The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 90 of 125
Ecstasy and the world made of love
It’s a long time ago now, but the runaway success of the first warehouse parties in the 1980s had seemed to promise a fresh cultural and political breakthrough. Since those days Ecstasy has been so commercialized that it’s hard to recapture the excitement that greeted its first appearance in Thatcher’s England of the Living Dead. Here at last was a psychedelic that was workable, a psychedelic that could excise the ego with surgical precision, but without the experience ever becoming overwhelming the way it does on acid. A psychedelic that could be used safely by anyone, however inexperienced, for MDMA simply switched off psychological fear—disconnecting it at the socket, so to speak. No longer was there any need to defend oneself, for rapport with others was revealed as the very substance of social life . . . and yet the experience could go very deep. For me at least, it was the first time that the mystics’ assertion the world is made of love—literally so—made self-evident sense.