PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

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____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
taste in my mouth for a long time. I have since been able
to ascertain that it was the water, not the LSD, that was responsible
for the taste. The session was carried out in my
laboratory, in very familiar surroundings.
At 9:55, I experienced a mild sense of ataxia as I walked
along the hall. I gradually developed a sense of strangeness,
and I felt stimulated and mildly drunk. Subsequently I felt
muscle tension all over my body, but especially in the back
and around the nape of the neck. My stomach felt queasy,
as if with suppressed excitement, and I felt tenseness in the
back of the throat. The floor seemed to be revolving in the
room to some extent, and I seemed to lose sensation, in the
cheeks and jaws especially but also all over my torso. The
internal symptoms subsided, but the muscular symptoms in
the back and neck and the loss of sensation around the jaws
returned throughout the day and signaled my going in and
coming out of the states.
The first visual experience was a series of transient palings
of color all over the room, which began at 10:15. Periodi-
cally there seemed to be flashes of white lightning. In be-
tween, everything seemed very distinct and very beautiful.
I became increasingly euphoric and laughed a great deal.
A bird flew toward the window of our room seeming to be
flying abnormally slowly. We then heard a clatter from out-
side behind our building, and I went to the window that
faced the rear of the building. B. was walking back toward
the building with an empty trash can. His face seemed cov-
ered with white grease paint, and he seemed a sad clown.
He smiled and waved up at me. We were listening to a record
of Plains Indians songs and dances, and every time the
drum beat, the light in the room would get brighter. I closed
my eyes and saw lettering on stone in the shape of the He-
brew letters shin and tsaddik. As I think about it, these
letters may represent portents of what I really wanted
the experience to do for me. According to Feuchtwanger in
his novel Power, shin is a symbol for wisdom and is repre-
sented by the pattern of lines over the bridge of the nose
of the cabbalists. Tsaddik may be a pun on tsadduk, the
holy, wise miracle workers of the Hassidic Jews. Starlings
walking among the trees outside seemed to be touched with