This session was different from the other one, right from the start. The first words on the tape are, "I feel tingly all over. I feel real happy, not speedy or excited like with acid, but just calm and happy to be here enjoying life."

The ultimate problem I see here is almost metaphysical. How does one describe perfection, bliss? At the same time the descent from that state was experienced as a falling out from perfection and bliss, of being pulled away from something very beautiful and true. This experience I have found to be intermittently painful and wistful during the past couple of days.

I didn't have a lot of specific recollections of suppressed material from the past. Even when I had what seemed to me were unmistakable birth-related experiences, I did not find a lot of mental accompaniment to what was happening to my body. My mind was calm, floating easily, relaxed, and was noticing what was going on with equanimity. It was strange and beautiful. There were none of the actual mental regression, the images and sounds of birth that I remember from LSD sessions. The body was just going through its thing and the mind was completely comfortable with that.

If so much beauty and calm is possible, I thought off and on, why do I have to suffer so much physical tension and unpleasantness? It was so bad at some points that I literally felt waves of despair rise up in me. As I watched, those waves would recede. And going to the hot tub in the evening returned me completely to the state of bliss I was in at the time of the drug effect. And yet the waves returned.

I found myself looking forward to the next opportunity to take Adam, but I was somewhat ambivalent about that. I didn't really think that it was a matter of fearing that I could become addicted to the experience in the sense of being addicted to alcohol or to sexual excess with prostitutes. I perceive those as addictions precisely because of their compulsive quality; they have such a compulsive quality because, by definition, they are characterized by the experience of never actually obtaining a satisfying, whole. pleasant experience

With the experience of bliss that is available with MDMA, on the other hand, I feel none of that compulsion. I feel no desire to go out in the street and try to purchase MDMA for my own use. I don't find my thoughts turning to it constantly, as I have with the sexual addiction. It really has an entirely different quality, like it's in some way outside all the time, outside of my life and my neuroses, literally a taste of the infinite bliss of being a conscious entity.

It is a rare and great priviledge to have had this experience. In a very fundamental sense it is the kind of experience that every conscious being really wants and needs. We get a sense of our true selves and how they are perfect, beautiful, whole, and complete. It fulfilled all of my childhood dreams, all of the unfulfilled longings, and all of the feelings of loss and limitation have been swept away by the sense of who I really am.

What I'm really talking about here is what is, to me, the fundamental thing, the basic reality of all realities, and it is this: that my nature as a conscious being is that I am infinite, I am bliss itself, but at the same time I am in this finite body, born with shocking suddenness into this really strange world, burst forth from my mother to spend my time and then to return or move onto the timeless existence that I have always had.

In my feelings I experience the fact of birth as one of not wanting to be here. That is, I had that experience at birth and in feelings I have had it again. Now I am not thinking of checking out of here. I'm not crazy, but perhaps only too sane compared with my usual state. What I am trying to describe is a feeling, not an intention.

I remember saying in awe and wonder to my guide at one point that I found it so shocking, so unexpected, that I could experience my birth, that I could experience that taste of infinite bliss without going through all of the feelings of panic, fear of death, physical agony, longing for sado-masochistic destruction, etc., that I had convinced myself that I had to go through. I had it wired up that I had to pass through those gatekeepers before I could deserve or "qualify" for unity.

It's like what I have been trying to describe: it was almost too deep, almost so far outside of or deeper than my previous consciousness that I don't know what to make of it. I would just encourage everyone to do it -- because what better gift to a conscious entity is there than to make available a taste of this bliss, this perception of one's true nature?

All during the next day I kept slipping into a really odd state of mind where the reality of our infinite existence as beings would suddenly come flooding in on me. Walking about the streets or driving in the car I kept thinking of how we take on bodies, sort of get together and make agreements to come to this planet and go through these experiences in bodies and took at all of the peculiar dualities was have set up here on this world.