Observations placeholder
Susy Smith - The psychiatrist's experience
Identifier
015510
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The enigma of out of body travel – Susy Smith
Out of body experiences are not uncommon when taking LSD. A prominent New York City psychologist writes me of his own experience in this regard on July 29th 1957:
“I felt as if I were almost completely detached from my physical body. My physical body was just a dead weight that I was aware of, as if I were looking down on it from a great height. The experience was one of height and light … I seemed to be a pinpoint in space – space all around me in every dimension, space filled with light, not a blinding light but a radiant light – and space that was not just empty space, but space pregnant with meaning – a meaning that I couldn’t comprehend but which I felt very distinctly – space that was peopled, perhaps with some knowing force”.
The doctor goes on that the outstanding characteristic of this drug state is the clarity of the mind.
“When I say the mind I mean certainly the higher mind, the ‘I’ in capitals. It was this ‘I’, this most real part of the Me, which I felt soared on this flight…. Utterly awake, utterly sensitive, far more sensitive than in the usual state to forces around me and certainly beyond the spectrum which I in the usual waking state could be aware of. Certainly I brought back from this experience an even greater conviction of the preservation of this ‘I’ beyond that thing which we call physical death. I felt so completely separate from and so distinct from my physical self that it would seem utterly incomprehensible or illogical that this ‘I’ should become extinct when this worn out carcass of mine gives up in the end”.