Observations placeholder
Masters and Houston - Standing against a fairly strong breeze
Identifier
014177
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience – Dr Robert Masters and Dr Jean Houston
the experience of standing against a fairly strong breeze has produced a different experience for half a dozen subjects and one that was strikingly similar for all six.
Here, while word choice naturally varied, the subject spoke of having become permeable to the wind and of feeling the wind blowing through them.
There was no wish to resist this penetration by the wind. On the contrary, it was welcomed or regarded as being 'in the nature of things'; and two subjects even went so far as to 'molecularise' themselves in order that the passage of the wind might be facilitated.
This position with regard to the wind – which ordinarily one senses as parting and breaking around the body – represents a capitulation to the phenomenon such as one rarely encounters in or out of the drug state.
Since the wind is experienced as remaining precisely itself, without any blending of its being with the subject's, all alteration is on the part of the subject and the wind is accorded a dominant status not met with when there is empathic merging or union with the phenomena.