Crasses et Voluptés

Not everyone who took one or another of the psychedelic substances understood the experience alike; some understood it not at all — their visions were meaningless marvels — and some understood simply that their minds and senses were temporarily abnormal. But certain visionary, philosophical, and metaphysical elements do recur in a high percentage of the reports and appear to constitute a fairly consistent dimension of the experience. These elements may be summarily listed as a transfigured view of the everyday world; a sense of timelessness, of living in an Eternal Now; the loss or transcendence of ego-consciousness ("depersonalization") and a consequent degree of Self-realization; a feeling of identity with the universe and love for all things; and a feeling of profound peace and joy. The hellish potential of the experience attends upon the second element in the list, ego-loss, if the ego "dies hard." Everything depends upon the successful breakthrough of the ego-bounds with its horrific threshold guardians. Beyond that, each element really entails all the others; or, each is only one aspect or linguistic facet, one way of talking about the single fact of imaginative being: in imagination the Real Man knows ecstatically that he is That eternally. To realize the Self is to be in eternity and joyously at one with the cosmos; or, otherwise worded, to be awake in the present moment is to be in union with life, which is the Self, and which is ecstasy.

gogetit