SOURCE: "Imagination, the Unifying Power," in Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience, Syracuse University Press, 1970, pp. 3-30.

In the following essay, Durr discusses the way psychedelic drugs affect one's focus of attention and the way writers and artists have used this phenomenon to unleash their imaginative abilities.

One of the most emphasized fundamentals in the total complex of the psychedelic or imaginative experience is its quality of absolute absorption: attention. To whatever the subject turns, his whole being is given. "Under the influence of the mushroom, one's power of concentration is far more pronounced than normally. You become deeply absorbed in whatever you may be thinking. There is no external distraction."¹ Huxley cites a passage from The Tibetan Book of the Dead: "'O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted.' That was the problem—to remain 'undistracted.' Undistracted by the memory of past sins, by...