The cactus, Anhalonium Lewinii, also known as Peyotl by the indigenous peoples of the new world and venerated as a deity was first the source of the active ingredient of mescalin. [Note: the author uses the spelling mescalin rather than the more modern Mescaline.] “Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist’s repertory. Mescalin is close to adrenalin. When adrenalin starts to decompose it can produce similar effects to mescalin and it would seem, therefore, that we can all produce minute doses of chemicals “which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness.” This may be the source of change that happens to people who experience near death experiences or who encounter the awesome such as Martin Luthor’s thunderstorm. “[I]n the spring of 1953….[on] one bright May morning, [the author] swallowed four-tenths of a gramme of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.”
Although we all live together, share the same language, and have many similar experiences, “every human group is a society of island universes.” Meaning we share just enough to get by in the world. But every one of our shared symbols are shared by individuals with different lived experiences and come therefore with a unique but similar meaning for every individual. Even within everyone there is an inner and an outer experience for every stimulus.
The mescalin experience is not one of visions, connections, hallucinations, or revelations. “The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant….I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” The author uses the term “The Dharma-body of the Buddha [as] another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.” To describe what ever his eyes happened to focus on: everything just is. Istigkeit – the German word meaning Is-ness. “[The Dharma-body] was anything that I – or rather the blessed Not-I released for a moment from my throttling embrace – cared to look at.”
“The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to mater very much….In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern….The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”
“And along with indifference to space there went an even completer indifference to time…. ‘There seems to be plenty of it,’ [the author’s] actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.”
“I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian…but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers – back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance…. I spent several minutes – or was it centuries? Not merely gazing at [the legs of a chair] but actually being them – or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for ‘I’ was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense where ‘they’), being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.”
The author describes a theory of mind in which, the mind’s function is to select the relevant sense perception for survival from the manifold super abundance of sense perception that we are continually bombarded with and that would overwhelm and confuse us if the mind did not sort the “important”, and discard the largest portion, being the rest. Mind at Large is the term given to when the mind stops or slows down this sorting and discarding; when the mind is like a newborn baby who is looking at the world for the first time. “To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of the is particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages.” Language is both a blessing and a curse: it is good in that it makes possible access to the accumulated knowledge of the world; it is a curse, “in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which in the language of religion, is called ‘this world’ is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed and, as it were, petrified by language. The various ‘other worlds’ with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes though the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language.”
The author then delves into the science of what mescalin does to the brain and what effects it has on behaviour. Mescalin inhibits the production of glucose regulating enzymes and lowers the amount of sugar the brain gets. Four characteristics can be observed in the vast majority of people who have been supervised while taking mescalin. First, unlike other hallucinogens, “[t]he ability to remember and to ‘think straight’ is little if at all reduced.” The author noted that later while listening to the recording of his conversation while under the influence of mescalin, “I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times.” Second, “Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinate to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.” Third, “the will suffers a profound change for the worse. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular”, because they have much more profoundly interesting things to contemplate. Finally, fourth, whether experienced ‘out there’ or ‘in here,’ simultaneously or in succession, all mescalin users find things to contemplate a better experience than anything else.
“When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can’t be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again ais revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an ‘obscure knowledge’ that All is in all – that All is actually each.”
The importance of colour was heightened for the author while under the influence of mescalin. After his return to normal and reflecting back on his life before the mescalin experience he commented: “But beyond the limits of their utilitarian spectrum, most creatures are completely colour blind.” He notes that throughout the great works of literature, the adjectives in the words of the heroes demonstrate a deficiency in authors’ ability to distinguish colours – we do not seem to have the vocabulary and therefore lack the concepts to see colour beyond the very basic Roy g. Biv. But “for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary…it evidently feels that colours are more important, better worth attending to than masses, positions and dimensions.”
When the author was handed a book with images of famous works of art, he found the art supremely uninteresting. The book itself was more interesting than the great works within it. The images of the great works were missing a quality of Suchness. While they may be sources of true knowledge in some sense in the world, they seemed to by missing the important secondary qualities that become important while under the influence of mescalin. “I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art – some refusing to have anything to do with it at all, others being content with what a critical eye would regard as second-rate, or even tenth-rate, works…. Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of the actual dinner.”