The Beyond within, the LSD story – Dr Sidney Cohen

As the effect increased, the music seemed to take over the direction of the experience.  I began to feel disembodied and a marvellous weightlessness commenced.  My consciousness seemed to rise into a wonderful limitless space, infinite and curving as the sky, with the earth and the sea below.  It reminded me of the hawks I have so often watched, soaring effortlessly on updrafts over the canyons and hills.

 The colours of the sky and sea and mountains were marvellously beautiful in a sort of shining air .  There was only nature, no buildings anywhere.  Only the land, the ocean and the limitless vaulted sky.  It was absorbing and beautiful, beyond speech.  I wanted not to speak, only to experience it silently.  The music seemed to speak beyond any eloquence.  Nothing in words could conceivably add to it.  I had to force myself to try to speak even a little..........

The feeling of being disembodied continued throughout.  At times my mind seemed to float above my body.  It could be anywhere spatially at any moment.  The prevailing feeling was the marvellous soaring in the universe, the immense light and a being borne aloft by the music.  I felt without will.  The music, the drug and subjective forces inside seemed to determine what happened.  There was no particular sense of time.  Also – most important – none of any of this seemed strange or new.  It seemed more real than ordinary consciousness and all of it seemed revisited.  Something one had known once.  It was as though there was a reality, which even with the help of a drug, one was catching merest glimpses of – perhaps like the sun seen through forest trees.

And certain factors in one's self and the opening of the drug enable one to see – however much or little according to the person and the moment.  But what you see you know is not an illusion.

…..........then I saw, when the drug was fading, some demons.... small dancing creatures.  They came in flocks, like little shore birds moving very rapidly.  They seemed entertaining, not alarming or particularly important.  I asked myself what they might be and instantly knew.

They were doubts.  My critical thoughts of this experience.