"The fact of the matter is that this very deeply felt moment of discovery, bathed in a sense of clarity and harmony, had been prefaced by dancing barefoot in the dirt at a corn-circuit outdoor rave, to sets of godly Detroit and Chicago house music. This connection between a richly cognitive quantum leap and a night of freeform neo-pagan mayhem was neither incidental nor isolated. It's a very concise embodiment of what I cheekily call "disco magic" - a Gnostic leap into the connectedness of things through dance culture, the art and science of a mindbodyspirit hoofing its ass off with the very fabric of our cosmos. It's also an apt capitulation of the most exuberantly turned-on chapter of my life, my passage from being a neurotically cynical student of human sexuality and pop culture to a psychotically positive bodhisattva of the beat, a self-appointed High Priestess of the Church of Disco Discordia."

"I would surrender to the beat, become the beat at times. In the Gordian knot of gyrating bodies, broken up into frozen tableaux by strobe light, my normative calibration of space and direction might also turn to vapor. I'd sweat until I thought I'd collapse, but I had no choice but to go on. That was the point that something clicked on, something that I had never even come close to experiencing - it was as if a powerful force were running through me that had nothing to do wtih ego, yet was still intrinsic to my being. No guru, no master! It had been revealed: Every man and woman is a Superstar. The first commandment of Disco Discordia, to be sure."

"Snaking from the anointing vibrations of bass emanating from the speaker stacks, through a crowd of kids with as many dancing styles as is imaginable, past the beautiful high-concept scenesters in stately glam repose by the toilets, I would begin to interact with my environment through a new set of rules that unfolded with each step. And the world would dance with me. Under the influence of psychedelics or not, I sensed a rich vocabulary of nonverbal communication with people I'd never met, developing very profound relationships with people I barely spoke to. Beyond this, a coherence of actions and perceptions would emerge, wherein scraps of overheard conversations would knit together into grand thematics, drunken dancers would spontaneously synchronize against all odds and things I thought about would suddenly appear. To be more prosaic, I was having a conversation with the chaos of the universe through a holistic and intimate relatinoship with my local surroundings. Not through willed dominance or dutiful submission, but through play."

"The magic soon contaminated the rest of my life, and as a talking, walking, dancing being in tiny Iowa City I sensed rhythms, musical coincidences and harmonies everywhere - as well as a sense of my influence upon them. My interface with the world wasn't one of aggressively willing other forces to yield, nor was it a case of passive acquiescence, it's more like having a kind of rule book in which the rules change with each turn of the page; and the way things change depends on your actions. In turn, however, the knowledge of the way you should act to follow your True Will reverberates from channels beyond yourself. This putative paradox may just be a function of using language to describe such a state of consciousness, whose "meaning" cannot be housed within words alone. It's hardly surprising that a ritual of music, bodily movement and a constant collision of elements in real time can facilitate access to this state of magical consciousness."

"Anyway, it worked for me. Strangers I wanted to meet would suddenly introduce themselves to me, friends I was thinking about would suddenly call. Coincidences would rack up to a critial mass of statistically improbable probability. Often these are quite amusing. As some old coffeehouse prophet in Ann Arbor told me years ago, the first thing you notice after enlightenment is that the world gets a lot funnier. I was more fearless, active and intellectually productive than I've ever been - and I suddenly looked like Aphrodite incarnate. But whatever I gave to the world, it would give back to me, through objects, bathroom graffiti, random bear hugs, glances and the beautiful wash of filtered French disco-house, wafting around me upon warm brick summer streets."

-Shaun Frenté
"The Sum of All Scenes: Forays Into Group Magical Consciousness"