If religion is the opium of the people, then the hallucinogenics may be the inside dope. As a longtime metaphysical student I felt duty bound to cultivate some first-hand acquaintance with the magic potions that so strongly stimulated the occult revival of the last part of this century. After all, much of my literary success stemmed from the coincidence of having returned from a two-and-a-half-year sojourn in India to set up shop as a yoga teacher in 1961, just in time to ride the rising wave of interest in Eastern philosophies. While observing the successive crests of the Zen-Beatnik-Macrobiotic-Psychedelic-Hippie movement, it was gratifying to fancy that I played a small role in advancing the causes of yoga, astrology, and reincarnation therapy.
My single LSD trip was painful but well worth the risk. At eight o'clock on an evening of undisturbed solitude I swallowed the small white capsule supplied by a hippie friend. During the next two hours of waiting nothing happened except for an increasing malaise. By ten o'clock, my mind was a churning miasma of misery. Demonic flames danced behind my eyes and there appeared no doubt but that insanity was pressing in. An hour later there seemed little chance of surviving the night. Surely I was dying! What would happen when my lifeless corpse was discovered?
After still another wretched hour my body was suddenly compelled to sit bolt upright. Glancing at my watch I noticed that both hands pointed straight up. It was exactly midnight. At that moment a current of blue flame rose from my spine along the backbone and shot out through the top of my skull. Like champagne bubbling from a bottle my spirit rushed out into an effervescent empyrean in which the entire cosmos resembled a gloriously scintillating multi-petaled lotus. This had to be the primordial, eternally flowing fountainhead of creation, the supremely effulgent core of all that which is!
This awesome peek through the rent veil of space and time probably lasted less than ten seconds. At that point the thought occurred that if I didn't somehow contrive to squeeze back into the cramped contours of the body it would be impossible ever to return. Reluctantly my untrammeled mind funneled back down into the dimly lit container of normal awareness and, like a genie returning to his bottle, submitted once again to the bondage of the brain.
The rest of the night was glorified with visions of sparkling colors, flowing streams of light, and bursts of gemlike scintillae, as though the watchkeepers of the psyche were celebrating their brief spate of independence from normal perceptual controls. In tune with these neural pyrotechnics, my heart seemed to open up and melt with a beatific love for all beings. I totally grasped the fact that compassion is the consciousness of God and that the capacity to relate sympathetically to all beings is the purest manifestation of the divinity within. Would it henceforth be possible to make my own life a more radiant expression of that sublime concern for the lowest and least particles of creation?
From that moment I have never doubted the essential reality of the vision perceived during my ten-second glimpse into the illimitable grandeur of a self-illuminating cosmos. I knew beyond all question that the revelation was not just in my own head. That coruscating blossom was no mere mirage of a mind disordered by an artificially induced concatenation of phase sequences in the cortex. To this day I believe that this is how the universe really is: an incandescent vortex spiraling outward through multidimensional designs of indescribable richness and beauty. And, amazingly enough, the whole pattern looks much like a flower.