Huxley on Psychedelic Experiences

The following passages are taken from the book Moksha, the volume that compiled many of the essays and letters written by Aldous Huxley. If you have any interest in the relevance of drugs in the context of mystical experience, I'd highly recommend this book. Much like Alan Watts, I think Huxley is infinitely quotable... All bolding of text is my doing. :)

It seems evident that [substances] like mescalin and LSD "open a door" which gives access to areas of the mind, of which ordinarily we have no, or very little, or only occasional cognizance. In this area of the mind we may find visionary experience, sometimes terrible, but more often (if we are physically and psychologically healthy) beautiful and illuminating.

We may also find what the mystics call "obscure knowledge" about the nature of the universe-- a "sense of something far more deeply interfused" (in Wordsworth's phrase), a sense that All is present in every particular, the Absolute in every relative. And associated with this obscure knowledge may come a new mode of apprehension, in which the ordinary subject-object relationship is somehow transcended, and there is an awareness of self and the outer world as being one.

Often, too, there is an actual experience of truths (they are known to be truths), which, when presented in conceptual terms to the mind in its normal state, seem incomprehensible and absurd. Such propositions as "God is love" are realized with the totality of one's being, and their truth seems self-evident in spite of pain and death. With this goes an intense gratitude for the privilege of existence in this universe. (Blake said that "gratitude is heaven itself"-- a phrase I was unable to understand before taking LSD, but which now seems luminously comprehensible.)

Different drugs give access to different areas of this Other World of the mind-- or at least make is easier to go to one area rather than another. It is surprising, however, to see how closely the experiences induced by very different chemicals correspond with one another. Mescalin is unlike LSD, and both are unlike the active substance in the mushrooms described by Gordon Wasson. But the experiences induced are very similar.

And, in their turn, these drug induced experiences are very similar to the experiences which come to certain people spontaneously and which others have induced by "spiritual exercises" and such psycho-physical methods for changing body chemistry as fasting, prolonged insomnia, violent mortification of the flesh. Nor should we forget the effects of "limited environment." What men like Hebb and Lilly are doing in the laboratory was done by the Christian hermits in the Thebaid and elsewhere, and by Hindu and Tibetan hermits in the remote fastnesses of the Himalayas.

My own belief is that these experiences really tell us something about the nature of the universe, that they are valuable in themselves and, above all, valuable when incorporated into our world-picture and acted upon [in] normal life. The effect of the mystical experience upon normal life has everywhere been regarded as the test of the experience's validity.

-Aldous Huxley, 1957

Somehow or other we have to invent the means of talking about these problems in an artistically varied way which shall make them accessible to the general public. Ideally, for example, we ought to be able to talk about a mystical experience simultaneously in terms of theology, of psychology and of biochemisty. This is a pretty tall order, but unless we can do something of the kind, it will remain extraordinarily difficult for people to think about this continuous web of life, to think about it as a continuum, and not in terms of the old Platonic and Cartesian dualism which so extraordinarily falsifies our picture of the world.

-Aldous Huxley, 1959

I have gone beyond vision into many of the experiences described in Eastern and Western literature-- the transcendence of the subject-object relationship, the sense of solidarity with all the world so that one actually knows by experience what "God is love" means: the sense that, in spite of death and suffering, everything is somehow ultimately All Right.
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That a chemical can help people to get out of their own light is distressing to many people; but it happens to be a fact. That the experience is a "gratuitous grace", neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation, is certain. Ethical and cognitive effort is needed if the experiencer is to go forward from his one-shot experience to permanent enlightenment.

-Aldous Huxley, 1959

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