Written by Aldous Huxley and published in 1954, The Doors of Perception documents the occasion when the author took a dose of mescaline in order to record the effect it had on him. It had been administered the previous year by the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, at Huxley’s home in Los Angeles. It was Osmond, by the way, who coined the term ‘psychedelic’ to describe the effect of mescaline and similar drugs. The term has its roots in two Greek words, the more familiar, psychē , meaning ‘soul’ or ‘mind’, the name of a princess in mythology, derived from psukhē, meaning ‘life breath’ or ‘butterfly’, and the less well-known verb, dēlein, meaning ‘to manifest’ or ‘to reveal’. Interestingly, psychedelic drugs are often referred to as ‘mind altering’ drugs, when, in fact, the true meaning of the word – ‘mind revealing’ – is slightly different.
Mescaline is one of the psychoactive alkaloids found in the peyote or peyotl cactus, a plant which was widely used as a drug by the inhabitants of the areas now known as Mexico and the American South West for centuries (or even longer) before the arrival of the European colonisers. From what he’d heard of its use, Huxley expected it to afford him a trip to a very different world to the one he lived in, one of multicoloured shapes and fabulous landscapes, forever hovering on the brink of some ultimate revelation.
As it turned out, his experience was very different. Rather than causing him to see fantastic visions, the drug caused him to see the world he thought he already knew in new ways. At first, he experienced some hallucinations, of lights and coloured shapes, but the most striking effect of the drug, for him, was how it changed his view of reality: he found himself seeing beyond the words for things, to the things themselves, ‘the miracle … of naked existence’. He sees three flowers in a vase, as he puts it, as if he were ‘seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation.’ Although he can still ‘think straight’, the seemingly nonsensical statements of Zen suddenly seem ‘as clear as day’. He becomes absorbed in the draperies of renaissance paintings. He reflects on the possibility that the brain, under the influence of the drug, may no longer home in on the details of the material reality we inhabit that enable us to make sense of it, presenting us instead with everything. Perspective feels flattened, time ceases to be significant.
Reflecting on the experience afterwards, he has reservations. Although the drug allowed him to experience the world more deeply, it was as if his Self – and, with it, his awareness of the needs of others – had ceased to exist: he was merely part of material reality looking at material reality. It was a mode of existence with no use for human relations. Be that as it may, he goes on to talk about how artists in the past had striven to see what is actually out there, in much the same way as he does under the influence of the drug, and laments the way the art of his own day is tawdry by comparison, having shifted its focus onto the personal, the world of ideas and the exploration of the subconscious. Listening to music while still under the influence, he feels ill-equipped and wonders if a musician in his position might feel the same way about music as he does about art. He discerns a Higher Order in the chaos of a Gesualdo madrigal, but faced with the intense, Romantic atonality of Berg’s Lyric Suite – a piece he holds in high regard, in normal circumstances – is forced to ask, ‘Who cares what his feelings are? Why can’t he pay attention to something else?’
He goes outside and walks round the garden, feeling oddly disconnected from his body. Absorbed in details and the intensity of the colours, he’s put in mind of a personal account he’d heard of the perceptions of someone with schizophrenia. Objects become confused in his mind with their symbolic meaning: curiously, he confuses a chair with the Last Judgement. He feels afraid, fearing that he might disintegrate under pressure from a reality too great for a human mind to bear, what with its limited view based on words and symbols. He can imagine himself reaching a point at which he wouldn’t know which of his perceptions were significant and which were not. He has, he thinks, gained an inkling of what a serious mental health disorder might be like. He realises that, without guidance, he would indeed be dazzled by what The Tibetan Book of the Dead calls ‘the Clear Light of the Void’, fleeing from it and seeking instead the comfort of rebirth. He speculates that perhaps Buddhist monks used the book to do for the dying what modern psychiatrists do for people with mental illness: that is, assure them that despite the sense of confusion, reality remains what it is.
He goes out into the street where he can’t stop laughing at the sight of a car: it seems to him – as indeed it is – preposterous: no more than a sleek, glossy commodity, designed to appeal to a fantasy. They go for a ride in it. The streams of traffic at an intersection seem ludicrous to him. Driving through a suburb, the architecture seems hideous, although beams of sunlight seem to transfigure the roofs, chimneys and walls.
They return home. The drug is wearing off. Reflecting on the fact that most drugs are illegal and that even those that are legalised (alcohol and tobacco) still bring with them appalling health and social problems, he suggests that there’s a need for a safer, readily-available, legal drug. Mescaline would be a candidate, he suggests, as it’s clearly preferable to alcohol and tobacco. However, it still has downsides – for example, it takes hours for the effect to wear off; modern pharmacology, he thinks, should be able to come up with something even better. Abstinence, he suggests, is not a viable option, as humans seem to have a universal urge to seek to transcend themselves, one which they will always strive to fulfil. It’s an urge that, for some, can be satisfied through religion but, for many, he thinks, religion will never be enough. Regarding Christianity, churches have generally tolerated legal drugs but never actually encouraged anything – like alcohol – that would undermine the devotee’s self-control. Mescaline, he suggests, would potentially be far more compatible with Christianity than the currently legal alternatives – indeed, he cites the example of the Native American Church (NAC) which incorporates slices of peyote into its Love Feast. This had come about as Christian missionaries, as they often do, had merely incorporated local customs and traditions into the religion they were seeking to introduce – only, in this case, the tradition involved the use of a psychedelic drug. (The NAC, by the way, is still on the go and, in the US, peyote is legal for sacramental use by them). Adherents may see visions, even of Christ Himself, or hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Not for them, as Huxley puts it, ‘the mild sense of virtue which sustains the average Sunday churchgoer through ninety minutes of boredom.’ However, he quotes an account of their rites which highlights the ‘religious feeling and decorum’ for which the church is known and which contradicts the popular image of psychedelic drug-use. As Huxley points out, the ‘sophisticated’ European traditions, with their elaborate theologies and philosophies might consider themselves superior to what’s going on here, but, in fact, by marginalising the transcendental, it might be that they’ve lost something important that’s still central to the religious life of the peyotists. It has to be said that he’s not suggesting mescaline could provide us with some ultimate explanation as to the meaning of life: it can, though, he thinks, provide insight. He quotes Goethe: ‘We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my windowsill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.’ Of course, Huxley says, we can’t dispense with words, but we need to be aware that by gaining language, we have lost direct access to a whole layer of insight into material reality which can only be regained through conscious effort. And, since conventional education is predominantly verbal, the system creates educated people who nevertheless know little of ‘Nature as the primary fact of experience’: people who may be knowledgeable, but who fall short when it comes to understanding our place in the world and what it is to be human.
In summary, Huxley, having experienced the psychedelic effects of mescaline, is suggesting a form of social engineering: the replacement of alcohol and tobacco in our society with a scientifically-created less-harmful drug that would also provide us with a more transcendental experience. It’s a novel, if not particularly radical idea which, though more benign in intent, has overtones of his earlier book, Brave New World. (In that book, drugs are used as a means of social control. By the time he wrote TDOP though, he’d become more interested, as we’ve seen, in the potential of drugs to open people’s minds). As an idea, it’s probably very much ‘of its time’: he was writing during the early days of the British Welfare State, at a time when grand designs of social engineering were popular. Nevertheless, it’s still a thought-provoking suggestion. (Huxley’s arguments, of course, don’t touch on contemporary debates and the idea that personal drug use might be best removed from the legal sphere and approached as a potential health problem). Although it would risk undermining our awareness of the needs of others while directly under its influence, such a safe, legalised psychedelic drug could, nevertheless, he thinks, ground us in Nature and deepen our insight. We’ll never get to the bottom of the unfathomable mystery of existence which words alone will never solve, but, as he says, ‘the man who comes out through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.’
It would be wrong to write an account of what Huxley has to say in TDOP without at least touching on the sequel he wrote to it, the essay Heaven and Hell. In it, he turns his attention from his personal experience of taking mescaline to the intense visionary experiences more usually described by users of psychedelics. He explores how aspects of these experiences can be seen to seep into the everyday world through art. For myself, I didn’t find his ideas here as compelling as his description of his personal experience in TDOP, nor am I sure how these ideas would stand the scrutiny of modern neuroscience. Nevertheless, irrespective of whether or not his argument stands up, he makes some interesting points on the way. He talks, for example, of how stained glass windows mimic the intense colours of drug-induced visions and, by doing so, can draw one towards the parts of the mind such visions spring from. He ends by stating his own views on what visionary experiences might represent. He name-checks Swedenborg and goes on to say that ‘from this world it is doubtless possible to pass, when the necessary conditions have been fulfilled, to worlds of visionary bliss or the final enlightenment.’ The great strength of TDOP – and what makes it a book that should appeal to humanists and non-humanists alike – is it’s rootedness in Huxley’s own experience. In H&H, on the other hand, he simply talks about his ideas.
Since it first came out over seventy years ago, TDOP has rarely if ever been out of print. Although it came in for some negative criticism – some, for example, challenging the idea that a drug could be a route to authentic spiritual insight – it exerted a huge influence over the psychedelic era that came into being in the years following its publication. Timothy Leary struck up a friendship with Huxley as a result of reading it. The band, The Doors, famously took its name from it. It’s been widely-read and even more widely name-checked.
And it’s good to be reminded of the true meaning of the word ‘psychedelic.’ While writing this, I did a straw poll, asking people what they thought the word meant. A surprising number got it wrong. It can so easily be reduced to a vague term used to describe ‘multicoloured’, a style or a vibe. It’s as if mainstream Western Culture has tamed it to make it sound more shallow and less exotic. It’s interesting to know this with regard to its use not only in relation to drugs, but also in relation to psychedelic music. It’s a term most often used to describe certain forms of jazz, rock and folk and overlaps with the free improvised music genre, where the term might be used less routinely. One could draw a distinction between the use of the term ‘psychedelic’ to describe the use of mainly conventional techniques (e.g., repetitive rhythms, drones and riffs) to invoke ‘mind revealing’ mental states and music in which the form the music itself takes is a representation of spontaneous, intuitive mental activity. Both, of course, can happen in the same piece of music. And then there is a great deal of music which, though not labelled as such, is psychedelic in its effect. Bach is often quoted in this context, not least by Huxley himself.
I’ve read that Huxley wanted to try mescaline because he’d attempted to expand his consciousness through meditation and felt that he’d failed. It’s interesting that, in his account of using the drug, he seems to feel that it, too, for him, failed to live up to expectations. Perhaps if you consciously seek an expansion of consciousness, what you achieve will never feel enough. The fact remains, though, that some of the effects he describes can be achieved through mental discipline, without the use of drugs or, even, simply because our mind takes us there. And the experiences people have are not always as positive as Huxley’s (something he touches on at the end of H&H). Some who’ve experienced similar encounters with material reality have been overwhelmed by the sheer absurdity or horror, even, of it – the ‘nausea’ of Sartre’s novel-title. The central character of Nausea, Roquentin, says of his famous revelation in the park, ‘the park gates, the bench, the patches of grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder — naked, with a frightful and obscene nakedness.’ And in The Waves, Virginia Woolf has her character Rhoda – said to be based on Woolf herself – recount the following experience; again, a state of mind arrived at without drugs or conscious effort:
‘Here in this dining-room you see the antlers and the tumblers; the salt-cellars; the yellow stains on the tablecloth. “Waiter!” says Bernard. “Bread!” says Susan. And the waiter comes; he brings bread. But I see the side of a cup like a mountain and only parts of antlers, and the brightness on the side of that jug like a crack in darkness with wonder and terror. Your voices sound like trees creaking in a forest. So with your faces and their prominences and hollows.’
I’ve never taken any psychedelic drugs myself and I wouldn’t encourage others to do so, although I can see why Huxley and others did back in the twentieth century and am all for pursuing transcendent states without the use of drugs. Blake, after all, achieved a level of insight that led him, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to coin the phrase Huxley chose as the title of the book without recourse to them: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’ Myself, the closest I’ve ever come to the experience Huxley describes was coming round from fainting in a library to find myself in a Roquentin-like mental state. I had no words for the books I’d dropped that lay scattered over the parquet floor my head was resting on, neither did I have a word for floor. My brain was processing the signals it received from my eyes and I was conscious of them, but had no inkling of what they meant. Material reality, when you see it like this, in the raw, is beyond strange. The experience stays with you. However, one doesn’t need to experience such states to appreciate their value: much can be gleaned from the insights of others. And, as well as the personal, the kind of insight we’re talking about can be thought of in political terms. Huxley, as we’ve seen, talks about the immediate effect of mescaline as being to cut one off from any concern for others, but it is also the case that, being able to see the world as it is, without honing in on the details our minds subconsciously select as being significant, is something we have to do in order to better understand it (as Huxley better understood the car he encountered). We need to be able to see through the illusions – both physical and social – the system we live in creates for us, in order to explain to ourselves what’s going on and challenge it. And, of course, such insights are probably best gained without the use of drugs. However, on a different level, experiences like Huxley’s have helped expose how our worlds are psychological constructions, not absolutes, and, as David Graeber said, ‘the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently’.
And it’s vital that we never lose sight of our capacity for vision. These days, people talk about their minds as if they’re machines (which, perhaps, in a way, they are, but infinitely surprising machines, not the limited, predictable, human-made kind). They talk about ‘survival mode’, ‘sleep mode’, ‘fuelling up’ to boost their ‘energy levels’. We live lives surrounded by and governed by sleek machines which, like us, but unlike the machines of the past, fail to reveal how they work when you break them apart. Like us, they remain inscrutable to most of us. We worry that they will develop intelligence, learn to think like we do and take over the world, but perhaps we should worry at least as much about how we’re subconsciously learning to be like them, to think of ourselves as machines. It’s a terrifying tendency. Machines don’t see visions: they have no ‘doors of perception’ to be opened. They don’t dream, don’t suffer, don’t have rights and can easily be discarded and replaced. If people become machines, the doors of perception will be closed, and it will be possible for relationships of all kinds to be installed and uninstalled like apps, allowed to take up space only so long as they’re useful. Follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion and we’re confronted with a humanity that could easily fall into a dark place where wars, ethnic cleansing and genocide are seen as no more than reorganisations and upgrades. Some of it already has.
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Dominic Rivron
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