Observations placeholder
Masters and Houston - On Castles
Identifier
004335
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Masters and Houston were two psychotherapists/psychoanalysts who used drugs, principally LSD, in order to evoke buried memories or enable a person to understand themselves
A description of the experience
The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience – Dr Robert Masters and Dr Jean Houston
After a period of several hours during which she did little more than remark that her images and perceptual changes were aesthetically not at all up to what she had been expecting, the subject closed her eyes, grimaced, and began to describe at length a sequence of images in which she became increasingly involved. She now found herself, she said, in the courtyard of an old evil looking castle which lay just at the edge of what seemed a vast forest. The atmosphere was medieval and the castle was complete with moats and turrets and towers from which blue and red pennants were flying. The courtyard in which she stood was crowded with a holiday throng of extremely ugly people who she likened to figures in paintings intended to portray the character and physiognomy destroying effects of gluttony, drunkenness etc. Like herself, these figures were dressed in costumes which she described as belonging to the Middle Ages...........
at a later stage after treatment
… the waters washed her up on a shore at the edge of a forest where another castle stood. This castle seemed newly built and had about it nothing of the evil aspect of the first castle. …........She entered the open door of the castle, walked down a long narrow, high ceilinged hall, and entered a room where she sat down in a long wooden chest which had panels on which many strange but somehow 'good symbols' had been carved. A man entered the room and she noticed he was younger, better looking and gave the impression of being much warmer and more human than the headsman