In this book Aldous Huxley tries to elucidate his experience with mescalin. He describes how he felt but also found that the words we use in common every experience do not do for conveying uncommon experience and are extremely in accurate when describing experiences at the far extreme of human consciousness. To make up for this defect in common language, the author draws on religious terminology, foreign words, and scientific theory to make some of his points. For example, from the first part: “The Dharma-body” is his term for trying to encompass the notions of Mind, Suchness, the Void and the Godhead. Istigkeit – the German word meaning Is-ness. Mind at Large for the totality of sense perception without the funneling and sorting of the brain into useful and not useful sensory input.
While under the influence of mescalin the author did not seem to be interested in great works of art in books, possibly due to their 2 dimensionality but he did recognize drapery in art as the artist’s preoccupation with a fascinating visual stimulus. The most interesting thing for the author during his mescalin experience was the folds in his trousers, the way the curtains hang, the general drapery of objects. The author speculates that the best artists were seeing with more Mind at Large than the average person and that this was the source of their greatest works.
When asked several times about human relations, the author detected that he did not want to think about people but rather “longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!” He kept repeating, “‘this is how one ought to see’”. There is something troubling about human affairs. “For persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behaviour, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful…but enormously irrelevant.” He further noticed that he had been avoiding eye contact with the speakers under this line of questioning. Referring back to his trousers, “‘These are the sort of things one ought to look at.’ Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of God.”
The author draws on the Gospel story of Mary and Martha, in which Martha, who works to be a good host but complains about her sister Mary who decides to forgo hosting duties and sits at the foot of Jesus and contemplates his words, to describe the mescalin experience in relation to others. “[N]ow I knew contemplation at its height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation – but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action.” Contemplation that does not bring the person back to earth and the real world is incomplete. “[T]here is no form of contemplation…which is without its ethical values. Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief….The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but to make up for it he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do. The sum of evil…would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room. He can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that he will never even be tempted to indulge in … ‘the dirty Devices of the world.’”
The author then turned inward, closed his eyes to see his inscape and was immediately disappointed. “[T]he inscape was curiously unrewarding. The field of vision was filled with brightly coloured, constantly changing structures that seemed to be made of plastic or enameled tin. ‘Cheap,’ I commented. ‘Trivial. Like things in a Five and Ten.’…This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe….What [mescalin] had allowed me to perceive, inside, was not the Dharma-body in images, but my own mind; not archetypal Suchness, but a set of symbols…a homemade substitute for Suchness.”
While listening to various genres of music, the author “listened with pleasure, but experienced nothing comparable to [his] seen apocalypses of flowers or flannel….Instrumental music, oddly enough, left me rather cold.” Later a walk was suggested. The author, after only a moment’s hesitation was able to get up walk around and open doors as long as he did not think about it. “It was odd, of course, to feel that ‘I’ was not the same as these arms and legs ‘out there,’ as this wholly objective trunk and neck and even head. It was odd; but one soon got used to it. And anyhow the body seemed perfectly well able to look after itself.”
“A meal had been prepared. Somebody, who was not yet identical with myself, fell to with ravenous appetite. From a considerable distance and without much interest, I looked on.” Then the author went for a drive. The drive was fearfully overwhelming. If sitting still and looking at the world around you through Mind at Large was awe inspiring then all the quickly moving images of objects became positively fearful. “The fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.”
At this point the description of the author’s mescalin experience ended and an argument that humanity would be better off with access to a safe chemical induced transcendent experience. “That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory – all these have served…as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants.” Every known intoxicant has been used where available since prehistory and great effort and risk is expended to get them. In Canada today, the legally allowable ones are alcohol, nicotine, and Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). “The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones. Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological in nature, others religious or psychological, others dietetic, educational, athletic. But the need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain.”
While it would be great if we could find transcendence in church or some social or solitary activity the likelihood of that happening on an ongoing basis seems farfetched. People lose interest, plateau, or lose ability in most non-chemical forms of finding transcendence. Further, unfortunately mainstream religions are unlikely to ever reintroduce legal intoxicants in sufficient quantities to their religious worship. Consider how much wine the disciples in the prototype of the Catholic Mass, the last supper, must have drunk to be unable to stay awake in the Garden of Gethsemane and how unlikely it is for the Catholic Church to ever again serve that much wine.
“I am suggesting that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call ‘a gratuitous grace,’ not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available.” Such “grace” shakes us out of our normal life and opens us up to a religious experience. This is especially important for intellectuals who are obsessed with words and symbols, who do not see or are not impressed much by what they see.
“To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness – to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.” With the mescalin experience as a gratuitous grace we can walk back through the Door in the Wall. “[T]he man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly to comprehend.”