LSD Experience

The Far-Off Land

Notes Taken During experiments 

with psychotropic drugs.

Eugene Seaich 1959-60

From The Book The Far-Off Land.

March 5, 198

11:25 am

Took 75 mcg. Lysergic acid diethyl amide

11:45

Slight withdrawal beginning,

rather definite euphoria noticeable.

12:00

Very intense euphoria.

12:05

Rapid onset of symptoms.

Slightly intoxicated feeling.

Narrowed vision.

12:20

Waves of elation and pure bliss.

Euphoria has grown steadily since taking drug.

little change in perception

12:30

Euphoria almost overwhelming.

Great tension and elation,

Physical sensation one of ecstasy.
12:40

hypereflexia, even greater pleasure.

First notice that lights are slightly brighter.

Ate lunch.

1:00

Took an additional 25 mcg. of LSD.

Feel peak of elation, euphoria.

Colors beginning to play their fantastic illusory images around

a periphery of vision when I quickly cast eyes across field.

Stroboscopic patterns on occasion.

Listening to music, note that the contrapuntal lines are more acute.

Intricacies of music in clearer detail than ever able to notice before,

as if 'hi-fi' were in even greater fidelity.

Warm, rich bliss.

I have needed reassurance of this sort,

for some time,

that pleasure and happiness is indeed this possible.

Pencil begins to act by itself.

As yet, little alteration of consciousness,

only heightened enjoyment of present mode of reality.

1:35

Withdrawal tendencies alternate with perfect normality.

Colors are now rich, deep and lovely.

the textures of surfaces seem richer than ever before.

A face on a magazine on a magazine seamed real,

changing, variously smiling.

1:40

First signs of hallucinated dreams and visions with eyes closed.

Daylight seams splendid and pulsating.

First physical euphoria going into psychic effects.

All colors in room are vivid, deep, full of subjective richness,

especially wood-grains, carpentry furniture.

Mood would be pensive,

were it not for elation and nervous stimulation.

2:00

Confusion and bustle in house keeps me constantly in touch with reality,

dispels tendency to savor experience.

Could be seeing visions now, if were allowed.

Note perspiration for first time.

Waiting for caller to arrive and leave--due in half-hour.

Intolerable urge to have visit done with so as is to enjoy experience.

2:20

According to previous accounts,

I should now be at peak of experience,

which would be so,

were it not for waiting out this damn interruption!

Mood to now intensely euphoric,

all bright, pleasant; here I sit,

waiting for opportunity to enjoy it!

Have been up and about through out.

2:30

Sat down in retirement for a while--ability to dream is pronounced.

Kaleidoscopic fancies very subdued,

due to anxiety of expected visit.

2:50

Can now have a while to myself!--

3:00

Too late!

Height of syndrome passed while unable to enjoy it.

No color heightening, synesthesia, visions, ect.

Euphoria mild now,

pleasant,

but has no particular novelty.

3:45

Thank god!

There is something left in nervous system!

When I lay alone on couch,

I had splendid dreams and scintillations

(though not as striking as they would have been earlier).

Felt if I was solid rock lying on bed,

bursting with atomic energy.

Matter-and-energy-image all splendid and luminescent.

Saw self hurled by atomic explosion out into the cosmos,

past uncountable galaxies of light and beauty.

Geometric patterns of color fluttered past in unbelievable profusion and delicacy.

Feel very withdrawn, intoxicated.

4:00

Light! Pure light!

Just to sit and stare into translucent being!

New interruption on phone.

4:10

Sitting in kitchen,

gathering my thoughts.

Colors are vivid and fresh.

Feel equilibrium between self and reality,

with general acceptance of objective world on its own terms.

Have again felt childhood lurking beyond the horizon,

enticing me back,

but with lessened persuasiveness.

Beauty in life has indeed for me equated with childhood;

reality on this spring day is self-sufficient,

must be accepted in order to go on.

Disenchantment has no terrors.

Somehow,

whole of day's experience has been subconsciously pervaded with

Kerouac's novel,

which I just read.

It seemed in visions I was reliving the frantic,

masculine search for adventure and meaning;

that meaning was to have been soft, feminine,

a realization of all life's longings,

but it was hard, bony and masculine,

therefore restless,

tortured, unfulfilled!

That is essence of male's being!

We long to be hermaphroditically united with feminine,

mother, women, sweetheart,

for softness to complete our masculine torment,

to be caught up in some higher unity,

which I see in vision as life,

childhood, adulthood, matter, energy, womanness, maleness,

on cosmic scale.

4:25

The enemy in life is the intellect,

the cold, analytical intellect!

I can feel it gnawing away at beauty and turning it into stone,

like an acid spot eating out through a pea-cock and

mother-of-pearl fabric.

We have no ability to believe;

we only know,

and in this life,

that is not enough.

All around me in the warm,

moist air are recollections of the past,

which my monster-brain repells.

Oh, this is all a farce,

trying to pretend that anything extraordinary is happening.

I can't see how other persons could get undone by LSD.

I can't go far enough!

4:30

Pleasant,

harmonious feeling of being suspended in time,

space and meaning.

Neutrality is essence of the reunified halves of existence!

But living, pulsing neutrality,

fire from within,

divine force in perfect harmony.

4:45

Oh bliss and ecstacy of sheer reality, family, possession!

Colors of cloth (children's new coats) dazzling and jewel like.

A mood of elevated, calm and tranquility.

Experience this time has been through out on a level of sheer ordinariness,

therefore real and divine,

not one of fantasy and other-world hauntings.
Merely sit and survey all with rejoicing,

noting ordinary shapes, sounds, and colors,

all good and tangible and rich.

This has been an uplifting testament of reality;

the LSD intoxication,

by being tangled with dross,

eventually elevates the ordinary and affirms it.

4:50

Took 50 mg. of Thorazine.

5:15

Oh warm joy and tranquil happiness!

Having a cup of tea,

listening to Parsifal Good Friday Music.

The sheer, outpouring affirmation of my mood and music indescribable!

Colors all bright, serene, the music peaceful;

body warm, relaxing and euphoric.

5:45

Lying here in my mother-of-pearl chamber,

listening to Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder.

The beauty of this experience makes these stupid words useless and superfluous.

How beautiful music can be,

and how wonderfully the emotions can be molded by it;

this fact beyond description.

Every note drips honey-sweet and rich like nectar,

so palpable, so tangible!

6:15

Listening to Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra.

Saw world as an immense Nietzschean mass of life,

solemnly affirming existence.

Ceiling dissolved in mass of grey clouds,

angrily swirling inn birth and death-struggles of being,

majestically yes-saying;

I AM LIFE! I AM THE FORCE OF ETERNITY! OH GOD!

What divine revelation of That-Which-Is!

The entire cosmic drama unfolds before my eyes in waves of eternal Recurrence!

During that drunken 'Dance-Song'

my soul followed every line of the music with frenetic urgency,

writing , contorting,

intoxicated to an almost unbearable degree.

Brilliant mental images formed and passed in mad,

dionysian motion,

subjectively vivid,

yet without sensuous impression.

As the music tolled

that aweful twelve-count of eternity

at its climax,

I experienced a sort of cosmic,

spiritual orgasm,

quite devoid of erotic content,

yet in a very real,

spiritual sense.

The emotions discharged madly along with the sounds.

As the 'Night-Song' descended,

an image of Rilke-like immensity of space and distance remained,

with some distant light shed over luminous darkness.

My soul hath contorted with agony,

and reached a climax with Eternity!

6:45

Calmed nerves,

effects definitely subsided.

Still pensive and withdrawn.

The Far-Off Land.

1959,

Eugene Seaich http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=46127654150