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All his life A. Huxley the author of the famous utopian novel Brave New World, was driven by a need to understand the mystery of human consciousness, a quest that led him from Christian Mysticism to the religions of the Far East and the pseudo religions of California. Unusually for a literary intellectual of his day Huxley was intensely interested in science and much of his work lies in the border zone between religion, art and science.
In the "Doors of Perception" he describes an afternoon in Los Angeles in 1953 when he first ingested mescalin and saw the gates of a new world open before him.
Mescalin is the active principle of the sacred cactus known to the Mexicans as peyotl.
The Substance inhibits the production of enzymes, which regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Hence Mescalin reduces the brain`s normal ration of sugar.
Mescalin causes up to some point similar reactions and visions as people experience it, who suffer of Schizophrenia.
Mescalin is innocuous, its effects pass off after 8 or 10 hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for renewal of the dose.
One bright May morning in 1953 Huxley took for-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything from the flower in a vase to the crease in his trousers was completely transformed.
" A bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light. Those folds- what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his own creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. "
The ability to remember and to think straight is little if at all reduced.
Visual impressions are greatly intensified.
Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.
"Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. "
"All is in all- that all is actually each. This is as near, i take it, as a finite mind can ever come to perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. "
Huxley supposes that a lot of artists and geniuses of human history, like the insane Van Gogh, Boticelli or musicians like J. S. Bach see the world in this different kind of reality, but not just for a certain period of time but always.
" What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. "
Mescalintakers are so fascinated by every little thing in their surroundings, they see perfection and finity in everything and dont have the will or the desire to do anything else. Human relations seem unimportant.
The will suffers a profound change for the worse, the Mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular. He finds most reaons for normal actions unintersting because he has better things to think about. These things may be experienced "out there" or "in here". That they are better seems to be selfevident to all mescalin takers.
Huxley believes that it's very unlikely that humanity at large will ever be able to dispense withArtificial paradises. In the history of human beings there have always been some kind of chemical intoxicants, found in nature and later being produced synthetically. In the western countries only two of them, alcohol and tobacco are legal and its use became as natural as eating.
"The problems raised by tobacco and alcohol cannot be solved by prohibition. The universal and every-present urge to self transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only resonable pollicy is to open other, better doors.
What is needed is another new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short. "
Enlightment. That is the highest aim of every human being. Huxley believes that it can only be found in religion or in consumption of drugs.
" Ideally, everyone should be able to findself-transcendence in some form of pure or applied religion. "
"Countless persons desire selftransendence and would be glad to find it in church"
The problem is that they are usually not able to find it there na dso they have to escape in consumtion of alcohol. Native Americans mix drugs and religion. They use them to experience and understand religion and to approach to god.
The question whether the use or abuse ofdrugs actually has an enlighting effect on the human soul or is just a deception of our system caused by the opression of certain parts of the brain remains unanswered.
I believe that this opression, that makes you unable to see and understand things as you usually would, leads you to experience things that under normal circumstances seem secundary to you as primary. Like somebody who is blind, who lacks one of the main human senses, hears things very differently and more distinctevly than people who obtain this visual ability.
Hence your experience is not on a higher level, but on a lower, more intuitive one, that maybe makes you think and feel the same way other users do and therefore creates the illusion of unity and being one with everything.
Huxley in any case is convinced that this drugexperience enrichened his awareness of the consciousness.
"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. "
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