Mescalin and the Absolute
The Doors of Perception. By Aldous Huxley. (Chatto and Windus. 6s.)
OF Mr. Huxley's countless admirers only a minority, one imagines, are sympathetic to the body of teaching with which his later works are primarily concerned. Of this still enviably lair minority the greater part like their mysticism in traditional settings evoked by such names as Kailasa or Tun Huang, or in the soiled, battered but still wildly exotic Europe of the Counter-Reformation. To these it is if anything a deterrent to learn that Tibet and Japan produced burly explosive sages reminiscent of Orson Welles, or that St. Teresa was an excellent housekeeper, and connoisseurs of remoteness and rarefaction who have read those passages in The Perennial Philosophy which compare the Mahayana and Hinayana schools of Buddhism may have noted with misgiving the author's preference for the 'richer' rather than what is usually accepted as the. 'purer' form. Furthermore, they will have heard from the greatest teachers that the blessed state comes, if at all, only after long and arduous discipline and not at the drop of a hat—still less from any form of intoxication. And it is after all a form of intoxication—the means favoured by Thugs and Assassins to prepare themselves for their killings, and often denounced in various contexts by the author himself—that now, after one dose of mescalin, he recommends as an aid to experience of the Absolute. The many sceptics who greeted Mr. Huxley's current phase with regret and frivolity may anticipate a field day (" Everyone pushes a falling fence," runs the Chinese proverb) but to his adherents this disconcerting message, though delivered with grace and lucidity, may well be hard to swallow.
Some at least of his findings may very briefly be stated, for during his experience his companions asked him various questions, these and his answers being recorded on a dictating machine. When asked about time he replies, " There seems to be plenty of it." Will- power is virtually suspended, but general intelligence remains much as before. There are private ' colour-fantasies of a modest order, but no significant changes in response to sound. It is in the fields of seeing, being and doing that the great developments occur. An eclipse of interest in the whole pattern of personal, mechanical, temporal and spatial relationships which determine the human economy is accompanied by an enormously heightened perception of texture and colour which frees the eye to assimilate pure composi- tion (" Braque or Juan Gris ") and the object seen to achieve transfiguration. And this, he tells us in a run of rhapsodic affirma- tions, they duly achieve. Three flowers become " the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence " ; four bamboo table-legs (" how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness "—they are later compared to St. Michael and all angels) shine out in " a sacramental vision of reality." A fresh climax, to which is coupled a delightful little disquisition on the function of drapery in art, is reached in contemplation of the folds of trousers. A garden chair is " inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful almost to the point of being terrifying." He feels close to panic, briefly enters the mental world of the schizophrenic (the dangers of the drug, given the wrong mental preconditions, at this point come in for emphatic notice), recoils, and resumes the series of what are noW diminishing raptures.
However boldly Mr. Huxley may have courted ridicule, no reader can doubt that these experiences were almost overwhelming in force and beauty, but he may surely question their absolute significance and also hesitate to ascribe them to any sovereign property of the drug itself. It is clear that in spite of certain disappointments the experiences themselves broadly correspond to 'their narrator's pre- existing tastes and aspirations, which suggest that the mescalin maY, merely have served to play these back to him in a supercharged form. (" All is soap to the Bedouin," say the Arabs ; could this be their meaning ?) At the very least, however, he has done us s
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