ing bag, your soul is free, loses all sense of time, alert as it 
never was before, living an eternity in a night, seeing in- 
finity in a grain of sand. What you have seen and heard 
is cut as with a burin in your memory, never to be effaced. 
At last you know what the ineffable is, and what ecstasy 
means. Kestasy! The mind harks back to the origin of 
that word. For the Greeks ekstasis meant the flight of 
the soul from the body. Can you find a better word than 
that to describe the bemushroomed state? In common 
parlance, among the many who have not experienced 
ecstasy, ecstasy is fun, and I am frequently asked why 
I do not reach for mushrooms every night. But ecstasy 
is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it 
tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe, 
or to float through that door yonder into the Divine 
Presence? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word, and we 
must recapture its full and terrifying sense. ... A few 
hours later, the next morning, you are fit to go to work. 
But how unimportant work seems to you, by comparison 
with the portentous happenings of that night! If you 
can, you prefer to stay close to the house, and, with those 
who lived through that night, compare notes, and utter 
ejaculations of amazement. 
As man emerged from his brutish past, thousands of 
years ago, there was a stage in the evolution of his aware- 
ness when the discovery of a mushroom (or was it a 
higher plant?) with miraculous properties was a revela- 
tion to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in 
him sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness and 
love, to the highest pitch of which mankind is capable, 
all those sentiments and virtues that mankind has ever 
since regarded as the highest attribute of his kind. It 
made him see what this perishing mortal eye cannot see. 
How right the Greeks were to hedge about this Mystery, 
this imbibing of the potion, with secrecy and _ surveil- 
[ 157 
