The boundary dissolution is alarming to the ego. It doesn't like that feeling and it tells you that you are dying. Psychedelic voyagers have to learn to just when that red switch goes on, you just reach out and turn it off. You say, oh no its set wrong, I'm not dying, but it tells you that you are dying because the ego very strongly identifies with the equilibrium of physical body. And as the physical body begins to slide into the intoxication, the ego is saying, what's happening Here! Wait a minute! I'm losing coherency.. This is not Good! You made a mistake! JOE ! JOE! We need help Joe! Its coming apar...
Chill, chill its going to be alright. So you have to discipline yourself that way. That the dissolving of the ego which is the dissolving of this maladaptive behaviour pattern that has made our sexual and social politics so complicated. In other words, the ego is not a good thing. Its existence in each one of us is so expressed a form is a symptom of neurosis. Cultural neurosis... and the psychedelic dissolves the ego, but the ego protests noisily while this is going on. And people who are very ego dependant, if they have a psychedelic experience they usually only have one, and then they say 'well that was like going nuts, I hated it, I just hated, it was just awful'. Because they are very strongly identified with the ego. Another person who isn't so strongly identified with the ego, could look at the identical experience and say that it was a wonderful liberation, it was just the quintessence of freedom and light and openness. So when I say that we are pathological and that we need to take strong medicine to fix ourselves. I don't mean the kind of medicine where you can't feel it working. I mean the kind of medicine where you CAN feel it working.

At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively distance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience is that nature seeks to communicate.

There was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of ahh.. beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment.