Twenty-five seconds after the infusion was complete, he began groaning, I love, I love . . . His blood pressure rose moderately, but his heart rate jumped to 140 beats per minute, up from his resting level of 65. This increase in pulse is equivalent to that which might occur after racing up three or four flights of stairs. But in this case, Philip hadn't moved an inch. At 1 minute, Philip sat up, looking at Cindy and me with saucer-sized eyes. His pupils were hugely dilated. His movements were automatic, jerky, puppetlike. There seemed to be "no one home" behind Philip's actions. He leaned toward Robin and stroked her hair: I love, I love . . . Twice that morning, then: a volunteer in a dazed DMT state, attracted to a woman's hair. Nils to Cindy's, Philip to Robin's. Perhaps it was the most powerful image of living, organic, familiar reality available when one looked around a dreary hospital room in such a highly psychedelic state. To our relief, he laid back down without prompting or assistance. His skin was cold and clammy, as had been Nils's. His body was in a classic "fight-or-fiight" reaction: high blood pressure and heart rate, blood moving from the skin deeper into the vital internal organs, but all while he was performing almost no actual physical activity. It was difficult to draw Philip's blood — the high levels of stress hormones caused the tiny muscles lining the veins to clamp down, reducing unnecessary blood flow to the skin. At 10 minutes, Philip began to sigh, How beautiful, how beautiful! Tears began streaming down his cheeks. Now that was what you would call a transcendent experience. I died and went to heaven. By 30 minutes after the injection, his pulse and blood pressure were normal. It was flying within a vastness. There was no relative space or size. I asked, "What did you feel when your breath caught in your throat?" I felt a cold, contracting feeling in my throat. It frightened me. I thought maybe I would stop breathing. The thought, "Let go, surrender, let go," was therefor a split second, then the rush of the drug swept even that away. "Do you recall sitting up and stroking Robin's hair?" I did what?

" “The most pronounced aspect of this session is her archetypal regression into the realm of antiquity and to the very beginnings of humanity,” Hausner later wrote.1 “Hana is beginning to formulate a new attitude toward death and eternity.” " At first, the experience was unpleasant, like she was being watched on a stage. But soon members of the community started violently arguing with each other—and Hana was flooded with empathy. “I am actually beginning to understand and to relate to people,” Hana wrote in her diary. “I can see and understand the reason for the things they do, and I don’t hate them anymore! Poor doctor. He’s got so many children. How can he cope with it all?” "

I saw such strange dreams, but at the beginning only.... I saw strange creatures, dwarves or something, they were black and moved about. [[1]]

The discomfort is also what made it so powerful, like when I felt this extreme connection to nature and “this is all that matters,” I was sobbing. But it felt so good to cry about it.

What Ian described as the “typical psychedelic” part of his experience involved “traditional psychedelic visual effects” and occurred about halfway through his experience. One particularly salient effect he described was being able to “see the music in 3D,” noting “It’s beyond what you can explain. But I could kind of stop it [the music] and look at it from 360°...in a way you could stop time and look at music kind of stretched out as time.” […] One of the most significant aspects of the experience was the presence of a light, which was always with him. Ian said “all the way through that trip, when I encountered something difficult or scary, or something I couldn't push through, I could always look up to see a light.” Most of the time, the light seemed to be partially obscured by an opaque screen, however at a pivotal moment in the experience – what Ian described as the “mystical” part – the screen disappeared and the light “broke through.” When this happened, Ian heard a female voice say “you are not alone” and with this voice came a “feeling of love that is everywhere,” a sense of “togetherness,” and what he believes was an ego dissolution experience. Ian described a “very strong experience of not being alone ... the certainty of not being alone and this feeling of light and love that was shining through everything ... everywhere.” Ian described this feeling of love as both flowing through him and flowing from him, and said that he could “send out” this love to other people in the room.

I had seen my mother in labor pains. She was sitting on the bed with her head hanging down. She looked awful; I somehow sensed that something important and maybe wonderful was about to happen. The midwife examined the entrance. I was horrified at the amount of stretching that I saw and presently the baby's head began to force its way out. I felt in pain myself. I felt as if my nether regions were being stretched. I think I must have passed out because when I looked again the baby was born, and I saw the large gaping hole between my mother's legs which was oozing blood. I felt a sense of emptiness and I did not know whether it was my emptiness or my mother's emptiness.

I was paralyzed, as if watching all of this through a glass pane...with all my consciousness vanished and my body disintegrated while I allowed the bagpipes to seize my nerves...

Charles: Then Mother Ayahuasca comes again and is like “It's time to die.” I'm like, “What do you mean it's time to die?” “It's time to die.” I'm like, “I don't want to die.” And she is saying, “Well, this next process, you're going to have to die.” And so, I was interpreting it like an ego death, like you're going to die to yourself today. And so, I remember once I surrendered to it, because I was resistant a little bit and then I had surrendered to it and said, “Okay, all right let's die then.”

Arab-Palestinian woman from Israel: “The frequency of the words and the letters and also where the person is singing from - it affects the listeners, who understand nothing of the letters or the words but they feel the frequency, and it’s like wow, who is singing, what is this?”

Arab-Palestinian woman from Israel: “You reach that point when you don’t see this as Jewish or Arabic ... there’s nothing, no language, no religion, no gender, nothing.

My father died of cancer this summer, and I had a long series of dreams in which I was aware that I was dreaming, and insisted that I didn’t want to wake up because I was talking to my father, telling him once more that I loved him, but he‘d insist that I wake up and accept that he was fine and had to go off on his long journey. In a dream I finally saw him off at the station and was relieved that he’d made the train: he’d delayed so long in saying goodbye that he’d almost missed his connections to go off to his wonderful vacation. That last dream was the last in the series.

Under the influence of psilocybin, one patient previously convinced that her power animal was a dove transformed into an eagle. For a while she danced the eagle in the office, fluttering her wings. In our subsequent integration sessions she wore a necklace with an eagle feather. She also developed from a dove into an eagle in her professional work, assuming leadership of a school in an appropriate and timely developmental step.

I have always looked at my dreams as being an ongoing story in which I have cast myself in the leading role. Things that happen in everyday life or on television or in a movie are molded into scenes for my “story.” Sometimes it can be a man that I have met. For the most part, my dreams are made up of situations that I would really like to happen in real life.

I put on chanting music and thought, ​“this is going to be sooo spiritual.” I shot it up. I immediately went into what I can only describe as a hyperspace. I was hurtling through this black hole that was made out of holograms and hieroglyphs. There were people sitting around me, maybe they weren’t human people but other living things. They chattered and fussed over me, and put long tubes into my head. It felt like they cared about me. Everything started to pixelate out and I was then floating towards this woman I can see in the distance. She’s gigantic, an indescribable scale. I opened my mouth and a million questions fell out really fast. She opened her mouth and I felt a wave of love and acceptance and appreciation. It just felt like pure unconditional love from this woman made of galaxies. Then I’m back in my room. With the needle still in my arm.

The Buddha said of his enlightenment, “Ignorance was destroyed; knowledge arose; darkness was destroyed; light arose—as happens in one who is heedful, ardent, and resolute.” On the night of his enlightenment underneath the bodhi tree near Bodh Gaya in India, the Buddha recalled his past lives, understood the workings of karma and rebirth, and saw the origin and ending of suffering. This understanding freed him from the cycle of death and rebirth and led to his most fundamental teachings: the four noble truths and the eightfold path.

I was flying through space with the spirit guide, and I encountered three people who are dead who were very close to me. My dad’s dad, my mom’s mom, and my best friend in college who died. And they all gave me reassuring messages in space. From my friend Tim, “I’m sorry for everything that has happened. I just wanted you to know I love you, man.” My grandfather gave me a hug, and my grandmother kissed me on the cheek. That was powerful.

"In this station that I was in, I saw light separated from him and a light that came from me. Both lights came forth and connected, and a beautiful form appeared, leaving me bewildered in this state for some time."

I was in a subway like the London tube system. I came to an escalator. The first three or four steps weren’t going. I figured I had to walk up. After I got up the first few steps, I found that it was working. I looked up toward the top and saw all this yellow machinery above the escalator. I realized that if I kept on going, I would be smashed by the machinery. I became frightened, and started to wake up. Then I said to myself, “No, I have to keep on going. I have to face it. Patty says I can’t wake up.” My heart began pounding and my palms sweating as I was carried nearer and nearer. I said, “This is bad for my heart,” but I kept on going. Nothing happened. Somehow I passed it and everything was all right.

“This new state is what the Easterns call Kaif. It is no longer the whirlwind or the tempest ; it is a calm and motionless bliss, a glorious resignèdness. Since long you have not been your own master ; but you trouble yourself no longer about that. Pain, and the sense of time, have disappeared; or if sometimes they dare to show their heads, it is only as transfigured by the master feeling, and they are then, as compared with their ordinary form, what poetic melancholy is to prosaic grief. it is but a bastard hallucination, and owes its being to the objects of the external world. The spirit is but a mirror where the environment is reflected, strangely transformed.”

I drank 400 milligrams of pure powdered mescaline sulfate dissolved in a glass of lukewarm tap water. The first sip convinced me that I was making a considerable sacrifice for the sake of science; the mixture tasted like warm vomit. We then waited for effects to begin. Two and a half hours later we were still waiting....The best I could report was that if I pressed forcibly on my closed eyes, the visual phosphenes, normally very dim, were perhaps 20 percent brighter than usual; this trivial effect hardly made up for the taste of the mixture. As a last resort, before calling it quits for the day, I drank another 100 milligrams of mescaline sulfate. A few minutes later the most extraordinary event happened. Quite suddenly the room, a dingy office in an old college building, resembled a cathedral of enormous size and beauty. The colors of the furnishings were incredibly beautiful, full of deep texture and hues I had never seen before. Small objects around the office were magnificent works of art. My friends were surrounded by beautiful colored rainbows: indeed, within a few minutes rainbows were floating through the air everywhere. It was only after reflecting on similar experiences later in life that I realized that I had gone from no effect at all to the peak of the psychedelic experience in less than a minute or two... To a student of psychology, the experience was fascinating beyond description. For example, it was the first time I really understood the concept of dissociation. To illustrate: at some point in the experiment one of my friends wanted me to do ESP tests, guessing at standard Zener cards. I had agreed to do this, but from my perspective at the time, I could not imagine a more trivial, uninteresting, and wholly inappropriate task. I resolved the problem by dissociating a part of my mind. It would generate the ESP symbols with no attentional involvement on my part and speak them aloud, as directed by the experimenter. After long intervals of exploring inner space I would occasionally check in and find that I was still dutifully calling ESP symbols, as I had agreed. The fact that a part of "me" could operate independently of "me" was quite clearly demonstrated. My ESP scores, incidentally, were at chance expectation… For me as a person, rather than simply a student of psychology, the most important thing about that first experience was that for the first time in my life I knew what the word "beauty" meant. True, I had spoken it thousands of times before, had pointed at objects I'd been taught to believe were beautiful and said the word in association with them, and had occasionally had vague, moderately positive feelings in connection with such objects. Now I understand that I had never even begun to penetrate what beauty was all about. While the incredible and intense immediate experience of beauty faded rapidly after the experiment, a door had been opened in my mind and senses that would never close completely.

For some strange reason nutmeg is a drug that seems to be used only in prison, and then only by the rare individual. I believe the reasons for this is that in the first place it is a revolting concoction to take. One has to have between six and eight tablespoonfuls. This is mixed into a mug of hot water. It is stirred frantically until the water turns a milky brown. Drinking this mixture is only the beginning. The nutmeg does not dissolve and the user then has to spoon the horrible bitterness into his rebellious stomach as quickly as possible. For the next half hour his stomach tries to get rid of it but heroically the user fights the nausea and doesn't vomit it back up. After approximately 45 minutes the user finds himself giggling in a silly manner at everything. Regardless what is said; what is done; what is thought; it all seems so ridiculously humorous. Anyone who has smoked marijuana has experienced this complete inability to control laughter at sometime. Some even have had this experience with LSD. After 30 to 60 minutes of this gut-tearing silliness the mouth and throat begin to dry up as though one had taken atropine. I believe the whole system becomes dehydrated because one may go 36 hours without a bowel movement or a desire to urinate. When the dehydration sets in then the laughter stops and a great lethargy creeps over one. Although one might think they'll lie down and read this is impossible because the eyes become dry, red, contracted to pinpoints and it's impossible to keep them open. The natural thing to do is lie down. A strange thing happens when one begins to 'coast' on nutmeg. I've taken it in solitary confinement where the bed was only the hard cement floor; and I've taken it where I had a comfortable bed and mattress to lie on. It didn't matter. Once the lethargy took over both felt like I was resting on a cloud. It seems that one has a tendency to lie flat on the back and the lethargy is so great not even a finger or a muscle will be moved unless forced to. It's when the drug really takes over that beautiful visions replace reality. These are usually very exotic visions. Mine, possibly because I lived in the Far East and still love it, immediately take me back to some tropical isle. But now is when the nutmeg begins to have many of the characteristics of an LSD session. The visions and dreams one experiences begin to lose their continuity and come in chunks of unrelated experiences. One may find his childhood becomes his reality except that it is invariably a happy childhood. Then his visions will jump into a whole vortex of revolving, unexplainable colors. Suddenly, as though it is coming from thousands of miles, music will take on such sweetness and lucidity and color that one becomes lost in it. You find yourself hung up on a bar and then hurry like hell to catch up with the rhythm and notes again. Usually the music you've been listening to is from the prison radio. Sometimes, just as in marijuana, one can hear a whole symphony played in the most exquisite manner when there's no music being played at all. Voices, speaking to you, are also part of the experience. Unlike both LSD and marijuana—I'm speaking only of my own experiences now—when someone speaks to me while in a nutmeg coma I can wrench myself back to reality and know what they're saying. The only problem is that it seems like ten minutes between their question and my answer and my speech is very slow and thick. Time loses all meaning just as in LSD. One also likes themselves when under nutmeg and almost becomes childlike in the ability to understand yourself and for­give yourself. The user becomes very sensual under its influence and although the effects are with him from 24 to 36 hours he usually has an erection most of the time. I've only taken it once when a free man and this was once I was very sick with a heroin habit. I got many of the same results as I did in prison except that the heroin sickness made it wear off quickly and I found I was ten times as sick after­wards with my habit. To get back to the sensuality one experiences, sex images become very vivid and pulsating. With no conscious thought of whether a guard will catch you or not, one finds himself fondling his penis with the greatest pleasure he's ever experienced. Soon he begins to masturbate and the sex images become so real they're in the cell with you. It seems to take hours and hours before the final orgasm but in all those hours one has the sensation that he is having an orgasm except there's no ejacula­tion. When ejaculation does occur, it also seems to be prolonged for at least an hour and although marijuana can give one a tremendous sensation during sexual intercourse, I know of nothing that creates such sexual pleasure as nutmeg. I've never had actual intercourse under its influence but I feel sure if a man and woman both experienced the same sensuality as the convict does in prison masturbating under its influence, one of them would go insane with pleasure. Another similarity to marijuana that one experiences with nutmeg is the develop­ment of a voracious appetite, especially for sweets. And just as one gets the 'chuck-horrors' under the influence of marijuana so that even a bite of dry bread tastes like the most delightful food in the world, the same thing happens with nutmeg. I've never had a desire for food with LSD although, like nutmeg, I've had a huge thirst for fruit juices. Whether the drug of nutmeg stays with one 24 or 36 hours one really doesn't sleep. But he is in a sleep stupor and capable of shutting out all noises that are ob­noxious. There seems to be no sensation of cold when high. Although many nights in the 'hole' were horror to me because of the cold and I had no covers, on the days or nights that a buddy was able to smuggle in nutmeg I felt no discomfort at all. Neither does it matter whether one is in a lighted place or in pitch darkness. The eyes are closed and one sees most of the visions in erotic colors anyway. I think possibly the greatest similarity nutmeg has to LSD is the sensation of going back and back in time to ages one has only read about. Another is the complete loss and the lack of need for time as we know it. When the drug finally wears off one sinks into a deep slumber. But the awakening is torture. The after-effects of nutmeg are actually painful. Every bone and muscle in the body aches as though one had malaria. The eyeballs set up a throbbing pain all their own. The nose runs frantically and a great deep depression sets in. Although in prison—unless in solitary confinement—one has to go to work if he is not so sick that it's impossible. No one reports sick to the doctor with a nutmeg hangover. But to save your soul it's impossible to work. All one can do is find a quiet spot and try to massage the ache out of the legs, shoulders and arms. I think possibly this also accounts for the fact that very few convicts ever indulge. When you do, you time it for a weekend. Strangely, you rarely see a narcotic drug addict or an alcoholic reverting to nutmeg in prison. It's usually those who have smoked considerable hashish or marijuana and this is the closest kick they come to it. Never have I known anyone who used it daily and was addicted; and I've never seen anyone take it on the outside.

I saw a snake come down to me and start talking to me. He asked me what I was doing there, what I was looking for. I could talk to him; it was like telepathy.

That night I started sweating. I saw a lot of flames, I was hot. Then I saw the devil, a vision that passed like a flash: an old man’s face crumpled on a background of flame. I was terrified, it was really horrible, I knew it was a demon. Thirty minutes later the same vision came back, and this time it was blowing gently on one of my ears. I don’t know why, but it was horrible, I was panicked.

Later, I again went deep within myself, and I had the image of going down deep into a dark, silent pool. Then I had a vision of absolute DIVINE love. It was like a flowing spring of silvery white liquid overflowing upward and was very beautiful to watch and feel. The feeling was of love and compassion toward the Divine and toward all men. I had the insight that all men had this same potential and worth within themselves. All men were equal in the sight of God and to my own feelings at this moment. I realized how I had not taken this enough into account in my past actions.

Rave is an expression of true freedom from social constraints and social definitions. It removes all layers of unnecessary energy. I was standing one morning in the middle of a dance-floor, after a long night of dancing, and I was weeping like a baby. Those were tears of joy and delight. I was celebrat- ing my self-liberation. It was an earth-shaking experience.

I went into it wanting to find out about my granddad and what was going on there. I lay on the couch with a blindfold on. It was a hot day, and the window was open. There was a bouncy castle in the street outside and a fair, and noises of children bubbled up through the window. That damn fan turned slowly. I started to drop and to drift. I remember my mind resting on my grandfather and just following some of his life. Just so much life and also so much trauma. In the session, I drifted along and experienced his story and then my grandparents and my mother. I felt this whole lineage history. That was in the more drifty part of the session. Then, some things got more intense, and this revelation about my life and things came through: I’m lying in a boat. It’s like a gondola, or a narrow wooden boat. I can see and feel the world on the inside of me. My attendant is in the back of the boat, and he is paddling. This is the River Styx. He is taking me across to the land of the dead. I’m dead in this boat. Then, the boat pulls up on the other side. I get up and get out of the boat. The boat moves away. I’m on my own. Here I am, standing on the bank of the river. I look up. There is a wall stretching from horizon to horizon. Imagine the wall that was around the Secret Garden, but bigger. It’s Victorian and faded, forbidding like stone but organic at the same time. I walk along the wall. I find a wrought-iron gate with a lot of stuff growing in it. It won’t open. Then, blindfold off, I sit up, and I’m like, “Hey, can we talk for a minute? This happened. I’m here. I’m next to a wall. I think this may be the wall that I’ve been trying to get inside in me that has the shame and the trauma behind it. I can’t get through. What do you recommend?” My attendant says, “Talk to the wall.” Gah! I put the blindfold on and lie back down. The answer I get back is, “You don’t have authority.” I’m like, this is happening inside my mind. What do you mean I’m not allowed in?” It was very clear. “You don’t have clearance to be in here.” I’m the one who is telling me. I’m like, “What the fuck? I came here to get here. Now, there is no entry?” Suddenly, my literal experience was that half the sky was light and heaven and had angels singing in it and represented all that was good. Half of the sky was the abyss and the total destruction of everything. It was only my attention to that line that was keeping everything from being swallowed by the abyss, all of reality. I said, “I’m not entirely okay. I’m not entirely okay. Would you come and hold me?” He came, and he held me. I needed a lot of convincing that things were okay or were ever going to be okay in that place. In that moment, it was so real that I was in the flux of the universe. He gave me a grounded perspective; I remembered I was just a person having a traumatic experience, remembering the past. He held me and told me it would be okay. I made it. I wouldn’t say that was some terrific victory or suddenly the sky had opened and the angels came and everything was great. No, but with his love and with his holding, I found my way. I got through. […] I only had to visit the hell once. I wasn’t actually in hell, but the fear itself very quickly becomes hell. I worked with that and the edge of fear again and again.

William, a forty-five-year-old medical doctor, wrote that, since drinking ayahuasca, "Marijuana use is down 75 percent. My relationship with my wife is deepening. I'm more compassionate and affectionate. I have more confidence and feel a renewal of hope that I can create a meaningful life. I feel an opening of my heart to the scope of mystery. William had been in almost one hundred ceremonies, the last one over six months prior to the study.

I kind of had this vision of a traditional brick and mortar stacking, this wall, finally sealing off. And what I saw, it’s like more softened and I can just push these bricks out. I can predict the bricks to dismantle the wall at the pace that I need to do it, the wall is still there, but I can take down the pieces of it at my own pace. And I can see what’s beyond it again. There’s that fear part of what's next, you know, what's my next hurdle and there’s another wall on the other side but that mortar is soft enough to dismantle that wall. And then the fact that I can feel positive about that and I feel hopeful about that and have some control over it. That feels good too. So, it's like a confidence booster. I haven't had confidence for too long.

When I searched for the source, it was a small pool at the top of a large mountain. Try as I might, I could not reach the mountaintop. However, I soon found myself up there, and I don't know how I got there. The pool was as deep as the mountain was high I dived into it and swam to the very bottom, and walked out of a door at the bottom of the mountain. Strange!

After one hour patient began saying he was very cold, and demanding more blankets in spite of it being a very hot day. Later he was very angry with me, and said he felt as though he was lying in a pool of blood, and why did I not do something about it. I reassured him, but he continued to say I was neglecting him, and that he would die if I did not do something about it fairly soon. I asked him to be patient and see what came into his mind, and he said he felt he had just been born, and was lying in a pool of blood, and no one was bothering about him because they were bothering about his mother. Later it came out throug his Aunt that his mother had been very ill what he was born, so that this could have been a true experience.

I’m used to seeing wiggles on psychedelics, but soon the walls were warping like the surface of the ocean. Amazingly, I could cause the lava lamp and other features of the bedroom to warp when my mind ordered it to. 'Move to the left. Okay, move to the right . . .' I’d never been able to manipulate open-eyed visuals with my mind before. After an hour of this, I closed my eyes and almost instantaneously, I went out of body to a place of power and shamanic possibility. It was an ethereal room with a network of energy strings that were connections to events past, present, and future. I plucked them, strumming them like you might the strings of a piano when the top is open. It was like playing God’s pinball game, though there was no sound. As it dawned outside, I came back into my body and went to the mirror, which I love to look in while tripping. My reflection was short and fat, which I’m not in real life. It was if my looking glass had been replaced with a funhouse mirror. Then I held up a bracelet and it too was misshapenly short and fat. I looked at my cat and she was short and fat. Everything was short and fat. Even my car out on the street looked squat and obese. I’d never had a persistent visual distortion that rendered everything asymmetrical relative to two axes.

I don’t know if I really learned – it was more like letting back in stuff that I had blocked out?… I don’t think I changed my values, just remembered more of them. Or just remembered to honour them more, or…allow them more.

I became like a point of awareness able to travel inside myself, others and the outside world. No reference to time or space… The feeling of joy and sadness at the same time– paradoxical.

During the Abangi ritual, Myobi ate fresh iboga root bark, which she referred to as “ibogaine” throughout our interview. She fell asleep for awhile, but after waking shortly after, recounted: "First, I was walking into the forest and then I was running. I was trying to find my way. I wasn’t even sure where I was going, but I was walking. And then I finally arrived into a village. When I got there, I saw my grandmother, my father’s mother, who passed away a few years ago. I saw her and she was so happy to see me. She ran to me. She took me in her arms. She told me that she wanted to see me, that she missed me. I was very happy myself. Then I saw my uncle, which is my father’s brother, who also passed away long before his mother did. I saw him too. He told me a few things that he wanted me to tell my father. We talked...[and] he gave me a few instructions as to how my father should handle his life, and what he should do when he is in times of trouble. Then I saw my mother’s father, who also passed away long before I was born. He was one great man here in Gabon a long, long time ago. My mother barely knew him because I think she was also young when he passed. And he also gave me a message for her, told me what I should tell her. He told me that he wanted to see her too, and that she needed to take care of the village. [“My grandfather was the creator of a village. He created his own village.”] I went there, I think, when I was maybe 8,but that was so long ago I barely remember the place. He gave me instruction on how my mother should handle the place, because there isa small river that passes through her village...My grandfather passed away maybe 30-something years ago. I have never seen him, ever in my life. But, he told me that my mother should cut the grass from where the river starts to where the house finishes. And it’s maybe, well, less than half a kilometer."

I went with them as you suggested. There were clinical researchers probing into my mind. There were sort of long fiber-optic things that they were putting into my pupils.

After that first session there were, in my mind’s eye, two individuals. That were the 15-year-old Harry and there was the present-day Harry. They were distinct bodies but at the end of yesterday, they went together and that was really the connection that I was looking for. I felt so good. There was the unification integration.

From the period of 5:30 to 6:00, I had a vague feeling of apprehension and some very very slight anxiety not knowing quite what to expect but knowing that the experiment, generally speaking, was considered boring by several of my friends who had taken the test. At 6:00 I took the drug and from 6:00 to 7:00, I noticed several interesting features. The first thing I noticed was that I was mildly to moderately anxious of what was happening in spite of the fact that I was in fairly familiar surroundings and knew the psychiatric personnel who were examining me. I was made particularly anxious by some of the questions that were asked by the psychiatrist. I found that I was completely unable to answer fairly simple questions. 1 felt a definite frustration and some humility and also a quite marked antagonism towards the psychiatrist because he insisted on asking questions I was unable to handle. I felt that I was definitely putting on a very poor performance to begin with and I assumed that if I had had a drug, that in the first hour it would probably have little effect, and that most of my slowness in performing these questions was either due to anxiety or to sheer stupidity. I was quite apologetic about not answering the questions smartly. I had definite symptoms of moderate anxiety—my hands were very cold and extremely sweaty. I felt upset, I had marked tachycardia and a feeling of discomfort in the epigastrium which is extremely uncommon for me. From the period 6:30 to 7:00, I noticed an increasing inability to perform the questions. I could remember the facts presented to me quite quickly in these mathematical questions, but I lacked the energy, the initiative to carry the solution through to a final answer. I was almost incapable of setting up the equations in any manner. Towards the latter part of the questioning, drawing close to 7:00 I believe, I could hardly even entertain the questions and this I attributed to my marked anxiety. I found this most frustrating and upsetting experience for I seemed to lack ability to localize my thoughts in a forward direction in handling these relatively simple arithmetic problems which I should imagine would be at grade eight level. I, towards 7:00, also began to feel a tremendous lethargy and apathy towards things in general and this I attributed to the fact that I was overtired when the experiment began which, on looking back, is probably not exactly true. Some time after 7:00, I found it extremely difficult to concentrate on the questions being asked me because during the application of the electrodes portions of my hair were being snipped off and also acetone and compressed air were used during this procedure, all of which I found fairly distracting. At about this time, which I would imagine would be 7:30, although I could not be sure, my attitude seemed to be changing somewhat and I had lost much of my initial anxiety and this was being rapidly replaced by a type of apathy which seemed to be increasing to tremendous fatigue. Accompanying these feelings, I began to lose my feeling of initial humility and also much of my initial hostility. These feelings were being replaced by a feeling of disinterestedness. Also a feeling that I was rather above these frivolous questions that were being asked of me. My examiners no longer seemed quite as friendly as they had formerly and I felt rather like they were young schoolboys wasting the government's money asking rather stupid and superfluous questions. At one point, during this procedure, I was asked to interpret some proverbs. Because of the distractions going on around my head I adopted a policy of answering the questions as quickly as possible and with as much dispatch as possible and sloughed off the answers in an effort to get them behind me as quickly as possible. Although the questions did not irritate me, I felt them rather frivolous and somewhat senseless and my main object was to get that part of the questioning over with as quickly as possible and likewise get the evening over with as quickly as possible because the whole thing by this time had become rather boring. I thought my questions to the proverbs being asked were sometimes rather clever. Likewise when I was asked such questions as 'why are people taxed' and 'what is the function of government' etc., I thought my answers to these were quite concise and astute and at least would be sufficiently good to satisfy this young group of upstarts that were attempting to question me. Towards 8:00, I found the results of the stroboscopic examination were not too disagreeable although rather tiresome. The flicker fusion test following the stroboscopic examination required a good deal more concentration for at this time I felt very fatigued, very apathetic and very often during the flicker fusion test, I would just take a rough stab at what I estimated was the fusion point. I had lost my enthusiasm completely for the experiment but considered that I would play the game and continue with the experiment just to please my examiners who I felt were carrying on in a rather frivolous manner. The culmination of the tests came when I was given the critical thinking test which I found extremely difficult. It seemed to never end and I must have taken well over an hour to perform it. Not only did I find the questions difficult but I found the instructions difficult to understand and I believe most of my time was spent trying to figure out what was required of me in the test rather than getting on and doing the actual questions. I found that I had to read over the questions perhaps two or three times and even then was not entirely clear as to what was intended. I was fairly discouraged and rather depressed, and thoroughly fatigued, and yet I had a supreme apathy much as a lotus eater must have had. I was very thankful when the test was finally finished. Following the experiment I returned to my ward where I had several duties to carry out. Although I felt very very tired and certainly ready to go to bed, I felt that I was in my right mind actually. I had to start an intravenous injection and to my chagrin I had great difficulty, making four or five attempts. However, this did not particularly upset me although it must have upset the patient somewhat and I continued to attempt to start this intravenous with some abandon. Later that night at 4:00 in the morning, I was required to get up to give another intravenous injection on the ward on which I worked. For this duty which was to be carried out on a ward some considerable distance from where I sleep, I decided I would get out my bicycle which was kept in a cupboard close by my room and ride down to the ward which I felt was a very practical thing to do at that hour. I had not done this before, although that evening I thought it would be a very sensible thing to do. On reaching the ward, I again experienced considerable difficulty giving an intravenous injection but again this did not worry me very much. This is perhaps unusual for me for when I miss intravenous injections, I normally become quite disturbed when I miss them for the second time. However, at that hour I didn't think it mattered if it took three or four or five trys which I again carried out with the same abandon as previously. The next morning I awoke and I was quite tired, still very very apathetic, and with a rather dull headache. I was unable to pick up any speed in my work throughout the morning and even into the early afternoon and although I had a fairly heavy schedule of work ahead of me, I was unable to muster the necessary energy and initiative to carry out these various duties. The fact that I couldn't seem to carry out these duties didn't really worry me too much at any time. By the following evening, however, I felt I had considerably more energy, I was more awake and more able and willing to carry out the necessary daily tasks. The following day I felt completely normal in all respects. On looking back over the whole evening, I might say that I had received a depressant drug which made me very apathetic, rather depressed and did not seem to completely abolish my anxiety. Although I felt anxious I didn't seem to be really able to do much about it because of this tremendous sense of fatigue. Generally speaking, I felt I had done only moderately well or rather poorly on the tests, particularly on the first few and especially on the critical thinking test. I regarded the evening as rather unpleasant and one which placed a considerable strain on me. As a result, I was not particularly looking forward to the next week's experiment, which I was afraid might have a somewhat similar effect.

As a teen I would make myself dream how I would act the next day in school or any social activities. I won my first tennis tournament the night before in my dream. I also dreamed myself through several college interviews before actually going through one. After nursing school, I dreamed how I would manage a cardiac arrest and most any stressful new thing in my career. I can make myself dream just about anything that I need to “practice” before doing it.

“Just before recovery, men and women alike often manifest hysterical symptoms. The will for a short time seems very weak, but I have never seen a prolonged fit of hysteria, as I have after chloroform; these symptoms always disappear in two or three minutes. Since the middle of last April I have recorded the cases in which I have given the gas, and they amount to 384. In all these cases there has been produced an amount of lividity, which in other circumstances I should have thought dangerous to life; in the majority, convulsive twitchings of the hands have occurred, in a few, dilatation of the pupil. In several, the pulse has become quick and weak, but never imperceptible at the wrist, and the recovery has been, in all cases, rapid and complete, so that the patient required no assistance in walking away. I am aware of only three cases of sickness where vomiting occurred within a few hours of taking the gas, and it was even then attributable to other causes.” “The lady laughed hysterically every time on awaking, but only for a minute or two.”

"At rave parties, in the forest, under the influence of LSD and rave music, I felt united with the universe. I felt connected to earth and trees and to the beauti- ful landscapes. I took a long walk exploring the surroundings. It was an amazing experience."

Cecelia: "What started happening for me is that I was cycling through, like, I would kind of want to go like root chakra up to crown chakra through the seven, seeing my friends, and then I would have this experience of dying. Where it was like I would go through the cycle and I was almost feeling like I would watch myself develop from like a baby to an elderly person. I would watch myself die and then be reborn and was just cycling through these life cycles."

“It was peaceful. It was calming and I just sat back and... you know, I didn’t lose sense of who I was. I always knew who I was, and I had confidence that this would be temporary.”

In my mother’s family there is a Nazi past history, that also played a role, I thought about that. And after these six hours I was able to just let go of it. That was fascinating. To realize that also this path that I am going is okay, that I should not condemn my family, my grandfather and that it is not my fault. That was great … During the second time it intensified even more and really all thoughts that came up, I was able to take with me and put them into practice and I did not have problems anymore… [I am] More relaxed, more patient. … I have less blockages and I believe LSD helps to realize that it is okay. Looking back, almost a year later, … I believe I changed quite a bit. In a spiritual way, in the way of thinking. I became relaxed, I am not so afraid anymore, no bad conscience anymore.

Tommy explained that prior to his deployment to Vietnam, the tribal elders prepared him in various ways for going to war. He was taught his “death song” to sing if fatally wounded. He was instructed as to how to use his Native American cosmology and natural connection to the earth and its creatures to help him stay alert and knowledgeable about danger and threats. Tommy said, “In Vietnam, I would ask the insects to be my eyes while I slept to look for the enemy; I asked the trees to signal me if the enemy is creeping towards me.” He continued by saying that during active combat with his M-16 automatic rifle, he would sometimes see a blue protective shield surrounding him that deflected enemy bullets away. Tommy said that at other times during combat he could hear his grandmother speaking to him, saying not to worry and that he was going to live and be free from injuries or death. He added that his grandmothers' voice told him that if he did get shot, to sing his “death song” so that ancestral spirits would be with him to join him and provide care and assistance to the other world (Heaven). Later, we would talk and he would detail how he survived Vietnam and his post-war coping with traumatic memories. However, I asked him how he dealt with his war trauma after coming home from Vietnam. Tommy said, “John, I will show you our way of healing” and arranged for me to participate in a Lakota Sweat Lodge with a sacred pipe carrier of the Sioux Nation.

For nearly an hour I walked along the road…Suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven—an inward state of peace and joy and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light.

This dream helped me overcome an irrational fear. My dream began with me walking up a driveway toward a large white house. There were dozens of people with candies going in. I did not have a candle and I felt afraid I would be unable to enter. When I came up to the door I had to squeeze my way in. Inside the main room were hundreds of people. While standing in line I noticed a guitar. Although I could play, I was afraid nobody would like my music. In the back of my mind I realized I was dreaming and that it was okay to do what I wanted. Since I had always wanted to play at a party, I went ahead and picked up the guitar. I was really amazed at how well I could play the music I wanted and I really enjoyed putting on my impromptu performance. Many of the people around me said to me how much they too enjoyed my songs. I felt as if a burden had been lifted. I then went through the crowd making friends.

When I see the face of one who fears n/um, I say, ''I'd better heal this one." Those who fear n/um have a blank stare on their face, and their eyes are downcast. They sit on the ground and shake and shiver. We experienced ones carry them around and put our sweat into them.

It is theoretically interesting that the occurrence of apparent movements in the mescal state depends to a certain extent on the nature of the stimuli. Certain observations show that small objects are more easily displaced than large ones; objects which together with their surroundings form an optical 'whole' and which are so to speak definitely anchored in optical respects are less likely to move than those which seem to be detached from their background; objects, the contours of which 'suggest' movement, are more likely to move than those with definite, well-marked contours; objects, the appearance of which gives the impression of weight, are less likely to be displaced than those which appear light. It is to be noted that even under normal conditions our apparently stable world involves optically certain tendencies to movement. Whereas in everyday life we may be aware of only this tendency we find that in the mescal state this tendency, this implicit dynamite, is transformed into actually perceived movement. At this point we have to insist on the fact that it is not necessary at all that the subject be consciously aware of the above mentioned qualitative aspects of the phenomena. It is not necessary, for example, that he consciously judge a given object to be a 'very small' object; what matters is not the judgment but the fact that 'smallness' or the dynamic aspects above referred to phenomenally exist. If they exist, then, apparent movement is likely to occur. Expressed differently: we find empirically that apparent movement is likely to occur as soon as certain optical characteristics are present.

I was jumping three feet high and I had such a thrill, a terrific feeling as if you were floating, as if you were in the air, you feel really high. I've only had such a feeling once before in my life when I was on heroin mainlining, but then I went through hell afterwards, it was terrible-but with the spirit song's power you get this feeling without the terrible aftermath.

Page 6-7: With an inexpressible flood of fear, I realized that I would, in effect, die. My ego-self was bouncing in and out of existence as time and space waxed and waned around me, in me, through me, but when I finally went "out" something that was still me, though beyond the confines of the personality that I identified with, still existed. I can't reconstitute a memory of where I went; it is beyond even imagery, let alone description. I just remember trembling with raw awe as I passed into the beyond, and feeling that I was unworthy-too dense, too un-clean—to be entering this exquisitely rarefied and awe-full place of sanctity, this ultimate holy of holies. I was a trespasser. To enter ! must die. So I died. Several eternities later, I found myself staring at the corner of the ceiling. Space had returned. Then time, slightly out of sync, seemed to somehow somersault into the scene over the top of my head. I was back in the room, and I began to sink slowly down levels of consciousness that were lower, though still elevated compared with my normal, daily waking state. I had only a few visions—a short version of the kind of "movie show" I'd been expecting. Some were odd, and had an almost cartoon-like corniness about them, such as the robed angelic arms appearing out of a cloud offering me a quill pen and an open, blank book. It seemed to be an invitation, but at that time my intentions were set on painting, not writing. Other visions had more gravity to them, such as when I was floating through interstellar space and coming upon what looked at a distance like a flaming star. As I drifted closer to it, I saw it was a great, spoked wheel, carved with all manner of arabesques and filigree, silhouetted against a vivid glow of multicolored, fiery light. This majestically rolling wheel was thousands of miles across, and what I thought at first was an intricate pattern around the rim turned out to be the flickering silhouettes of countless human beings, engaged in myriad activities. From across the universe a pure, godlike voice rang out: "This is the human race." Things were equally weird when I opened my eyes and looked A Head of the Times around the room. The fellow who had sipped a teaspoonful of the LSD solution had himself gone on quite a trip, so I didn't wonder that I was being hung out to dry in the cosmic gales. He was engrossed in the folds of the (undrawn) window drapes. He stirred himself and pulled out his crumpled cotton handkerchief, which I saw as a dove that my friend was holding by the beak. It was a dead dove, but exact in its lineaments and totally convincing. I marveled at the way consciousness could mold realities. At that moment I realized that our normal perceptions are simply the possibilities that get "frozen" within the consensual cultural frame. There simply isn't one set reality "out there" in the environment. The fabulous processing capabilities of the brain-mind can conjur any appearance out of the matrix of energies that bombard our sensory receptors from the environmental world. I understood what Blake had been talking about with his "double the vision my eyes do see, and double the vision is always with me." He could see a thistle across his way as an old man gray, and so could I. Or a handkerchief as a dove. I moved around the room, stretching my legs. A dull glow of color around someone's shoulder caught my eye. I looked closer and focused on the effect. I saw bands of very soft, almost ethereal color surrounding the person's head and shoulders. I could easily see the wallpaper pattern through this delicate, slowly shifting rainbow atmosphere. It suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at the human aura, the stock-in-trade of clairvoyants and other occult practitioners. "Jesus! The aura is a real thing!" I thought in amazement. I knew then, as I remain convinced, that this was a true observation. It was no hallucina-tion, but a phenomenon that I was able to closely and repeatedly observe. In later years I managed to clearly observe it on one or two occasions without the use of drugs. Somehow this observation worried me. It was one thing having high experiences that partook of the mystical and the visionary, but this was occult. Prejudices I had inherited surfaced in me. And it worried me in another way: if the aura really was a feature of the human being (it clearly was), and if that feature was de nied and even derided by our mainstream society, it meant that our society had a significantly incomplete model of reality.

There was no turning back. After a moment or two I became aware of something happening to my left. I saw a psychedelic, Day-Glo — colored space that approximated a room whose walls and floor had no clear separations or edges. It was throbbing and pulsing electrically. Rising in front of "me" was a podium-like table. It seemed that some presence was dealing/serving something to me. I wanted to know where I was and "sensed" the reply that I had no business there. The presence was not hostile, just somewhat annoyed and brusque.

There were some scenes or forms like in a nursery. No babies, but there were cribs and different animals, vibrant. I went to a childhood scene, or feeling. It was like I was in a stroller, kid images. It was sort of scary, l can't describe it. I could draw it maybe. It was like being in a room, as a child, with a stroller. There were cartoonlike people in the room, but they weren't what I wanted to see.

I am an inmate confined in a federal prison. When I read the article about being conscious while in the dream state I became very interested in it for I was able to do the same thing. I have had such experiences while dreaming and have loved them. They have at times given me a way to escape from being confined. In one such dream I started realizing that if I wanted to I could control the environment here, for this was created by my subconscious, therefore subject to my conscious will. I thought for a moment of what I would like to do. The first thought that came through my mind was the fact that I had not been with a woman in years and is what I wanted most, for even though it was only a dream, everything there was just like here, there was no difference. So as I sat there I looked at these two guys and told them that this was no more than a dream. I then told them that I have been in prison for a while now and that I wanted a woman to have sex with. Neither of them said anything but looked at me in a crazy way. I then repeated my desire and began to think upon it. The guy at the table then told me that I should go into the other room. So I got up, went to the door, and before entering concentrated on my desire. I was then in the room. There on the bed was lying a woman who had been in the dream earlier. I took my clothes off and got into bed with her. Throughout the entire sexual act I kept concentrating on keeping in a conscious state of mind, because in previous such dreams I would panic or lose myself and fall out of the dream. There was total awareness of every moment of our sexual act, from beginning to end. After we were finished I rolled over on my side. As my head hit the pillow I felt that drifting feeling coming over me and realized that I was getting ready to pass into the blackness that I always find myself in when I leave these types of dreams and wake up.

"After taking the first dose of ibogaine, Jordan described the effects “building,” and then: The next thing I know a helicopter is landing on the roof. Buh buh buh buh buh buh buh. And then zoom, I’m...in another dimension...my legs were suddenly mush. My speech was suddenly completely slurred...I kind of just drifted off and the next thing I know I’m a...Mexican little boy and I’m praying on the side of a road with semis going by—big semis. It is really noisy. I’m watching my sister to make sure she doesn’t go on the road. I’m the oldest. I’m the boss. There’s two small little boys playing there in a trash pile behind me and we’re sifting through the trash looking for cool stuff. That’s where we play. It’s really, really poor. Off to the side is a cinder block house. Out of this house comes running a little old lady and she’s scolding me in Spanish, saying, “I told you to get inside. Now you get inside.” In Spanish! And I could actually understand without any effort. I followed her inside, like, “Yes ma’am." And we walked down a little kind of corridor along the side of this cinderblock house. We go down into this little doorway without an actual door on it and in the back are these dirty little mattresses, and one single light bulb hanging from the ceiling that’s right from the outside. There’s no plumbing. There’s no water. There’s only a couple of windows without glass. It is just bars. And I can smell the grandmother’s body odor as she’s walking past me and walking in front of me. I can smell her. I’m looking out the window and I’m watching the cars zoom by on this highway, and the cars from my childhood, from the early 80s, and they’re like Lincolns and Buicks and Impalas and stuff like that. And I’m watching and watching because this is my only entertainment. I’m trapped inside. As I’m watching these cars and trucks go by I kind of shift and all of a sudden I’m a truck driver. There’s a truck that went by and all of a sudden I’m riding shotgun. I’m not actually him this time, not like I was the little boy, but I’m riding shotgun with him, and I can see him shifting the gears and just driving. He works for the mine or whatever was down the road. Jordan described this entire sequence above as “vivid...it feels like it was a real place, like it was an actual place that exists somewhere.” He said that at first, he didn’t really understand how significant the vision or the vibrancy of it was. Later he reflected, “Here I am, a spoiled coddled white boy, you know, and here’s this kid growing up at the exact same time who had a shitty situation and was stifled, could not grow, could not learn, could not evolve as a human being.” This recognition of his racial and geographic privilege related directly to his opioid use. I have absolutely no excuse. I have no right to be an addict, to be dependent. I am spoiled and I am a very fortunate...I live like a king compared to most of the world. The small boy was a microcosm of the reality of our planet. It was an average boy in the grand scheme of things. Jordan reported this as the most “memorable and vivid part,” even though the effects continued for many hours afterwards. “There were messages, actually words that would show up in front of my face. People would...different voices would tell me things, just out of the blue.” With his eyes open he would see strong visuals, “Everything was melting. Everything was swirling.” With eyes closed he would “come in and out of it...Ok, now I’m in la la land. Ok, now I know where I am.” At one point one of his caretakers came in and appeared as “a big praying mantis, like a giant insect. Her voice sounded like a robot,” a vision which faded as she came closer. When his caretaker suggested another dose, he refused because of the intensity. Instead, he underwent a longer protocol of titrating morphine and lower doses of ibogaine. During the days that followed, he would feel relatively normal, could walk around the house, but then at night, “as it would get dark, the trip would come back on and I would be back in it, cars going by, zoom, trails, people, people’s faces swirling around, and it was just...weird.” After days of sleeplessness, some difficult protracted withdrawal symptoms, and an episode of food poisoning that was physically difficult, Jordan says that his shift in perspective has led to an altered relationship with his family. “I feel like it has made me a much more empathic person.” Although, he felt that this didn’t come from an immediate and dramatic transformation. “It wasn’t until later that I was able to piece it together and take away the message. It wasn’t clear to me during the trip. It was just there. It was just happening.” I think about it 10 times a day. I see the house. I’m in the house. I can still see it. I can still see the cars going by. I can still hear the music coming out of the rolled down windows of the cars driving by. I can hear the trumpets playing in Mexico. I can hear it all. I can smell the diesel exhaust. I can see the plastic bottles that we’re playing with. I can feel them in my hands. It was so real. When asked how exactly this perspective shift influenced his relationship with his family, Jordan said: Everything seems to make more sense now...So many little things that happened in my past, both good and bad, placed me here. It steered me in the direction that the universe needed me to go, and everything is exactly as it was supposed to be. It has me looking at my son in a completely different way. Like, you don’t just have a kid. The fact that my son Jonas exists is a miracle. It is a gift, and he is perfect, and the odds of him being who he is exactly right now are so astronomical. I mean, think about all of the sperm cells and all of the eggs, and all of the time, and the different places that could have resulted in a child. They didn’t. It was him, specifically, for a reason. Now I have this sense of duty as a father that’s deep. Not to say that I didn’t have that feeling before. I did. I guess I just didn’t fully understand it. I hadn’t thought about it in this way" "First, I was walking into the forest and then I was running. I was trying to find my way. I wasn’t even sure where I was going, but I was walking. And then I finally arrived into a village. When I got there, I saw my grandmother, my father’s mother, who passed away a few years ago. I saw her and she was so happy to see me. She ran to me. She took me in her arms. She told me that she wanted to see me, that she missed me. I was very happy myself. Then I saw my uncle, which is my father’s brother, who also passed away long before his mother did. I saw him too. He told me a few things that he wanted me to tell my father. We talked...[and] he gave me a few instructions as to how my father should handle his life, and what he should do when he is in times of trouble. Then I saw my mother’s father, who also passed away long before I was born. He was one great man here in Gabon a long, long time ago. My mother barely knew him because I think she was also young when he passed. And he also gave me a message for her, told me what I should tell her. He told me that he wanted to see her too, and that she needed to take care of the village. [“My grandfather was the creator of a village. He created his own village.”] I went there, I think, when I was maybe 8, but that was so long ago I barely remember the place. He gave me instruction on how my mother should handle the place, because there is a small river that passes through her village...My grandfather passed away maybe 30-something years ago. I have never seen him, ever in my life. But, he told me that my mother should cut the grass from where the river starts to where the house finishes. And it’s maybe, well, less than half a kilometer. When she was asking me the questions like, "What is your spirit name?” and stuff like this, I couldn’t answer. I was told a name in her language, and I told her the name that I was told was Myopi.* And she was like, "No, no. Myopi doesn’t mean anything. Ask again.” And the spirit on the other side was saying, like, “You’re telling me a name and I can hear the name but she doesn’t understand. So maybe the name is wrong.” And she said, “No, you have to say it right. You won’t be able to say it the way she wants you to say it so explain it to her what this name means.” Then I asked her what is the meaning of the name and she told me...as she was telling me the names means the “Queen of the ---”...She was telling me this name but in Mitsogo, in a language that I don’t understand. As she told me, as the spirit told me, I automatically started to tell the lady who was next to me too that the woman says that I am a Queen, and just as I said, “A Queen,” she screamed, “Myobi!” It’s a ‘b’ not a ‘p.’ So she screamed, “Myobi!" When I looked in the mirror, I saw a woman crying. She was holding a baby. And she was crying, she was crying, and I told the people around me she was crying with a baby. And they told me, they said, “Ask her what’s her name. Who is she? What does she want?” Stuff like this. She was just screaming and crying, and I couldn’t tell who she was. In the morning like at 6 or 7am...[my brother-in-law]‘s...wife was expecting a child that night. While I was sitting on the mat, she started having pains. This woman is in Libreville. I am two hours from Libreville sitting on a mat. I have never seen this woman ever in my life, I don’t even know her until today, but she is the one who I saw in the mirror. That night she was seven months pregnant, and she started feeling very bad and she went to the hospital...she started losing a bit of water, something like this, I wasn’t sure, because they explained to me when I was still in ibogaine, and I don’t remember all of it. I could tell that the baby was in between death and life, and I was just asking her and she didn’t answer. She didn’t say anything, so I wasn’t sure..." "The imagery was like, for example, something would die...and it showed me this rainbow squiggly. It was kind of like, if you were a snail and you were like a rainbow the last thing that you would do before puttering out was leave this snail trail. The snail trail was this DNA, the helix in your DNA, and it was all of the knowledge and information that wanted to continue, that wanted to be passed on. I just was curious about it and looked into it, and it was showing me that even in death there is still energy. The visions were kind of like cartoons in a way. I was being open to letting it show me, because it wasn’t really speaking in words, it was speaking in imagery. They were things that I needed to interpret. It was, if you can imagine, a string of pearls on this sort of conveyer belt in a system, sort of like the gears inside of a clock. It was just showing me that it was green, and then for example it showed me the caduceus. It showed me at this one point this teacher teaching kids about the two items that are really far out ahead of the pack...there’s going to be, you know, one extreme to the positive side, and one extreme to the negative side. And the teacher would say, we don’t have to consider these because they’re so extreme. My boyfriend called and I was explaining to him, and he said, “Oh yeah the outliers.” That was like the first thing out of his mouth and it was just immediately confirming that what it wanted me to look at was the extreme part of how, yeah, those things do play a part and do play a role. It was weird because that thing came up and the medicine was like, “You’re an outlier.” One of the things that I had been struggling with was that my boyfriend wanted to stay in the States. I’ve lived overseas. As an adult I lived in Panama for 8 years. The slogan in Panama is ‘Bridge of the Americas, Heart of the Universe.’ At some point the medicine was showing me how you can have these two really large independent bodies of thought, but there can be a bridge, and bridging that gap into acceptance and flow and all of that was really important for it to show me, that even though he and I are disagreeing on our views about a number of things that there can be a bridge, and the importance and value of that. A big portion of me doesn’t want to have kids because of the tiredness. So it was the first time that it had me go back and cry about my ex, because I’m actually a widow. The pain that was still left over from that needed to come up and get expelled. At one point I was puking up a whole lot of energy from that, and it felt like this big dark energy came up out of me and like I even had a moment where I opened the door because it couldn’t stay in the house. I don’t know if that was like the ghost of my ex, because he did turn into a ghost and did stick to me for a long time. I don’t know if that was his energy finally releasing to let me go ahead and be free...but it was definitely this presence of sadness, or this presence of tiredness and resentment."

“Early in the morning when grandpa passed away, I dreamt of his wheeze, the sound whichwas the result of his bronchitis. I did not know he passed away until next day. I felt that he wanted to say goodbye to me.”

Efforts were now made to induce me to listen to music. This produced the usual negative reaction. I sat down again, apathetically refusing to be interested in anything. I was asked to close my eyes and to try to visualize something I liked. I could think of nothing whatever I liked. The investigators then suggested a glass of water, large quantities of which I had been drinking. Try as I might I could visualize absolutely nothing. The investigators now no longer seemed to want to interest me in things. Their tactics were wise, for I finally suggested myself that Berlioz's Te Deum be played on the gramophone. I was still very conscious of the cold in my feet which had now spread to the hands, genitals, and lower abdomen, and which seemed to be creeping up my legs. This I found vaguely disquieting, thought it might be dangerous, but didn't mind if it was. I wasn't sure about the Te Deum. Perhaps it would be boring like everything else. Yet the moment the music went on, I was completely absorbed. It is a magnificently noisy work, and the moment it started, I knew I just wanted to lie limply in my chair and let the music in, choirs, brass, tympani, and all. The 'phenomena' had not stopped. Things, and particularly the lines on the fireplace, refused to stand still, my feet and hands were still as cold as ever, and at one stage my left hand looked half its normal size. These were now no more than irritating distractions. I closed my eyes, but patterns, though very inoffensive and indeterminate ones, continued to form. On opening them again the lines on the fireplace were up to their old tricks. As the Te Deum came near to its end, however, things settled down and I found I felt very exhausted but wide awake. Otherwise, I felt absolutely all right and declined Dr. Smythies's kind offer of a sleeping pill. Berlioz's Te Deum has, for me, religious as well as musical significance; and the fact that I asked for it to be played showed that at that stage I felt the manic phase had passed sufficiently for me to think about religious things. In the manic stage Raphael had stopped the laughter and the praying figure of Piero della Francesca had elicited the sane remark 'It's a holy thing not to be looked at when you're drugged'. Berlioz seemed to bridge the two worlds. Before the experiment I had said that his Te Deum 'puts me into a manic state anyway'. A friend of mine who came in just before the work began, agreed that that was the effect it had on him. To me it was quite different; it brought me back to the real world, slowly and surely, without violent transition. My only regret was that I should still be distracted from the music, the full strength and beauty of which I felt I was missing. During the performance of the first side of the Te Deum I became increasingly conscious of the cold in my feet and hands. I thought that if this cold should reach my heart, I would probably die. This thought did not worry me at all, and I felt strongly that this was God's concern, not mine, and that He would certainly be merciful. I would not presume to draw any conclusions from so trivial an experience. It was interesting and it certainly seemed hilariously funny. All along, however, I felt that the experience was in a sense 'anti-religious', I mean, not conformable with religious experience or in the same category. In Huxley's terminology 'self-transcendence' of a sort did take place, but transcendence into a world of farcical meaninglessness. All things were one in the sense that they were all, at the height of my manic state, equally funny: the quality of 'funniness' and incongruity had swallowed up all others. I was never frightened, and as, under the influence of Berlioz, I slowly returned to sanity, my normal religious consciousness, which was never completely swamped, returned in full vigour. There was no longer any reason why I should be afraid. I would not wish to take the drug again, but purely on moral grounds. I should be most interested to know whether the drug taken elsewhere and in a different and less friendly environment would produce different effects; but the more the experience fades into the past, the clearer does it seem to me that, in principle, artificial interference with consciousness is, except for valid medical reasons, wrong. As far as I am concerned, mescalin was quite unable to reproduce the 'natural mystical experience' I have described elsewhere. I half hoped it would. However, once the drug started working and I was plunged into a universe of farce, I realized that this was not to be. The two experiences were so totally different that I refused, during the experiment, to be tempted by Rimbaud. He too, like Raphael, was too 'serious'. The fact that I am an assiduous reader of Alice through the Looking-Glass is probably not irrelevant to the nature of my experience.

"After I ate some peyote I felt good, then I began to see a big bunch of snakes crawling all around in front of me. I asked Oliver if he heard kittens. It sounded as if they were right close to me and then I sat still for a long time, and I saw a big black cat coming toward me, and I felt him just like a big tiger walking up on my legs towards me, and when I felt his claws I jumped back and made a sound as if I was afraid."

I started floating in the bed and the electrodes were puling and then the walls started to move back and forth. Then Stephen appeared in the corner. He said, “If weird things start happening, you know you’re dreaming....

Throughout the music I was alternately a tiger or my usual self. I was leaping from ridge to ridge among black snow-covered mountains. Then came the pause when, still a tiger, I saw my two cubs play-ing in the grass on a plateau by a stream. I got them food and then they alternately played and followed me. Then I became myself again and I saw the gold crown at the top of the mountain. I thought there needed to be some reason for going to the top of the mountain. My cubs wouldn't follow, so I went alone. On the way up I saw my kit-ten. He didn't want to go with me either and ended up falling off the cliff. But as 1 watched him fall, feeling helpless, suddenly a parachute opened and he reached the bottom safely. I continued to the top and got my crown, and leaped around the mountain tops again, alternately a person and a tiger. Then I returned to the waiting cubs, and somehow we all proceeded together, stopping to catch fish, swimming in the mountain streams, gamboling in the grass. I had a deep contented feeling when the music was over. It was odd, the way I changed from a tiger to myself all through music. The imagery was very vivid, with beautiful colors and settings.

I was “crushed” out of existence. At the beginning of the experience an amorphous gray “cloud” was slowly descending toward my reclining body, and I somehow knew that when it reached me, I would be crushed. Indeed I was. It was a strong ego death experience, but once the ego was gone, it was very ecstatic. In my experience, the process of ego loss can sometimes be difficult, but it seems it's the ego that experiences fear, and once the ego is gone, there is no fear.

Ashley: And in that moment, I had an experience of an entity appearing to me. And this was, I knew in this experience that this was an ayahuasca entity. You're talking to a total atheist and I'm like, what's this? Not that this is God, but just that this is something that is outside of everyday awareness and evidence. I'm telling you this in retrospect, but in the moment, I was completely with this entity and we were communicating. The entity, I could say, looked like a combination of some sort of animal and plant. It almost had octopus like tentacles except they were vines. And the striking thing was that this entity was there with pure love and compassion. And this entity was seeming to appreciate the music that was being played and liked it. And I said to the entity, “You're giving me so much. What can I give you in return? I don't play music. I don't make art. What can I give to you?” And she said, it was female-ish this entity. And she said, “Live the lessons that I give you.” And without a blink of hesitation, I said, “Okay,” because I could do that. And that was a commitment and a relationship with ayahuasca that started there. The commitment was, there's always a lesson and I'm going to live it.

It happened one morning that the Servitor saw in a vision that he was surrounded by a troop of heavenly spirits. He therefore asked one of the most radiant amongst these Princes of the Sky to show him how God dwelt in his soul. The angel said to him, 'Do but fix your eyes joyously upon yourself, and watch how God plays the game of love within your loving soul.' And he looked quickly, and saw that his body in the region of his heart was pure and transparent like crystal: and he saw the Divine Wisdom peacefully enthroned in the midst of his heart, and she was fair to look upon. And by her side was the soul of the Servitor, full of heavenly desires; resting lovingly upon the bosom of God, Who had embraced it, and pressed it to His Heart. And it remained altogether absorbed and inebriated with love in the arms of God its well-beloved. [[1]]

The others walk to and fro in the room, but for me time does not pass. The clock works exactly as it did before. … Time passing and the clock hands turning are things I can no longer quite imagine.… What does the future mean to me? One cannot reach it. … Time stands still; … this is boring, extended time without end.

We had taken some LSD and I remember just being out in the sunshine right, and looking at clouds, but then there's this full sense of connection that I had to the people around me, to the earth, to the grass that I was sitting on. You know, seeing kind of fractals in the light. I would look at something farther away, maybe it was a log cabin or something. And, there were actually like different colors that existed in the air. And so, that was something for me, that's like, okay well this is a light spectrum that exists outside of what we're [usually] able to see…So that was always something that I really enjoyed, you know, in those scenes.

We shared some joints and a few of us took some Orange Sunshine, which was especially powerful acid in circulation at the time. This was only the second time I’d ever taken LSD, and I was sliding. The religious issues on my mind were plaguing me and I was feeling nervous about a lot of unsettling things going on in my life. All of this was flooding in on me as the acid took hold. Acid seemed the only stable force in the world at the time—or so I thought. One of the guys in the group handed me a piece of silver Christmas tinsel, which enthralled me with the light flashing off of it and the trails when I waved it around. It became my anchor and focal point. Shapes were shifting and layers were coming off of things. The street lamps were emitting all manner of color through the dark December air. Everything was moving very, very slowly. Sounds had fallen about half an octave. I was dragged down by this general deceleration of the living universe. It was everything. My essence was in that piece of flimsy metallic glitter. It had become me. As growing numbers of hyped-up students crammed into the courtyard, my agitation mounted. The Christmas sermon commenced—exactly what I didn’t want to hear. It was very noisy with laughter and shouting. Most of them didn’t mind being sandwiched and slid around with no control over their own motion, but I was terrified. As the crush moved me toward the log, I could feel the heat before I could see it. Then it was there in front of me. I’d envisioned throwing the tinsel on it and then watching it melt slowly and puddle down like mercury at the base of the fire. But that’s not what happened. It vaporized instantly in the flames, and I went with it. I was gone. There was nothing left inside of me. I absolutely panicked. I had to get out of the room. I could hear myself yelling, “Get me out of here! Get me out of here!” Then I blacked out. I don’t remember what happened for about ten minutes. When I regained consciousness, I was sitting down on a cold brick sidewalk with all my cohorts standing over me, peering down as though to wonder, “What are we going to do with him?” The panic had subsided, but I was still very nervous. I sat on a bed, then stretched out and lay back in it. The only source of light was a plastic sphere with a multicolored cylinder inside. Red, yellow, and blue streaks of light flashed through the room. They put on the first side of the Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord, with the song “Legend of a Mind” that goes, “Timothy Leary’s dead. Now he’s on the outside, looking in.” I lay in the bed, totally immobile. Then I suddenly started feeling very cold, and that’s when the switch took place. Suddenly everything was okay. Another part of myself kicked in and told me, “It’s all right.” At that moment, I noticed I was looking down on myself. I was up on the ceiling, floating above the room. I could see everyone else sitting in a circle on the floor, listening to the music. I saw myself lying on the bed, looking up at myself looking down at myself. It was uncanny. I realized I was dead. There was no other explanation. I was very, very cold. It was scary and strange at first. I was shivering as though I were outdoors in subzero weather without a coat on. On the one hand, I had the strong physical sensation that I was cold, but on the other, I seemed to be without a physical body at all, which suggested that the coldness had nothing to do with my body, that it was something else altogether. It was okay to be dead. The light was warm, even though I was feeling cold. I opened my eyes again and I was lying on the bed and everything was normal and all right. I knew then that the whole idea of a bad trip wasn’t relevant. It just couldn’t happen, because I had this previously untapped ability to disconnect and observe. Suddenly I was hearing just that [Bach]. As I drifted off to sleep, I heard the beautiful strains of Bach cantatas coming up through the floor into my brain. To this day, I don’t know whether somebody in the dorm was actually playing Bach, or whether I’d conjured his exquisite sound. I tripped all through the next day at a lower level, and the day after that I was back at work shelving library books. Colors were still shifting, almost forty-eight hours after I’d dropped the acid. I ended up shelving a whole truck of books by color, because I just couldn’t read the call numbers.

The pleasant elated feeling increased. I had been angry about a particular situation. By 10:30 the anger was dispelled and I felt at peace with the world. I wandered out to a leisurely lunch with some friends and felt quite unconcerned about my work. This is unusual for me. After lunch I went to a store downtown and then took the specification for a piece of marble to a stone cutter, and especially returning, I noticed that I was having difficulty concentrating. I experienced increasing feelings of being detached and somewhat depersonalized. My mouth was becoming noticeably dry. After parking my car, I went to my office and lay down on my couch, only to have the very strange feeling of being completely lost. At this point I discovered that I had a pulse of about 124, and so called to some of my colleagues for help. I was apparently highly suggestible because one person suggested a drink of whiskey and I took a small drink of whiskey. Another suggested a dextroamphetamine and I took a methamphetamine tablet. Another person suggested dimenhydrinate and I took one of those tablets. By this point I was unable to think clearly. When people tried to talk to me I had the sensation of watching a television commercial with the sound turned off. I was aware of sound but I simply could not make any sense out of what was being said to me. I had complete lapses of attention although I remained conscious. I was driven home, and on arriving there I experienced considerable emotional lability, bursting into tears at one point. I ate very little supper, having no appetite at all, and then went to bed. At bedtime my temperature had fallen to 94°, my pulse was still around 100. I was pale and clammy and my mouth was gone dry, but my pupils were constricted. Although the dry mouth and the inability to concentrate were annoying, I slept off and on through the next day. On Friday, I was aware that I had not had a bowel movement in 24 hours and took a dose of Epsom salt. I was by this point suffering from lower abdominal distension. The feeling of vague detachment continued although I was unable again to drive a car or get about much. Friday was spent almost solely in bed. I was unable to concentrate, think, or do much effective work around the house. I was quite content to lie still and look at nothing. By Friday evening at supper time I was feeling a good deal better. I had a drink before dinner and went to bed promptly after dinner and slept through the evening again. By Saturday morning I was feeling quite well and was able to drive the car again, although some vague feelings of detachment and unreality were detectable from time to time.

Polyp from the Deep (0.150 mg LSD on 15 April 1961, 9:15 hours) Beginning of the effect already after about 30 minutes with strong inner agitation, trembling hands, skin chills, taste of metal on the palate. 10:00: The environment of the room transforms itself into phosphorescent waves, running hither from the feet even through my body. The skin - and above all the toes - is as electrically charged; a still constantly growing excitement hinders all clear thoughts.... 10:20: I lack the words to describe my current condition. It is as if an "other" complete stranger were seizing possession of me bit by bit. Have greatest trouble writing ("inhibited" or "uninhibited"? - I don't know!). This sinister process of an advancing self-estrangement aroused in me the feeling of powerlessness, of being helplessly delivered up. Around 10:30, through closed eyes I saw innumerable, self-intertwining threads on a red background. A sky as heavy as lead appeared to press down on everything; I felt my ego compressed in itself, and I felt like a withered dwarf.... Shortly before 13:00 I escaped the more and more oppressing atmosphere of the company in the studio, in which we only hindered one another reciprocally from unfolding completely into the inebriation. I sat down in a small, empty room, on the floor, with my back to the wall, and saw through the only window on the narrow frontage opposite me a bit of gray-white cloudy sky. This, like the whole environment in general, appeared to be hopelessly normal at this moment. I was dejected, and myself seemed so repulsive and hateful to me that I had not dared (and on this day even had actually repeatedly desperately avoided) to look in a mirror or in the face of another person. I very much wished this inebriation were finally finished, but it still had my body totally in its possession. I imagined that I perceived, deep within its stubborn oppressive weight, how it held my limbs surrounded with a hundred polyp arms - yes, I actually experienced this in a mysterious rhythm; electrified contacts, as of a real, indeed imperceptible, but sinister omniscient being, which I addressed with a loud voice, reviled, bid, and challenged to open combat. "It is only the projection of evil in yourself," another voice assured me. "It is your soul monster!" This perception was like a flashing sword. It passed through me with redeeming sharpness. The polyp arms fell away from me - as if cut through - and simultaneously the hitherto dull and gloomy gray-white of the sky behind the open window suddenly scintillated like sunlit water. As I stared at it so enchanted, it changed (for me!) to real water: a subterranean spring overran me, which had ruptured there all at once and now boiled up toward me, wanted to become a storm, a lake, an ocean, with millions and millions of drops - and on all of these drops, on every single one of them, the light danced.... As the room, window, and sky came back into my consciousness (it was 13:25 hours), the inebriation was certainly not at an end - not yet - but its rearguard, which passed by me during the ensuing two hours, very much resembled the rainbow that follows the storm.

That morning, I woke unusually early—a move that immediately raised suspicion with my parents. They were used to me sleeping in during summer break, and I doubt I’d ever bounded out the door so briskly before 8 a.m. But I didn’t care. There was anticipation in the air, a faint pulse of electricity in my chest. I grabbed my bike and rode over to meet Frank at Plaza del Lago, a kind of outdoor shopping village in our part of the North Shore, just off Lake Michigan. There, I swallowed a tiny silver tablet of LSD—a much smaller physical form than the Blue Blotter I’d taken with Reed. But this little silver dot was no less potent. We rode to Gilson Park, a broad, open place near the lake, perfect for letting the acid take hold. As the minutes passed, my senses began to stretch and shimmer, and the world around me brightened with that unmistakable glow of onset. I felt the rise of energy—not yet euphoria, but the unmistakable change, the mental unmooring that signaled something big was underway. We cycled over to the Bahá’í Temple, a striking white structure with an almost mystical silhouette, not far from the park. I'd seen it many times before, its domed architecture always looming over the skyline like some divine juicer. But I'd never actually been inside. This time, we went in—me, fully tripping, and Frank, quietly keeping an eye on me. Inside the temple, we joined a small scattering of tourists and sat in the auditorium, where they were showing a promotional film about the Bahá’í faith. From the elevated, electric perch of my acid state, the film seemed laughably earnest, a kind of smarmy, multicultural commercial for a religion too broad to have depth. All these smiling people from all corners of the Earth, waving flags and singing praises to a mosaic faith—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism—all rolled into one. It felt corny to me, almost artificial. I watched, smirking and acid-giggling, barely able to suppress my giddy rebellion. I was the teenage maverick, quietly sneering at the idea of unity through conformity. But then the visuals began to melt. The walls of the theater were breathing, the seams of the architecture pulsed with light, glowing and quivering in perfect sync with my heartbeat and brainwaves. It was the first time I ever hallucinated in such a direct, undeniable way. My visual field shimmered with lines of energy, like colored neon outlining the room’s geometry. The space itself became animate. It was stunning—and a little terrifying. After we emerged from the auditorium, we paused at a display showing the various world religions. Frank, more skeptical than I was, challenged their claim to true ecumenical inclusion, pointing out that they’d conveniently left out Satan—or at least a Miltonic archetype of darkness. I didn’t engage. It all felt too abstract, too distant. My mind had turned inward. We returned to the park and sat on a bench by the lake. I remember asking myself: “What’s the date?” I waited a few seconds, expecting my brain to serve up the answer. But... nothing came. I drew a blank. It was a harmless question, but the silence that followed inside my mind was deafening. In that moment, everything cracked open. A sharp pang of panic shot through me. It started small—like the first jolt of a roller coaster's descent—but then plunged downward, fast and hard. I felt myself falling into inner space, into a void I couldn’t comprehend. It was like I’d tripped a wire, opened a trapdoor in my mind and was now free-falling, with no way back. I remembered a story I’d heard—a kind of LSD urban legend—about someone who took acid and ended up not knowing who or where they were. The tale had always stuck with me, a cautionary campfire horror story. Now, I feared I was becoming that person. It wasn’t just anxiety—it was mortal dread. A visceral, terrifying certainty that I had permanently broken something in my brain, that I might never return to normal. My thoughts raced in chaotic loops. I could smell metal in my sweat. My mind was buzzing with one horrible, unrelenting question: “How am I going to get down?” I tried to keep it together, not fully admitting to Frank just how unhinged I felt. But eventually, I broke. In a brittle, high-pitched voice, I told him we needed to move—now. We hopped on our bikes and rode vaguely in the direction of home. I was trying desperately to stay tethered to something familiar. When we passed the home of Ruth and Marshall, a hippie couple I often babysat for, I bolted off my bike and ran up their porch. I hadn’t explained anything to Frank. He called out behind me, panicked, “You’re going to get in trouble!” But I knew what I was doing. I needed help. Not discipline. Not interrogation. Just understanding. Ruth and Marshall were perfect. They were gentle, stoned adults who knew the terrain. I told them I was too high and needed to come down. Ruth—braless, in bell-bottoms and a tank top—immediately ran out to find a “freak doctor” who could give me tranquilizers. Marshall, serene and smiling, told me he’d recently had a bad acid trip himself, writhing on the kitchen floor in existential agony about his role as a father. His story actually comforted me. If a grown man could freak out and come through it, maybe I could too. When Ruth returned, I took the pills and sat on their couch—quiet, hollowed out, still haunted by the fear I’d done irreparable harm. I stared at their kids playing in the backyard. They looked so innocent, so untouched. I envied them. Later, Frank and I walked aimlessly through South Wilmette, a neighborhood far enough from home that I could feel anonymous. Eventually, we circled back, and I even mowed the lawn—mechanically pushing the mower, the scent of grass and gasoline grounding me back into reality. By evening, I was more or less myself again, or at least enough to pass as normal. At dinner, my cousin Pat asked if I’d seen a ghost. And my father, suspicious, asked what kind of “dope” I’d taken so early that morning. I said nothing. I ate my baked chicken in silence, still coasting on the downers, still absorbing the fact that I had made it back. But something inside me had changed. I had seen the edge, and for a moment, I had leaned too far over.

(with 250 mg, orally) "Shortly after I ingested the substance I heard a spirit say, 'Once in a lifetime.' She encouraged me to believe that I would have more life after the experience. But, there was a feeling of foreboding. The light was there, but DIPT was the body of Satan. The voices of people were extremely distorted - males sounded like frogs - children sounded like they were talking through synthesizers to imitate outer space people in science fiction movies. In fact I felt that I was somehow sent into an anti-universe where everything looked the same as normal but was a cold and empty imitation. I felt I was a fallen angel."

I am falling asleep. Golden dots, sparks and tiny stars appear and disappear before my eyes. These sparks and stars gradually merge into a golden net with diagonal meshes which moves slowly and regularly in rhythm with the beating of my heart, which I feel quite distinctly. The next moment the golden net is transformed into rows of brass helmets belonging to Roman soldiers marching along the street below. I hear their measured tread and watch them from the window of a high house in Galata, in Constantinople, in a narrow lane, one end of which leads to the old wharf and the Golden Horn with its ships and steamers and the minarets of Stamboul behind them. I hear their heavy measured tread, and see the sun shining on their helmets. Then suddenly I detach myself from the window sill on which I am lying, and in the same reclining position fly slowly over the lane, over the houses, and then over the Golden Horn in the direction of Stamboul. I smell the sea, feel the wind, the warm sun. This flying gives me a wonderfully pleasant sensation, and I cannot help opening my eyes.

In the spring of 1994, a friend told me that a Shaktipat Intensive was going to be held at the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center in Wroclaw, Poland. She suggested that I come with her. I hesitated, because I already had plans. A few days before the Intensive, however, I made up my mind to participate. The very same night I signed up for the Shaktipat Intensive, I had a dream. I was climbing a staircase of stone steps, and I saw a man standing at the top. He was wearing a white cloth around his waist. I felt unconditional love radiating from his presence—love which felt beyond time and space. When I got closer, he embraced me and we danced. Then he touched the space between my eyebrows, and everything melted into pure energy. There were no shapes, no different forms: all became one, and it was all red-colored energy. When I woke up I was in an ecstatic state. The love I felt in the dream was still with me, and I knew it was God's love I was feeling. A few days later, when I walked through the doors of the Intensive Hall in Wroclaw, my eyes were immediately drawn to a picture near the puja. I recognized the man from my dream. A sevite at the meditation center told me that this was Bhagavan Nityananda, Baba Muktananda's Guru. I have heard many Siddha Yogis share that the Shaktipat Intensive begins as soon as they register for it—whether it's their first Shaktipat Intensive or their twentieth. This was certainly my experience. Just a few hours after signing up for the event, I received shaktipat from a Siddha Yoga Guru! This experience of shaktipat, and the eternal love I felt in my dream, has transformed my life. Since then I know in my heart that there is not a single second when God's love is not with me. I know that I am not alone; God's love, the Guru's love, is always here. The awareness of this love is the foundation of my life, bringing me peace and expanding my joy within.

German author Ernst Jünger described light effects of his own while on LSD, as “colors [getting] brighter, as if the Nubian sun had begun to shine or as if matter was radiating more intensely. It seemed to me as if, up until that moment, I had only perceived shadows of the light; now everything became essential. Even when I closed my eyes the colors did not cease to shine.”

Arab-Palestinian woman from Israel: “In the beginning I used to criticize the idea - they used to read a lot from the Torah. So I used to put on the Quran - we also have a culture we want to share. And I remember the tears.”

As the bus rolled along, I closed my eyes and saw forms morph into cartoon images, an entirely new visual phenomenon for me. When we arrived at the hotel, I was rather disoriented and staggered up to my room on the top floor. I lay down on the bed and noticed that my mouth was getting very dry, almost sticking to itself inside. I was concerned about choking, so I got up to get a glass of water. When I came back to the bed, I noticed a tremendous expansion in the range of my audio sensitivity. I was hearing sounds from far away as well as the voices of people in rooms below me very clearly, almost as if they were in the same room with me. Then a dramatic tolling sound rang into my room, the clanky tone of an anchor on its chain and then the taut, creaking sound of mooring ropes tied to the dock being pulled by the movement of the boat. The harbor was several hundred meters away, so I realized that there was something extraordinary going on, that this was not a common cannabis high. Almost immediately, a speck of bright light appeared in my closed-eye visual field, like a little star in the distance. Growing in size and speed, the light moved from the left to the right. Soon everything was white but for some thin, crystalline rays, which were a source of particularly powerful brilliance. In the presence of this intense luminosity, there was no passage of time. It was as if all moments and all space coalesced into the light. As the light streamed toward me, engulfing me, 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 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 would go away to [an ayahuasca] retreat and come home and my symptoms would get far worse for a period of time [. . .] because ayahuasca would stir up, like, trauma and stuff, I would come home and initially like be a victim to my, you know, habits and brain, and engage in [ED symptoms], and then be able to like pull myself out of it, and have like I said, a higher sort of baseline in terms of, like, mood, insight, satisfaction, confidence, etc.

Arab-Palestinian man from Israel: “[We were in (a Jewish village)], it’s an Arab village whose people were deported, and there is a [Muslim] cemetery which is probably that of those village people. And we drank and I decided to have this trip outdoors ...then I began - I will never forget it - to see people rise up from the graves. Arabs. Locals ... they are walking to the bus, and I start screaming to them “come back, it’s OK, no one will kill you, we are here!” and they can’t hear me. It was a very difficult moment. I see them on their way to Lebanon, just like I learned, like what I read about all my life, and I yelled to them and it didn’t help, they went ... it was very, very sad. And the absurd thing is that the person comforting me is this Jewish guy (laughs).”

The shaman typically experiences an ineffable joy in what he sees, an awe of the beautiful and mysterious worlds that open before him. His experiences are like dreams, but waking ones that feel real and in which he can control his actions and direct his adventures. While in the SCC, he is often amazed by the reality of that which is presented.

Brother Jacques of la Massa had a vision in which came St. Francis to give the chalice of life to his brothers : and he gave it first to Brother John of Parma : who, taking it, drank it all in haste, devoutly ; and straightway he became all shining like the sun. And after him St. Francis gave it to all the other brothers in order : and there were but few among them that took it with due reverence and devotion and drank it all. Those that took it devoutly and drank it all, became straightway shining like the sun ; but those that spilled it all and took it not devoutly, became black, and dark, and misshapen and horrible to see ; but those that drank part and spilled part, became partly shining and partly dark, and more so or less according to the measure of their drinking or spilling thereof. But the aforesaid Brother John was resplendent above all the rest, the which had more completely drunk the chalice of life, whereby he had the more deeply gazed into the abyss of the infinite light divine? [[1]]

Philip, age twenty-nine and a graduate student in psychology, said, "I've always struggled with anxiety and depression, but I'm more accepting of them now." Philip had undergone an array of therapeutic approaches and had seven experiences of drinking ayahuasca, the last one a few months before the study. He carefully distinguished between changes in anxiety and depression and his attitude toward these feelings. Although his ayahuasca experiences did not provide a miracle cure in the sense of removing anxiety and depression, they helped him to change how he related to these challenging feelings. Philip described an important inner shift that implies having greater compassion, possibly at a spiritual level beyond psychological experience.

Arab-Palestinian man from West-Bank: “I had this weird experience of being in the body of an Israeli soldier. It was like seconds of experience – the whole experience was the eye coming down to look for shooting and as the trigger is pulled, that’s it, there is no seeing after.....I could feel him after, this is painful, this is not an easy life after.”

Nature means real freedom. At a rave party, in the desert, I danced barefoot. Under the influence of LSD and listening to psychedelic rave music, I felt the sun, the sand touching my skin. The beautiful landscapes and trees made me feel united with the universe and it enabled an amazing meaningful experience.

The space seemed to expand, to grow infinitely, and at the same time was as if emptied out, such as the time when I walked across the fields one evening. I felt incomparably alone and abandoned, powerless to fulfill myself and exposed to the infinitely broad space, which despite its emptiness stood threateningly before me. For me it was the immediate extension of my own emptiness and my psychic collapse.

"I learned more in six or seven hours of this experience than I had learned in all my years as a psychologist."

Page 48-49: They ate the mushrooms in total darkness, with the shamaness and her daughter singing beside them. During his first sessions Wasson saw extremely detailed landscapes and figures-"a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot"—as well as abstract patterns and colorful geometries. He was astounded by the precision of the visions, which were not dreamlike at all; if anything, they seemed more real to him, more objective and accurate, than the world beheld through normal sight. "I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view; 1 was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life. The thought crossed my mind: could the divine mushrooms be the secret that lay behind the ancient Mysteries? Could the miraculous mobility that I was now enjoying be the explanation for the flying witches that played so impor-tant a part in the folklore and fairy tales of northern Europe?" Wasson felt removed from any possibility of contact with the visions shown to him. He became "a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen." The bemushroomed state was nothing like intoxication in the ordinary sense of the term. Despite the visionary and sensory overload, Wasson noted that his rational intellect remained intact throughout the journey: "The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses." In one of their first séances with the Mazatecs, the Wassons witnessed a demonstration of accurate clairvoyance. After eating thirteen pairs of mushrooms, the shaman Aurelia Carreras told them that a relative would become critically ill within a year, that their son was in trouble and might soon join the army—all of which, to the Wassons' shock, they later verified. They intentionally omitted this episode from their early accounts. "I had always had a horror of those who preached a kind of pseudoreligion of telepathy, who for me were unreliable peo-ple, and if our discoveries in Mexico, including our initial velada [cere-mony], were to be drawn to their attention we were in danger of being adopted by such undesirables," Wasson wrote decades later, still pondering on the mystery of it: "The entheogen, at least when taken by a wise shaman…. conveys information, but how?"

In concluding this chapter I would like to share the experience of Roland, a patient I treated with psilocybin for severe depression. After his wife and children distanced themselves when they were no longer able to take his sensitivity, put-downs, and pessimism, his relationship to Buddhism grew increasingly important. He had belonged to a Buddhist community for many years, but as his depression progressed he also began to doubt his own experiences, insights, and the group. He had been shocked when the disappearance of one member of the community was barely acknowledged after he reported it. The concept of karma had also begun to weigh more and more heavily. He came to me in the hopes that psychedelic treatment might give him a new lease on life. Roland was quite sensitive to psychoactive drugs, so in the first session I only administered ten milligrams of psilocybin. Yet even a small dosage gave Roland a vision of wandering for hours in a slum somewhere in South America. Though he had never been to a slum or South America, everything was pictured in great detail; he saw collapsed homes, earthen streets covered in puddles, mountains of different colored plastic sacks, dried vomit and blood, broken glass, and everywhere the foul stench of decomposition, decay, and feces. The slum was completely empty of people. During the integration session Roland expressed disappointment at the experience; while he could clearly recall his vision of the slum, he found it lacked meaning. I myself had several interpretations, for example the Buddha’s insight that people suffer because they want to possess and hold on to things which are by nature impermanent. I felt hesitant to offer this sort of spiritual interpretation, however, recalling US psychologist Mark Epstein’s warning against easy readings in his book Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself. Epstein, whose work combines Buddhism with psychotherapeutic approaches, bases his advice on spiritual grounds: “The Buddha, in getting over himself, did not vanish. In fact, his presence became even more powerful, his ‘being’ a vehicle of transformation for those around him. In this way, he became a true expression of advice not given.” Despite Roland’s disappointment and my uncritical stance, three months later he called about a second session. “This time with 15 milligrams,” he said. Despite a supposedly meaningless experience, he had an intuition that another session might help him. His vision in the second session hardly differed from the first; he was back in a slum devoid of people. This time, the sight of a broken teapot and a black plastic rice bowl told him that he wasn’t in South America but Asia. Here too, Roland found the vision meaninglessness. “It’s always the same. The misery looks the same everywhere.” Yet he didn’t give up, and continued exploring possible meanings. Peering in through the window of a hut he glimpsed a miniature statue of a Buddha seated on a small wooden alter with a relaxed expression, projecting an air of calm. The sight shook Roland to the core. “Now I understand,” he said, starting to cry.

I was bodyless, selfless. Yet I could grasp His feet and ankles. I embraced this formless form with an infinite love. Friendly power and love filled the Light. Beyond words. Unforgettable. A slow shifting back to the sense of being In-God and In-Christ. They and I merged, then became separate. It makes sense out of the idea of the Trinity—three in one, separate yet one, person and non-person. A most deep understanding of the meaning of God giving his Son to this suffering world. I moved into His love-suffering and felt the cost of His life. I took on all the pain of the world, not in general, but person by person, infinitely, all mankind at once. A universal sense of the purpose of the crucifixion—the meaning, the tragedy, the profound love and pity of suffering humanity.

[A theology student] while diligently pursuing his graduate studies, had been neglecting his wife and children. In the early days of research in Boston, he took LSD in a living-room setting and, with open eyes, saw many visionary veils superimposed before a fireplace. The veils appeared like curtains between himself and the burning logs. Intuitively, he interpreted them as barriers between himself and God. Slowly, with the expressive movement of his arms, he pulled one veil after the other aside until only one remained. He braced himself for what he was convinced would be 'the great experience of seeing the Face of God.' Dramatically, he then pulled the last veil aside and found himself almost brutally confronted by a vivid vision of his three children crying for their father.

Who are you asking for help? I don't know. Who wants help? I don't know. Behind that voice, and mine, lurks a presence — para-noia perhaps — cruel, mocking. Heh, heh, heh. I become smaller,shrunk within myself, surrounded by something dark and nameless. And even farther behind, behind the behind the behind, I hear from somewhere slightly out of reach as if it were external (yet I know has come from deep within), a disembodied consciousness as that of some sort of god, malevolent possibly, make a throat-clearing sound —ahem — as if it were watching me and wants me to know how trivial all that other nonsense had been compared to it. What have you been messing with? I could feel the hair rising on the backs of my arms. 1 amso small. Help me. It just becomes too much. Too much. I can no longer fight, no longer resist. There is nothing left but to forgive myself and show mercy. The crescendo rises, the space between the notes diminishes, the vortex spins faster, taking up all my thought. What am I to do but let go? I can no longer stay afloat, spinning in all this misery. 1 abandon myself to theraging funnel, whirling faster and faster. Transgressions, errors, unkind-nesses and quotidian irritations gather such momentum that it is a relief when they blur together, creating what seems like a paisley tornado. Approaching the void, I offer no resistance. Voices and images dis-solve into a soft, floating darkness. At the end of a last dizzying spiral upward, my head explodes in a flash of relief. It is a big bang.Illumination, from a pinpoint to All, is instantaneous. And, like slowly falling plumes from a skyrocket, I become suffused with a golden feeling of clarity and calm.. I am at peace, complete and whole, with a sense of well-being the like of which I could not ever have imagined. lamina pure state of grace. In the background, I can once again hear the sitar music of Ravi Shankar, hear it instead of inhabiting it. The wailing notes ascend and descend an ancient scale in plangent tones I now implicitly understand to be the classic pattern of creation. I had had only to have opened my eyes to make the maelstrom go away. But, as I would learn another time, the voices and discomfort would have stuck to me for days, weeks, months, even years,like smeared shit,. Had I seized upon my fear it would have stayed with me for the rest of the ride, settling in as a bad trip. Instinct orluck, or a combination of the two, enabled me to abandon all hope and accept whatever came next. It also helped to have a sufficiently powerful dosage to render the concept of control as being futile. Death will come like this. I know it. The secret, then, is to not resist. Let go and embrace it if you can. Since I had been flying solo without a guide or instruction, my own nature had saved me. This was important. Somewhere, buried perhaps deeply within, was a strength I either didn't know I had or had forgotten. It was durable,something I could trust. I felt truly fortunate to have realized that,however briefly. There was a resource available to me — and it came from within. Hallelujah! ... Ingesting the alkaloid, LSD, was something else. Nothing would ever be the same again. Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception" had been opened. I had seen the Garden. What I had seen, or realized, could not be dismissed as mere illusion or hallucination. I remembered everything. For me, nothing could ever be the same again —in a good way. It could just as easily have been in a bad way, or anothing way, wholly unsatisfactory. One thing I knew for certain is that acid wasn't anything to idly mess around with.After what I had just gone through, I saw LSD as a sacrament. have never been persuaded otherwise. Creation had been revealed to me in startlingly clear form. Suddenly it was all there, and, attwenty-three or four, I had access. The cosmos was mine, although it almost seemed as if I had cheated somehow. Scholars had laboured until their hair had turned white, searching for answers through the weight of decades. Theologians had spent lifetimes in the service of faith in what could not be named, arriving at tentative proofs accepted by adherents, possibly ridiculed by competing theorists. Ascetics denied the flesh, or flayed it into either hell or ecstasy, in hopes of a tiny shred of enlightenment. Hermits lived silently in caves listening to rocks grow. Certain mathematician scackled gleefully in rubble-strewn rooms with formulae that proved the existence of God. I had dropped a pill on a Saturday afternoon because I had to work all week. In an instant I had elbowed my way to the head of the line. Later, in an upstairs bedroom, with Degen calling up from the living room from time to time to determine if I was all right, I felt like some sort of cosmic warrior who had survived an epic struggle.Hours before I had, as we say, dumped my garbage — one of the therapeutic benefits of acid, if done correctly, is to get rid of all the crap that sticks to you from inhabiting the world — and peaked, afew hours into the trip. Now, around hour nine, I was mellow but still sailing. I was sitting on the edge of the bed. My senses were acute and things were kind of sorting themselves out for me. I needn't have worried about jumping the line. What I had searched for and found, I still seek. The difference being that I realize that the glow of enlightenment is, at best, temporary, transitory and fleeting. I wouldn't have it any other way. Then, I saw it asa state to be achieved and dwell in forever — like winning some sort of spiritual lottery. Find the grail and all will be well. Yet, all around me, the very ebb and flow of things that ebb and flow, egress and ingress — the natural way of things — contradicted the static nature of this desire. Knowing and not knowing, empty and full,inhale and exhale; the strength comes not from achieving a particular state but realizing that there is a rhythm. Down will eventually traverse its way to up, and back again. The circle will turn. Streng this having the sense not to grab on to any one part, good or bad, allowing respiration to occur. I suppose I had no right knowing anyof that. Wisdom is all well and good until the exigencies of something gnawing at your ass force you to abandon nirvana and embrace reflex. I had a job. Having failed the mature matriculation course, I would not be advancing to first-year university. I had learned bridge, improved my hearts game, and made a few interesting friends.

God, he had to make everything in the world; everything, [including] angels. He begin to think, he got to have somebody that look like him. Because all the animals, you know, they got young ones. And he was alone, and then he got to have a son. Just as quick as he think that, well, he got a son; I seen him once [in a Peyote vision]. Looks like a man; powerful; he's taller than T here, [a tall Menomini]; have whiskers, long hair, brown hair.

The experience began not long after receiving the injection and it seemed right away like I got into a battle of sorts, like I guess with demons and devils, and whatever. This seemed to last for quite a while and then we’d be transported into another world and kind of go from one world to another. It seemed pretty far out. There was a whole range of emotions from a lot of fear, from fear to anger to love to beauty to contentment to the fullest extent possible, I believe. At times it came to panic and became paranoid at one point, when I began to think there was a plot to steal my identity, to steal my soul, and even [my therapist and cotherapist] were in on it and I wasn’t sure. I was trying to hold on to reality. I wanted to make sure I would come back to reality but then I kept getting taken in different worlds.

Page 225 — Salvia: I had tried Salvia several times in New York and found it unpredictable, ranging from dissociative to em-pathic. It had a peculiarly orthogonal effect, as though giving a view into a universe linked, at an odd diagonal angle, with our own. On my first attempt, I felt as if I was trapped forever in a time-loop, although the entire experience lasted less than five frightening minutes.

Page 214-216 — Psilocybin & Modern Rationalism: A few years earlier, when I revived my interest in psychedelics, I first went through a merry mushroom-eating phase. I was impressed by the way moderate doses of mushrooms added levels and layers to normal conscious life-colors and sounds deepened, the effect of a pat-tern of light and shadows could become almost unbearably beautiful, my own empathic and emotional qualities seemed finer-tuned. On higher doses, with eyes closed, I saw those Aztec-patterned sci-fi civi-lizations flying past me at jet speed, as McKenna described, although I never took the five-gram megadose that, according to McKenna, leads to direct communication with a loquacious "mushroom man." The Aztec futurist imagery still seemed like something that could be an op-tical effect, a rapid fring of neuronal impulses caused by a drug work-ing on neurotransmitters. That night, on mushrooms and moclobemide in Palenque, I saw something that I absolutely did not want to see-something so ludi-crous, so embarrassing that I hesitate to tell it. Lying on a bed in a dark-ened room with eyes closed, I watched rapid bands of green and yellow flimmering across my inner view screen, typical optical effects, but these green blobs suddenly sharpened into focus—-the knobs of my internal receiver turning-until I found myself staring at a group of laughing green elves standing in a line. There were many of them. A mob of little people in traditional green outfits and peaked caps. The elves were jumping up and down and they were cheering. When I saw them, I could hear their cheers faintly in my ears-"Hooray!" They seemed to be welcoming me, very happy and excited because I had seen them. What was alarming about this apparition was that it was like a photographic projection: The elves were as clear to my inner vision as film images. How could this happen? Of course, there are many possible answers. The elves could have been some form of high-resolution delusion. Perhaps my previous psychedelic endeavors were making me susceptible to new forms of nuttiness. If I am going to hallucinate, I thought before eating the mush-rooms, show me something related to the majestic Palenque ruins, evoke the cruel and silent Mayan gods. Instead, here confronting me were a bunch of happy elves. This was leprechaun kitsch, an outtake from a Disney flick. I had no interest in elves and was perturbed to see them. Perhaps some element of my unconscious had glommed onto the "Elf Arche-type" and pulled it up from out of my childhood. I knew McKenna's writing on DMT, and I might have been influenced by it, although these elves were not transforming and not at all machinelike. They were just normal, garden-variety fairies. Another option to consider: Maria Sabina, the famous Mazatec shamaness, called the mush-rooms she used in divination and healing "the sacred children." She said that these children appeared to her when she ate the mushrooms, and they showed her how to heal people, told her what plants to use, and generally helped in all of her undertakings. Perhaps I was being allowed a glimpse of Sabina's "sacred children." Was it my cultural bias or a universal phenomenon that they appeared identical to the traditional "fairy folk" or the "good neighbors"-those archaic spirits of the Welsh and Irish countryside, exhaustively chronicled in a won-derful turn-of-the-century book by Dr. W. Y. Evans-Wentz called The Fairy Folk in Celtic Countries. Evans-Wentz took hundreds of testi-monies from country folk and local seers who had confronted the fairies-actually, there seemed to be different hierarchies of supernatu-ral locals, including the Siddhi, the "tall shining ones," and pygmy fairies such as gnomes, leprechauns, and "Little People." Contradicting the restrictive dogmatism of modern rationalism, Evans-Wentz argued that because these peculiar dwellers in their sylvan worlds had been encountered by so many otherwise sensible Celts, and appeared as such a universal element in world folklore, they had, in some way, to be real.

It helped me in the decisions. Not in the decisions, in the action itself. Like, not thinking, just doing.

I remember having a ceremony where I really saw that at the time bingeing and purging and restricting were actually adaptive coping mechanisms; at the time, they were the only coping mechanisms that I actually knew to use to deal with the difficulty that I was experiencing, that I had no words for and that no one was asking about.

To seek to condense any of my experiences into words is to distort them, rendering them finite and impure . .. What is a "transcendent dimension of being?" Such words on paper are little more than metaphysical poetry. Somehow I feel I could better communicate my experience by composing a symphony or by molding a twisted piece of contemporary sculpture, had I the talents required for either form of artistic expression. In no sense have I an urge to formulate philosophical or theological dogmas about my experience. Only my silence can retain its purity and genuineness.

What's interesting is that I began experiencing sets of hallucinations, and then I said to myself, "Ah, this is the Logos. " There's the blue-yellow core of meaning and semantics, basically. [[4]] I laughed at his use of the word "basically": "That's easy for you to say." I know! It's like threads of words or DNA or something. They're all around there, they're everywhere. After the blue amoebic shapes, there were several pulsating places. I thought, "There are lots of these." It's a good feeling. Then it breaks into a ruffled reality. When I looked around, it seemed like the meaning or symbols were there. Some kind of core of reality where all meaning is stored. I burst into its main chamber. Trying to keep up with Eli, I wondered, "It seems like some kind of membrane you break through, into a feeling of meaning and certainty." It is! I don't know if it's because of my interest in computers or not, but it seems like it's the raw bits of reality. It's a lot more than only ones and zeros. It's a higher level, very potent bits. Eli went on to describe the "room" into which he burst. With this report, the view DMT provides now starts enlarging. I was in a white room, experiencing certain emotions and feelings that gave me an intense feeling of being a co-reality. Like a dream I had of bumping into some Hispanic kids with my car, into their car. They were really mad at me. I said to them "If you hate me, you hate yourself. Our cultures are merged, so there's no defending against that. " Their culture, our culture, they were co-real, existing simultaneously. The white room consisted mostly of light and space. There were cubes stacked with icons on the surfaces, like a Logos of consciousness. It was light but there was a lot of other information coming in.

Slight changes in perception (dizziness, lightheadedness, increased brightness of room, changes in size of far objects) occurred. There was no change in thought and there was slight euphoria. After 2 hours, he found the experience unpleasant and took 1 gm of nicotinic acid by mouth. That evening, he was irritable, restless, and without ambition. He was bothered by the odor of new wax on the floor, and later by insomnia.

The most striking of these common characteristics is the experience of light. There is a great intensification of light; this intensification is experienced both when the eyes are closed and when they are open. Light seems preternaturally intense in all that is seen with the inward eye. It seems also preternaturally strong in the outside world. With this intensification of light there goes a tremendous intensification of color and this holds good of the outer world as well as of the inner world. …Intensified light, intensified color, and intensified significance do not exist in isolation. They inhere in objects. When the eyes are closed, visionary experience begins with the appearance in the visual field of living, moving geometrics. These abstract three-dimensional forms are intensely illuminated and brilliantly colored. After a time they tend to take on the appearance of concrete objects such as richly patterned carpets, or mosaics, or carvings. These, in turn, modulate into rich and elaborate buildings, set in landscapes of ex­traordinary beauty. These things are all new. The subject does not remember or invent them; he discovers them, 'out there,' in the psycho­logical equivalent of a hitherto unexplored geographical region.

Out on the street the cool evening air was chilly but exhilarating. The city, which had seemed from the window cold, grimy and slightly sinister, now was transformed into the wonderland I had envisioned when hearing fables as a child. The rich colors and textures of fantasy, more real than real, were pure enchantment. Walls of buildings had an added dimension to their surfaces. I felt I was walking in a waking dream. It was an all-consuming pleasure, just to see, touch, feel and smell. I had the urge to run and, giving way to the impulse, felt myself propelled along at triple speed, as in an old speeded-up movie. The occasional passer-by was also greatly altered in appearance and I saw him as a grotesque distortion of himself. The personality and intentions seemed to be boldly written on his features and reflected in his mannerisms. I found myself laughing openly at these people, a laughter that seemed to be three-quarters sarcasm and one-quarter delight. I believe now that this was a magnification of a trait I ordinarily keep hidden, below the surface, even from myself. It was eerie, how I seemed to be able to divine the intentions of these strangers. I recall also seeing a car, built during the era when much chrome trim was in style. In the bright moonlight it became a blinding mass of glinting silver, overwhelming in its impact. I staggered back and looked with relief on the subtler tones of the city skyline. My friend——'s illusions took on a more frightening form. I can still see his expression as he looked down at a caterpillar on the ground and saw it seemingly grow in size to gigantic proportions and start to pursue him. He quickly looked away and never looked back on the creature again. Returning to the apartment I saw once more how the others were distorted, as if I were focusing on the dominant quality of each… . The guide seemed more and more, as the evening wore on, a kind of benign Buddha, making his own inner judgments of the people present.

“I knew where I was, but I just, it wasn’t a pleasant experience like the first one and then the end part, the second one. It was, it was scary. And to the point of when you’re on it, you barely breathe, you’ve quite shallow breathing.”