Absolutely. It blew my mind when I read it. Here was this book which I expected to be all plot, just a story of Kerouac's travels across the U.S., and then suddenly he phase-shifts from the physical realm into a direct experience of psychedelic quintessence. Though you can't discern it from the quote I posted, this whole passage happens right in the middle of a relatively mundane event. Sal Paradise (Kerouac) is wandering around the streets of San Francisco with no real purpose when he suddenly starts to interpret strange meanings in people and things around him, and then dives into this ecstatic reverie before slipping out of it and returning his awareness to his wandering the streets picking up cigarette butts and smoking them. I was on a train in Japan when I read it--on my way to go see a music festival in Osaka with my sister--and I had to put the book down for a minute and take a look around at where I was. It was like the passage directly mirrored my experience of reading the book: I was traveling through an unfamiliar place when my awareness shifted away from my surroundings into the orthogonal space of Kerouac's imagination. I got this weird, familiar sense of universality.