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get deeply enough into a drug experience that they really forget that it is a drug experience. That’s never happened to me. I’ve always been aware at some level that whatever was going on was because of this thing that I had eaten or smoked or whatever. This was different because I wasn’t on any drugs and something very profound and very emotional happened to me and there was only me. There was only me, and if there was something else from outside, some kind of spiritual force, whatever, it isn’t anything I know about. It sort of snuck up on me, 1 didn’t take it willingly. I didn’t take it deliberately the way I do on drugs. So in that sense it was very different.
S: Did you also consider that the drug experience is not real, is something false and manufactured by the drug itself?
A: I think it is real—just different real. I remember one time when I was in the desert in Utah and sitting and staring at this wonderful red sandstone cliff that has these patternings on it from the way the chemicals weather on it. The whole cliff was moving, it undulated and it moved up and down and the whole world seemed to be alive. At some level it made me feel oneness with the universe— that yes, everything is alive and I am part of this. The rocks, although they don’t appear to move to me, are part of a living, breathing, organic world, and I think at some philosophical and some real level that it is true. It’s not part of my everyday reality. I don’t treat the rocks as though they are alive, but I think that drug experiences can open you up to what are probably fairly profound truths. But they don’t really last.
S: What’s the difference between that and what was happening to you? Was there much of a difference in terms of the quality of the experience or the sense of its being real and lasting?
A: Well, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that very much. I mean, I had been talking with Jim (a fellow researcher) about how you can learn a lot from drugs and that they are selective disinhibi- tors, that they sort of turn on parts of your mind that are usually left off, and allow parts of your mind to shut down that maybe screen you from other experiences. To that extent the drug experience is real, and I don’t think the drug puts anything in your mind that wasn’t there already. It just—you see it differently.
S: But the sense of realness—is there a difference in this sense of realness in the drug experience compared to the feeling you had—was