
"empathogen-entactogen". just sayin... I personally became interested in Buddhism at age 17 simply as a way to try to "get back to the MDMA state" without taking a drug. I felt that the MDMA experience was real, more real than normal life. It felt like how I just knew life was supposed to feel. It turned out that I was right and all I needed to do was learn buddhist meditation in order to break out of a hypnogogic trance so that I could reclaim the MDMA-like-feeling for my everyday life.
MDMA can promote an extraordinary clarity of introspective self-insight, together with a deep love of self and a no less emotionally intense empathetic love of others. MDMA also acts as a euphoriant. The euphoria is usually gentle and subtle; but sometimes profound.
MDMA's primary effects on the user are surprisingly consistent, unlike the wilder psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, or DMT. MDMA may feel mystical, magical or sublime; but it doesn't feel weird. The drug's influence feels highly controllable. MDMA tends to enrich the user's sense of self-identity, not diminish it. MDMA "provides a centering experience, rather than an ego diffusing experience" (Dr. Philip Wolfson), though it may also cause a "softening of the ego-boundaries". Sometimes a degree of derealisation on MDMA may occur, but rarely depersonalisation in the ordinary sense of the term. On the contrary, users feel they can introspectively "touch inside" to their ideal authentic self with total emotional self-honesty.
As well as acting as a "gateway to the soul", MDMA "opens up the heart". Taking MDMA induces an amazing feeling of closeness and connectedness to one's fellow human beings. MDMA triggers intense emotional release beyond the bounds of everyday experience. The drug also enhances the felt intensity of the senses - most exquisitely perhaps the sense of touch. The body-image looks and feels wonderful. Other people look and feel wonderful too. Minutes after dropping a pill, a lifetime of Judaeo-Christian guilt, shame or disgust at the flesh melt away to oblivion.
When MDMA is taken outdoors, the natural world seems vibrant and awe-inspiring, perhaps even enchanted. The experience of colour is gorgeously intensified. On MDMA, Dr Shulgin reported how mountains he'd observed many times before appeared to be so beautiful that he could barely stand looking at them. MDMA is not normally classed as an entheogen. "Entheogen" is a term proposed in 1979 by the scholars R. Gordon Wasson, Carl A.P. Ruck, Jonathan Ott, Jeremy Bigwood and Danny Staples for agents "generating the god or the divine within", shorn of any speculative metaphysics. Yet MDMA is used by a variety of spiritual practitioners of widely diverse beliefs as a gateway to the divine. Some MDMA users undergo life-changing spiritual experiences. Nicholas Saunders, author of the book E for Ecstasy (1993), cites a Benedictine monk who finds MDMA "opens up a direct channel to God". MDMA may not be "Christ in (al)chemical form", but if it had been present in the Eucharist, then we would all still be devout Christians, possibly for ever...