The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 9 of 125
Four levels of the psychedelic experience
Masters and Houston start by asking the basic question facing anyone who becomes involved with LSD—how can individual trips differ so wildly from one person to the next?—and drawing on several years of research, they speak of “four levels of the drug experience hypothesized as corresponding to major levels of the psyche,” levels that they proceed to characterize as follows: the sensory level First, LSD brings changes to perception, most obviously to sight, but more generally to the body image—which can appear to grow or shrink, age or become youthful—changes tending to congregate in the early stages of a session, while the drug’s effects are still mounting. the recollective-analytic level This general loosening of one’s perception of oneself and the world, plus the massive influx of energy, allows unconscious material to begin to work itself free. This was the level that so excited psychotherapists. There was no longer any need to go digging for repressed emotions or memories; they burst into consciousness with little or no prompting. Using the term loosely, this could be described as the Freudian level of the drug’s action. the symbolic level If the session goes deeper, a further level is reached. Personal identity starts to thin out and disappear. Phenomena don’t just become more beautiful physically, they become more densely charged with meaning. They become mythopoetic. The personal unconscious appears to be becoming replaced by something you could well call the collective one . . . the theater of ritual and myth. Masters and Houston call this the “symbolic level”—and it could, again using the term loosely, be characterized as the drug’s Jungian dimension. the integral level The sensory . . . the autobiographical . . . the archetypal. A typical session would be multilayered with these three levels shifting in and out of one another. However, there was one final, qualitatively different variety of psychedelic experience, reported by Freud and Jung, that in a few cases appeared to be religious epiphany. This had always been the most contentious implication of psychedelics, the possibility that God could be put in a pill; and Masters and Houston, while admitting themselves baffled as to how any such thing could be happening, were forced to acknowledge that a small number of their subjects did appear to be having authentic mystical experiences.