesthetic responses are greatly heightened, colors seem more intense, textures richer,
contours sharpened, music more emotionally profound, the spatial arrangements of
objects more meaningful.

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.”

As all great musicians have insisted and as anybody who has listened to music with
understanding agrees, music has some kind of cognitive meaning. It does say something
about the nature of the universe. Beethoven insisted on this very strongly.

Every cell in your body is singing its song of freedom—the entire biological universe is
in harmony, liberated from the censorship and control of you and your restricted
ambitions.

For the perception of art, particularly music, it is not infrequent that as a result of
psychedelic experiences, nonmusical persons develop vivid interest in music and others
discover entirely new ways of experiencing it.

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?

Music seems to serve several important functions in the context of psychedelic therapy. It
tends to evoke a variety of powerful emotions and facilitates deeper involvement in the
psychedelic process.

One of the most common statements one reads in subjects’ reports about LSD sessions
refers to the feeling that on the session day, they really heard music for the first time in
their life.

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.

Shapes devoid of content could produce feelings of meaning in the same way that
unusual notes in a pattern seemingly devoid of content, can convey very specific images
and emotions.

Sound and music seem to represent direct manifestations of the cosmic order. (This refers
to sound and music within yourself, internally, that only you hear, but it can also refer to
sound and music in the external world that everyone who is there can hear.)

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.)

This new psychedelic style has produced not only a new rhythm in modern music, but a
new decor for our discotheques, a new form of film making, a new kinetic visual art, a
new literature and has begun to revise our philosophic and psychological thinking.

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 you are seeing and what you are hearing appear as one, the music assumes
harmonious shapes, giving visual form to its harmonies and what you are seeing takes on
the modalities of music.

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.

Adventurous painters and musicians discovered that LSD was a catalyst, an impetus to
startling new rearrangements of vision, to a bubbling, ecstatic, seemingly inexhaustible
pool of images and ideas, to a new-old kind of harmony between the artist and the
medium.

It’s a battle of lifestyles. It’s the lovers versus the salesmen of junk. It’s the poets versus
the manufacturers of crap. It’s the dancers versus the bringers of war. It’s the
songmakers, the earth tenders, the new gardeners of Eden versus the military/industrial
complex. And beware, my friends, they are relentless.

Just as photographic chemicals bring to light the picture already imprinted on the film,
the psychedelic chemicals have, in actual practice, introduced many people to an
appreciation of music, a capacity for art or a sensitivity to poetry that was there but which
they never dreamed they had.

We can use music as a remembrance of the different facets of consciousness that we want
to evoke. (Music can be associated with an experience or a state of consciousness.
Hearing that same music can trigger a remembrance of that experience or state of
consciousness. Similarly, music can be associated with a person.)

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.

Certain physical stimuli from the environment can change the session in a very dramatic
way. This may be observed in connection with certain accidental sounds; thus barking of
a dog, sound of a jet, explosion of fireworks, factory or ambulance sirens or a particular
tune may have a specific biographical meaning that can elicit quite unexpected responses
from the subject.

Sensory perceptions become especially brilliant and intense. Normally unnoticed aspects
of the environment capture the attention; ordinary objects are seen as if for the first time
and acquire new depth of significance. Aesthetic responses are greatly heightened; colors
seem more intense, textures richer, contours sharpened, music more emotionally
profound, the spatial arrangements of objects more meaningful.

The work of many artists—painters, musicians, writers and poets—who participated in
LSD experimentation in various countries of the world has been deeply influenced by
their psychedelic experiences. Most of them found access to deep sources of inspiration
in their unconscious mind, experienced a striking enhancement and unleashing of fantasy
and reached extraordinary vitality, originality and freedom of artistic expression.

We may feel that we are really seeing the world for the first time in our lives. Everything
around us, even the most ordinary and familiar scenes, seems unusually exciting and
stimulating. People report entirely new ways of appreciating and enjoying their loved
ones, the sound of music, the beauties of nature and the endless pleasures that the world
provides for our senses.

Composers given the drug discovered that they had greater insight into music.
Dante described the song of the angels in heaven as “the laughter of the universe.”
Existence is basically a kind of dancing or music, an immensely complex energy pattern.
External objects dance and sing.
God is a singing, swinging energy process Who likes to laugh and make love.
Life is a song. Life is beautiful. Life is the golden dream.
Listening to the music and seeing the visions, you know a soul shattering experience.
More and more, it seems that the ordering of nature is an art akin to music.
Music became a language of heads. (potheads and acidheads)
Music can assume a previously inconceivable emotional and aesthetic intensity.
Music can develop into a euphoric experience.
Music frequently becomes an absorbing delight, even to the nonmusical.
Music has added dimensions.
Music intensifies and deepens the process.
Music is an essential part of psychedelic psychotherapy.
Music is heard with increased fidelity and dimension.
Music is pure play.
Music may produce visions of color.
Music produces emotional states.
Prose is talk. Poetry is music, musical-emotional more than conceptual-mental.
Psychedelic art is expressive of an inner rhythm like that of music.
Surrendering can be greatly facilitated by music.
The experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, music.
The music seems to play in you.
The subject listening to music may become completely absorbed in the experience.
The walls change color with the music.
The world does not point to a meaning beyond itself. It is like pure music.
There is a potential contemplative dimension in music.
There is such a thing as music therapy.
This is truly a wonderful world of infinitely variable colors, forms, music.
Under LSD, music seems to have an immediate and powerful impact on one’s emotions.
Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection.
You see music-like dancing particles and see sound in multicolored patterns.

He and the room take on the quality of the music, erotic, the deep mystery of images
complete in themselves.

I see centuries and all of the glory and tragedy of man. Everything is in this music (eyes
closed).

I feel the music flowing uncontrollably through our bodies.

music—That passage is so sweet that I can taste it. That stream sounds like orange.

The stars are as big as huge diamonds—gleaming, sparkling, singing.

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

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

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

He could distinguish the exact notes played by each of two different violinists, both
playing the same part and both in the middle of the full orchestra.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the playing of the record I felt myself being swept along by the movement of the
words, as if the meaning were coming through directly to me and the meaning itself was
a movement, a dynamic flow which carried me along as if on a journey.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

A subject who had “almost no sense of smell” was invited to try to smell a lemon. He
was told to “smell the lemon in the music.” At once, the subject declared himself able to
“hear the smell.” Then he said he could smell the lemon in the music. Then he was able
to smell the lemon directly.

At the end of the record, I felt that I had been on a long journey and that I had come to
my destination. My guides came to me and welcomed me into this “brave new world.” I
felt that I had reached the psychedelic shore and enjoyed the wonderful things around me.
I felt joyous and deeply related to everything, as if I were part of a whole. It was a sense
of total relatedness and involvement, bringing with it a sense of joy, peace and wonder.

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

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.

Celestial chords were trembling up into their sublime fullness.
Colored forms swayed to the music.
For the first time, his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed.
He heard music like that which Beethoven “may have heard in dreams, but never wrote.”
He saw “miracle,” heard “holy music.”
His “insight” was induced by music.
I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it.
I had never heard music in this manner before.
I was able to detect which note came from one violin and which from the other.
I was not…listening to a recording, but…was the music itself.
I’ve never listened to music like this before. I’ve never heard music like this before.
Instead of just my ears hearing the music, all my senses seemed to encompass the sound.
It seems I fused with the music and was transported on it.
music—The sound flowed through every fiber of my body.
My breathing and train of thought had a strong correlation with the music.
She felt like she was being carried upward and held by the music.
Slowly, the music seemed to absorb all my consciousness.
The music became very profound, or my feeling became so.
The music burst through the walls and overwhelmed him.
The music carried and sustained me.
The music flowed through me.
The music he had heard a hundred times before, had been reborn.
The music pulsed through me, striking my very organs at their core.
The music rolled on in orgiastic waves of sound and color.
The music seemed like a celestial melody.
The music seemed more beautiful than any kind I had ever heard before.
The music seemed multidimensional, very beautiful.
The music seemed to take over the direction of the experience.
The music sounded divine.
The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments.
The music wove me into a cocoon and I burst out as a butterfly.
The rhythm of the music became outbursts of beauty.
The visions were influenced in content by the music.
The woods were vocal with heavenly music.
Throughout everything, the music seemed an intrinsic part of the experience.

a golden chance to tune in, to break through, to glorify, to really groove and dance with
God’s great song

a keen appreciation of the beauty of the music, my surroundings and myself, although
without egotism

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

awesome beyond-musical choruses that surged to holy crescendos of sound and then
receded to equally holy silence

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

music which provoked intense pleasure sensations as if each nerve end were being
simultaneously stimulated

the cultivation of the inner life in response to the hunger for expression of the nonrational
aspects of the psyche, new forms of music, art, poetry, dance, mysticism

the purest of soul-searching, high-classic, rock-concert music, the sound of the
miraculous space between eternity—between paradise

a music that was at once primordial and future bound
a “musical” conception of the world in which order is dynamic and changing
a richer music
a transition of everyday experience into something of the same as music
a wondrously beautiful heaven of visual imagery and music
aesthetic, emotional, psychological, physiological and biochemical effects of music
all forms dancing to the nuclear tune
can enjoy music and art during the experience with a new and deeper appreciation
can enhance appreciation of art and music
change in time sense listening to music
discovering entirely new ways of listening to music
environmental stimuli like music
experiencing the emotions aroused by music
inspiring music
listening to music, discovering entirely new dimensions in pieces that he knew quite well
magic lights and music
music a source of insight
music an important unifying and deepening element in the sessions
music and love and beauty and serenity and fun and the seed of life
music refined to its ultimate ethereal spirit
music so soul satisfying
music to create rhythmical patterns of incredible richness
music to fill the new spaces in one’s mind that drugs unlocked
music very helpful for mood change
Plato’s idea of the “musical unconscious” or as he called it, “the spiritual unconscious”
psychedelic drugs inspiring talented musicians to create new kinds of work
the effects on the release of creative potential in artists, writers and musicians
the essentially musical and dancing spirit of the universe, the musical quality of nature
the extensive use of music for ritual, healing and spiritual purposes
the extreme clarity and beauty of the music
the extraordinary potential of music for psychotherapy
the glorious rapture of music
the magic of music
the most heavenly music I have ever heard in my entire life, incredible beautiful
the music and the passion and energy pouring into the room
the music, the vast music
the musical or dancelike character of the world
the musical vibration of the world
the secret messages of glorious sexual liberation spread by rock and roll
the sound-textures of various musical instruments
this rapture of music
to go deeper into myself through the music
what true pop music is all about, the obliteration of thought for sensation