PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

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____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
through his veins as well as the receiving and transmitting
operations of the nervous system. All these reports character-
ize the first, or sensory, level of psychedelic experience.
The verbal reports associated with the recollective-analytic
and symbolic levels are somewhat different. For example, one
subject at the recollective-analytic level reported the insight
to Masters and Houston, "I have never been in love with my
own body. In fact, I believe that a major emotional problem
in my life is that I have always disliked it." At the symbolic
level, a number of subjects experience bodily sensations in
terms of a mythic drama. One anthropologist reported going
through a Haitian transformation rite in which his body be-
gan to take on aspects of a tiger (Masters and Houston,
1966, pp. 76-78).
At the integral level, bodily sensations are also reported.
One of Masters and Houston's subjects had a mystical ex-
perience in which he was "... overwhelmed by a bombard-
ment of physical sensations, by tangible sound waves both
felt and seen," after which he "dissolved." He later stated,
"Now I understand what is meant by being a part of every-
thing, what is meant by sensing the body as dissolving."
A great deal of research is needed to correlate the data on
bodily sensations with the data on LSD. One important hy-
pothetical formulation that would be helpful in effecting this
correlation was presented by Gardner Murphy and Sidney
Cohen in 1965. Murphy and Cohen suggested that psyche-
delic drugs lower the threshold for internal sensations, espe-
cially those from the digestive system, the sex organs, and the
striped muscles. As a result, body feelings emerge into self-
consciousness, and an individual may interpret the experience
as one of "cosmic love." Murphy and Cohen also hypothe-
sized that there was a direct relationship between certain
physiological sensations and such verbal reports as "entrance
into the void."
In considering the effects of psychedelic substances upon
speech, attention could be paid not only to the physiological
determinants but to the psychological concomitants of the
experience. One of the most typical phenomena is the state-
ment by the subject that his experience has been ineffable,
that it cannot be communicated adequately to others. Some