IRC-Galleria

'There are no apt words ... to characterize your state when you are, shall we say, 'bemushroomed.' ... How do you tell a man born blind what seeing is like? In the present case, this is especially true because superficially the bemushroomed man shows few of the objective symptoms of one intoxicated, drunk ... [the mushroom] permits you to see, more clearly than our pershing mortal eye can see, vistas beyond the horizons of this life, to travel backwards and forwards in time, even (as the Indians say) to know God. It is hardly surprising that your emotions are profoundly affected, and you feel that an indissoluble bond unites you with the others who have shared with you in the sacred agape ... All that you see during this night has a pristine quality: the landscape, the edifices, the carvings, 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 unnaturally, what is happening to you seems to you freighted with significance, beside which the humdrum events of everyday are trivial ... What you are seeing and what you are hearing appear as one: the music assumes harmonious shape, giving visual form to its harmonies, and what you are seeing takes on the modalities of music - the music of the spheres ... All your senses are similarly affected: the cigarette with which you occasionally break the tension of the night smells as no cigarette before had ever smelled ; the glass of simple water is infinitely better than champagne.'

From 'The Hallucinogenic Fungi of Mexico', R. Gordon Wasson in The Psychedelic Reader, Ed. Gunther M. Weil et al, Citadel Press Inc., 1973.