PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

286___________
____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
in a positive, happy state, which was brought crashing down
when the outside observer raised some issues about which the
subject felt guilty.
The quality of the experience for the other subjects is best
exemplified by the fact that one subject reported that every-
thing was part of a divine order and he must spend his life
serving God. A second subject described the world as "... at
once a gigantic formal garden and an irrepressible wilderness
of joyous space." A third subject titled his account of this
session "And then there was Depth!" The two subjects with
experience of a psychedelic (marijuana) reported the expe-
rience as being like "a pot high." The simulator became con-
vinced that our usual perception of depth is an illusion, and
was engrossed with the tridimensionality of space.
All six subjects responded to this condition with an
expanded awareness of the world similar to the experiences
described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception (1954).
With the exception of the fifth hypnotic subject, all became
and remained exuberantly happy. All but the simulator seemed
to have experiences similar to what has been described under
the rubric of "psychedelic experience." All the hypnotic sub-
jects reported sensory enhancement, most marked in the visual
area, but cutting across all sense modalities. The hypnotic
subjects were also, as a group, impressed with the order in-
herent in the world about them, which three of them im-
bued with religious significance.
Blurred vision. Three hypnotic subjects responded posi-
tively to this condition; two hypnotic subjects and the simu-
lator responded with schizoid withdrawal. Those that re-
sponded positively responded in terms of the primacy of
color and light over form, and compared their perceptions
of the world with impressionist paintings. One subject and
the simulator responded in terms of an inability to make con-
tact with anybody; the last subject responded with a blunting
and dulling of thought processes. All subjects lost some
sensation in non-visual modalities. When the perception of
outlines alone was blurred, colors tended to stand out. Alan
Watts (1962) has noted how the perception of form and the
perception of color may really be the same, but the behavior
patterns of these subjects do not support this point of view.