mind-altering stimulants

[pporteous at worley.co.nz]

just got this sent to me - it is the final section which made me send this
to the p-list. Does anyone know where this quote comes from?

peter (too busy to join GRGR but enjoying what I get a chance to read)


>
>Some extracts from www.resort.com/~banshee/Info/N2O/nitrous.mind.html:::
>William James, no mere doctor but a major American philosopher and early
>experimenter with mind-altering substances at Harvard.
>Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide
>                 by William James
>     Originally appeared in "Mind", Vol. 7, 1882
>    Reprinted in _Laughing Gas_, 1973
>Some observations of the effects of nitrous oxide gas-intoxication which I
>was prompted to make by reading the pamphlet called "The anaesthetic
>revelation and the gist of philosophy" (Blood, 1874), have made me
>understand better than ever before both the strength and the weakness of
>Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat the experiment, which
>with pure gas is short and harmless enough. The effects will of course
vary
>with the individual, just as they vary in the same individual from time to
>time; but it is probable that in the former case, as in the latter, a
>generic resemblance will obtain. With me, as with every other person of
whom
>I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exiting
>sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view
>in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all
>logical relations of being with an apparant subtlety and instantaniety to
>which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety
returns,
>the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few
>disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking
snowpeak
>from which sunset glow has just fled, or at a black cinder left by an
>extinguished brand.
>The immense emotional sense of reconciliation which characterizes the
>"maudlin" stage of alcoholic drunkenness -- a stage which seems silly to
>lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a
chief
>part of the temptation to the vice -- is well known. The centre and
>periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its objects, the
meum
>and tuum, are one. Now this, only a thousandfold enhanced, was the effect
>upon me of the gas: and its first result was to make peal through me with
>unutterable power the conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and
that
>the deepest convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong. Whatever ...
>
>It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the
>identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this
>experience. I ...
>
>The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:
>There are no differences but differences of degree between different
degrees
>of difference and no difference. But...
>
>My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the
law
>of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived, engender a
>very powerful emotion; that Hegel was so unusually succeptible to this
>emotion; throughout his life that its gratification became his supreme
end,
>and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the means he employed; that
>indifferentism is the true outcome of every view of the world which makes
>infinity and continuity to be its essence, and that pessimistic or
>optimistic attitudes pertain to the more accidental subjectivity of the
>moment; finally, that the identification of contradictories, so far from
>being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
>self-consuming process, passed from the less to the more abstract, and
>terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of
>vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
>
>
>[or the modern version]
>
>
>The circuits of the brain which mediate alarm, fear, fright, fight, lust,
>and territorial paranoia are temporarily disconnected. You see everthing
>with total clarity, undistorted by animalistic urges. You have reached a
>state which the ancients have called nirvana, all seeing bliss. -- Thomas
>Pynchon on MDMA
>
>