such a phantasmagoria, means for me that he was in the 
same state as one bemushroomed. Nor do I suggest for 
a moment that William Blake knew the mushroom when 
he wrote this telling account of the clarity of ‘vision’: 
The Prophets describe what they saw in Vision as real and exist- 
ing men, whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal 
organs; the Apostles the same; the clearer the organ the more 
distinct the object. A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern 
philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are or- 
ganized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and 
perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger 
and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perish- 
ing eye can see, does not imagine at all, {Italics mine. From The 
Wrilings of William Blake, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes, vol. II], p.108] 
This must sound cryptic to one who does not share 
Blake’s vision or who has not taken the mushroom. The 
advantage of the mushroom is that it puts many (if not 
everyone) within reach of this state without having to 
suffer the mortifications of Blake and St. John. It per- 
mits you to see, more clearly than our perishing mortal 
eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to 
travel backwards and forwards in time, to enter other 
planes of existence, even (as the Indians say) to know 
God. It is hardly surprising that your emotions are pro- 
foundly affected, and you feel that an indissoluble bond 
unites you with the others who have shared with you in 
the sacred agapé. All that you see during this night has 
a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, the carv- 
ings, the animals—they look as though they had come 
straight from the Maker’s workshop. This newness of 
everything—it is as though the world had just dawned— 
overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty. Not un- 
naturally, what is happening to you seems to you 
freighted with significance, beside which the humdrum 
events of everyday are trivial. All these things you see 
with an immediacy of vision that leads you to say to 
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