16:45
The LSD thing is is fascinating in relation to this. It is a intentionally achieved schizophrenia, so to say, with the hope and expectation for spontaneous remission which doesn't always occur. Yoga is also an intentional schizophrenia. One breaks off, it turns inward, and that the mystic process as well is very similar. Now what's the difference between the mystical and the psychotic experience? They plunge into the same waters... there's no doubt about it! The symbolism is just the same. And I want to speak about it in a little what it is. The difference is with the mystic... with the instruction of a master or because of his own native talents.... Is able to swim in those waters. He does not drown in them.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7297224-the-lsd-phenomenon-on-the-other-hand-is-to-me-at
And so, with that challenge before us, let us try to become acquainted with some of the tides and undertows of our inward sea. Let me tell you something of what I have recently heard about the wonders of the inward schizophrenic plunge.
The first experience is of a sense of splitting. The person sees the world going in two: one part of it moving away; himself in the other part. This is the beginning of the regressus, the crack-off and backward flow. He may see himself, for a time, in two roles. One is the role of the clown, the ghost, the witch, the queer one, the outsider. That is the outer role that he plays, making little of himself as the fool, a joke, the one kicked around, the patsy. Inside, however, he is the savior, and he knows it. He is the hero chosen for a destiny. Recently one such savior did me the honor of paying me three visits: a tall, beautful young man with the beard and gentle eyes and manner of a Christ; LSD was his sacrament -- LSD and sex. "I have seen my Father," he told me on the second occasion. "He is old now and has told me just to wait. I shall know when the time comes for me to take over."
The second stage has been described in many clinical accounts. It is of a terrific drop-off and regression, backward in time and biologically as well. Falling back into his own past, the psychotic becomes an infant, a fetus in the womb. One has the frightening experience of slipping back to animal consciousness, into animal forms, sub-animal forms, even plantlike. I think of the legend here of Daphne, the nymph who was turned into a laurel tree. Such an image, read in psychological terms, would be the image of a psychosis. Approached in love by the god Apollo, the virgin was terrified, cried for help to her father, the river-god Peneus, and he turned her into a tree.