Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception

[JavaJak]

The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley

The Doors of Perception was first published in Great Britain by
Chatto & Windus Ltd 1954. ©Mrs. Laura Huxley 1954

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If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would
appear to man as it is, infinite. ãWilliam Blake

It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin,
published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his
own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to
science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the
American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing.
Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the
early Spanish visitors to the New World, "they eat a root which
they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity."
Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent
when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and
Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active
principle of peyote. True, they stopped short at a point well this
side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a
position among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in
suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more
profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the
pharmacologist's repertory.
Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since
the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis. Chemists have not merely
isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so
that the supply no longer depends on the sparse and intermittent
crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed themselves with
mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand,
understanding of their patients' mental processes. Working
unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of
circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of
the drug's more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists
have found out something about the mechanism of its action upon
the central nervous system. And at least one Professional
philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may throw on such
ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the
relationship between brain and consciousness.
There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and
perhaps highly significant fact was observed.* Actually the fact
had been staring everyone in the face for several decades; but
nobody, as it happened, had noticed it until a Young English
psychiatrist, at present working in Canada, was struck by the
close similarity, in chemical composition, between mescalin and
adrenalin. Further research revealed that lysergic acid, an
extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural
biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery
that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of
adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin
intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in
the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of
manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause
Profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes are
similar to those which occur in that most characteristic plague of
the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is the mental disorder due
to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its
turn, to psychological distresses affecting the adrenals? It would
be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that
some kind of a prima facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the
clue is being systematically followed, the sleuthsãbiochemists ,
psychiatrists, psychologistsãare on the trail.
By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I
found myself, in the spring of 1953, squarely athwart that trail.
One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of
seventy years of mescalin research, the psychological material at
his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and he was anxious to
add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a
guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one bright May morning, I
swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a
glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but
always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs
go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone.
Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated
ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very
nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in
solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fanciesãall these are
private and, except through symbols and at second hand,
incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but
never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every
human group is a society of island universes.
Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to
Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or
"feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and
humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous
circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly
Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases
communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent.
The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane
and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places
where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no
common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or
fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The
things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually
exclusive realms of experience.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift.
Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see
themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species
and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the
sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short
of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius,
how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg,
to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a man at the
extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in
the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or,
except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of
one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the
unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are
meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in
practice they know to be trueãnamely, that there is an inside to
experience as well as an outsideãthe problems posed are real
problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble,
some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not
available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I
shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe
Louis. On the other hand, it had always seemed to me possible
that, through hypnosis, for example, or auto-hypnosis, by means of
systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I
might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to
know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the
mystic were talking about.
From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was
convinced in advance that the drug would admit me, at least for a
few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake and AE.
But what I had expected did not happen. I had expected to lie with
my eyes shut, looking at visions of many-colored geometries, of
animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of
landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling
perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I had not
reckoned, it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental
make-up, the facts of my temperament, training and habits.
I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a
poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not
evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the
verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not
present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an
effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what
happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look
before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the
only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three
and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance
and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to
real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts
stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the
shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images
come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of
visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab,
limited and uninteresting. This was the worldãa poor thing but my
ownãwhich I expected to see transformed into something completely
unlike itself.
The change which actually took place in that world was in no
sense revolutionary. Half an hour after swallowing the drug I
became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later
there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from
bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing,
patterned life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a
complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept
emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide
noiselessly upwards, out of sight. But at no time were there faces
or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous
spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing
remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which
mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out
there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was
in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective
universe was relatively unimportant.
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was
sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The
vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal
rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter,
flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and,
pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic
blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay
broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that
morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors.
But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an
unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the
morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked
existence.
"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this Part of the
experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating
machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of
what was said.)
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just
is."
Istigkeitãwasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use?
"Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophyã except that Plate
seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of
separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the
mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow,
have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light
and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with
which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose
and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more,
and nothing less, than what they wereãa transience that was yet
eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure
Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some
unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the
divine source of all existence.
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light
I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathingãbut of
a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent
ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty,
from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and
"transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what,
among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose
to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the
smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The
Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the
first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate
hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those
prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage
I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of
the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of
saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is
asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And
with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the
Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the
man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires,
'"what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the
shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."
It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of
nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of
course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom
of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was
these flowers, it was anything that Iãor rather the blessed Not-I,
released for a moment from my throttling embraceãcared to look at.
The books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like
the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter
colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald
books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine,
of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was so intense, so
intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of
leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my
attention.
"What about spatial relationships?" the investigator inquired,
as I was looking at the books.
It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked
rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in
right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The
really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased
to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in
terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye
concerns itself with such problems as Where?ãHow far?ãHow situated
in relation to what? 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. I saw the books, but
was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I
noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all
of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was
more manifest than in others. In this context position and the
three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the
category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked
about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the
whereabouts of objects. 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.
And along with indifference to space there went an even more
complete indifference to time.
"There seems to be plenty of it," was all I would answer, when
the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.
Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I
could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew,
was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still,
of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present
made up of one continually changing apocalypse.
From the books the investigator directed my attention to the
furniture. A small typing table stood in the center of the room;
beyond it, from my point of view, was a wicker chair and beyond
that a desk. The three pieces formed an intricate pattern of
horizontals, uprights and diagonalsãa pattern all the more
interesting for not being interpreted in terms of spatial
relationships. Table, chair and desk came together in a
composition that was like something by Braque or Juan Gris, a
still life recognizably related to the objective world, but
rendered without depth, without any attempt at photographic
realism. I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who
has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the
cameraman or scientific recorder, 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. The legs, for example, of that chairãhow miraculous
their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I
spent several minutesãor was it several centuries?ãnot merely
gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being themã-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 were "they")
being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.
Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the
eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do
well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been
inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in
connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is
that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs
is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at
each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to
him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in
the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to
protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of
largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of
what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and
leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely
to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of
us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals,
our business is at all costs to survive. 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 this 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.
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the
linguistic tradition into which he has been bornãthe beneficiary
inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of
other people's experience, the victim 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 through the reducing valve
and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language.
Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass
that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes
may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of
deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means
of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there
flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening
everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the
reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at
Large), but something more than, and above all something different
from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our
narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least
sufficient, picture of reality.
The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which
serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate
the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the
production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose
available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When
mescalin reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar what happens?
Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive
answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of
the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be
summarized as follows.
(1) The ability to remember and to "think straight" is little
if at all reduced. (Listening to the recordings of my conversation
under the influence of the drug, I cannot discover that I was then
any stupider than I am at ordinary times.)
(2) Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye
recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the
sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the
concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time
falls almost to zero.
(3) Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though
perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound
change for the worse. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing
anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at
ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly
uninteresting. He can't be bothered with them, for the good reason
that he has better things to think about.
(4) These better things may be experienced (as I experienced
them) "out there," or "in here," or in both worlds, the inner and
the outer, simultaneously or successively. That they are better
seems to be self-evident to all mescalin takers who come to the
drug with a sound liver and an untroubled mind.
These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could
expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to
impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. 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 is 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 allãthat 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."
In this context, how significant is the enormous heightening,
under mescalin, of the perception of color! For certain animals it
is biologically very important to be able to distinguish certain
hues. But beyond the limits of their utilitarian spectrum, most
creatures are completely color blind. Bees, for example, spend
most of their time "deflowering the fresh virgins of the spring";
but, as Von Frisch has shown, they can recognize only a very few
colors. Man's highly developed color sense is a biological
luxuryãinestimably precious to him as an intellectual and
spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. To
judge by the adjectives which Homer puts into their mouths, the
heroes of the Trojan War hardly excelled the bees in their
capacity to distinguish colors. In this respect, at least,
mankind's advance has been prodigious.
Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the
percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to
which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem
that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of
things are primary. Unlike Locke, it evidently feels that colors
are more important, better worth attending to, than masses,
positions and dimensions. Like mescalin takers, many mystics
perceive supernaturally brilliant colors, not only with the inward
eye, but even in the objective world around them. Similar reports
are made by psychics and sensitives. There are certain mediums to
whom the mescalin taker's brief revelation is a matter, during
long periods, of daily and hourly experience.
From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of
theory, we may now return to the miraculous factsãfour bamboo
chair legs in the middle of a room. Like Wordsworth's daffodils,
they brought all manner of wealthãthe gift, beyond price, of a new
direct insight into the very Nature of Things, together with a
more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of
the arts.
A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair
legs were St. Michael and all angels. Four or five hours after the
event, when the effects of a cerebral sugar shortage were wearing
off, I was taken for a little tour of the city, which included a
visit, towards sundown, to what is modestly claimed to be the
World's Biggest Drug Store. At the back of the W.B.D.S., among the
toys, the greeting cards and the comics, stood a row, surprisingly
enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that came to
hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened
was "The Chair"ãthat astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which
the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to
render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of
genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was
obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though
incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the
chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive
symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this
was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge
about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to
prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its
own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can
never be the things they stand for.
It would be interesting, in this context, to make a study of
the works of art available to the great knowers of Suchness. What
sort of pictures did Eckhart look at? What sculptures and
paintings played a part in the religious experience of St. John of
the Cross, of Hakuin, of Hui-neng, of William Law? The questions
are beyond my power to answer; but I strongly suspect that most of
the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to
artãsome 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. (To a person whose
transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this,
the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting
will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) 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 actual
dinner.
I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume
standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the
pages. "The Birth of Venus"-never one of my favorites. "Mars and
Venus," that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin
at the height of his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously
rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." And then a somewhat less
familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My attention was
arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic
heroine or her attendant, not at the victim's hairy head or the
vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of
Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.
This was something I had seen before-seen that very morning,
between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by
chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own
crossed legs. Those folds in the trousersãwhat a labyrinth of
endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray
flannelãhow rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here
they were again, in Botticelli's picture.
Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no
portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without
representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for
the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant
development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts.
Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own
sakeãor, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery,
you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical
purposes, are non-representationalãthe kind of unconditioned forms
on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to
let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly
human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per
cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored
variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen.
And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an
Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in
quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art,
they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they
express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the
artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces,
the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between fact
and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all
but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous
sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or
bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoricãthe heroism,
the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires,
for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco's disquietingly
visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting,
flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the
first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless
physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized
sense of the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or
consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for
balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble
trees, for the Cythera of every lover's dream; their enormous
melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their
creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the
gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of
their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch
of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only
a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an
incessant modulationãinner uncertainty rendered with the perfect
assurance of a master handãof tone into tone, of one indeterminate
color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the
plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that
which disposes is ultimately the artist's temperament, proximately
(at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted
drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fÍte galante
shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the
point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost
intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a prodigy of female
brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres' incomparable Mme.
Moitessier) shall express the austerest, the most uncompromising
intellectuality.
But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now
discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of
non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and
sculptures. 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. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes
past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness.
It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent.
For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living
hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the
unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair,
though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the
folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To
what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say. Is it,
perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and
dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the
miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows?
What is important is less the reason for the experience than the
experience itself. Poring over Judith's skirts, there in the
World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelliãand not
Botticelli alone, but many others too-had looked at draperies with
the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that
morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of
folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or
stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and
the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the
Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith's skirt I
could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might
have made of my old gray flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in
comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation
after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at
least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic
imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of
television.
"This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down
at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at
the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. "This is
how one ought to see, how things really are." And yet there were
reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never
want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine
Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be
enough. But in that case what about other people? What about human
relations? In the recording of that morning's conversations I find
the question constantly repeated, "What about human relations?"
How could one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought
to see with the temporal duties of doing what one ought to do and
feeling as one ought to feel? "One ought to be able," I said, "to
see these trousers as infinitely important and human beings as
still more infinitely important." One ought-but in practice it
seemed to be impossible. This participation in the manifest glory
of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the
necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns
involving persons. For Persons are selves and, in one respect at
least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being
the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self,
the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had
momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time
fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was
not one of the categories in terms of which I was thinking), but
enormously irrelevant. Compelled by the investigator to analyze
and report on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone
with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four chair legs and the
Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!), I realized
that I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with
me in the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware
of them. One was my wife, the other a man I respected and greatly
liked; but both belonged to the world from which, for the moment,
mescalin had delivered me "e world of selves, of time, of moral
judgments and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was
this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to
forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words
and idolatrously worshipped notions.
At this stage of the proceedings I was handed a large colored
reproduction of the well-known self-portrait by CÈzanneãthe head
and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked,
red-lipped, with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It
is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a painting that I now
saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came
to life as a small goblin-like man looking out through a window in
the page before me. I started to laugh. And when they asked me
why, "What pretensions!" I kept repeating. "Who on earth does he
think he is?" The question was not addressed to CÈzanne in
particular, but to the human species at large. Who did they all
think they were?
"It's like Arnold Bennett in the Dolomites," I said, suddenly
remembering a scene, happily immortalized in a snapshot, of A.B.,
some four or five years before his death, toddling along a wintry
road at Cortina d'Ampezzo. Around him lay the virgin snow; in the
background was a more than gothic aspiration of red crags. And
there was dear, kind, unhappy A.B., consciously overacting the
role of his favorite character in fiction, himself, the Card in
person. There he went, toddling slowly in the bright Alpine
sunshine, his thumbs in the armholes of a yellow waistcoat which
bulged, a little lower down, with the graceful curve of a Regency
bow window at Brightenãhis head thrown back as though to aim some
stammered utterance, howitzer-like, at the blue dome of heaven.
What he actually said, I have forgotten; but what his whole
manner, air and posture fairly shouted was, "I'm as good as those
damned mountains." And in some ways, of course, he was infinitely
better; but not, as he knew very well, in the way his favorite
character in fiction liked to imagine.
Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we
all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction. And the
fact, the almost infinitely unlikely fact, of actually being
CÈzanne makes no difference. For the consummate painter, with his
little pipeline to Mind at Large by-passing the brain valve and
ego-filter, was also and just as genuinely this whiskered goblin
with the unfriendly eye.
For relief I turned back to the folds in my trousers. "This is
how one ought to see," I repeated yet again. And I might have
added,' 'These are the sort of things one ought to look at."
Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves,
sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying,
insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in
Luciferian defiance of the grace of god.
"The nearest approach to this," I said, "would be a Vermeer."
Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was truly
gifted-with the vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge
at the bottom of the garden, with the talent to render as much of
that vision as the limitations of human capacity permit, and with
the prudence to confine himself in his paintings to the more
manageable aspects of reality; for though Vermeer represented
human beings, he was always a painter of still life. CÈzanne, who
told his female sitters to do their best to look like apples,
tried to paint portraits in the same spirit. But his pippin-like
women are more nearly related to Plato's Ideas than to the
Dharma-Body in the hedge. They are Eternity and Infinity seen, not
in sand or flower, but in the abstractions of some very superior
brand of geometry. Vermeer never asked his girls to look like
apples. On the contrary, he insisted on their being girls to the
very limitãbut always with the proviso that they refrain from
behaving girlishly. They might sit or quietly stand but never
giggle, never display self-consciousness, never say their prayers
or pine for absent sweethearts, never gossip, never gaze enviously
at other women's babies, never dirt, never love or hate or work.
In the act of doing any of these things they would doubtless
become more intensely themselves, but would cease, for that very
reason, to manifest their divine essential Not-self. In Blake's
phrase, the doors of Vermeer's perception were only partially
cleansed. A single panel had become almost perfectly transparent;
the rest of the door was still muddy. The essential Not-self could
be perceived very clearly in things and in living creatures on the
hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only
when they were in repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies
motionless. In these circumstances Vermeer could see Suchness in
all its heavenly beautyãcould see and, in some small measure,
render itãin a subtle and sumptuous still life. Vermeer is
undoubtedly the greatest painter of human still lives. But there
have been others, for example, Vermeer's French contemporaries,
the Le Nain brothers. They set out, I suppose, to be genre
painters; but what they actually produced was a series of human
still lives, in which their cleansed perception of the infinite
significance of all things is rendered not, as with Vermeer, by
subtle enrichment of color and texture, but by a heightened
clarity, an obsessive distinctness of form, within an austere,
almost monochromatic tonality. In our own day we have had
Vuillard, the painter, at his best, of unforgettably splendid
pictures of the Dharma-Body manifested in a bourgeois bedroom, of
the Absolute blazing away in the midst of some stockbroker's
family in a suburban garden, taking tea.

Ce qui fait que l'ancien bandagiste renie
Le comptoir dont le faste allÈchait les passants,
C'est son jardin d'Auteuil, o˘, veufs de tout encens,
Les Zinnias ont l'air d'Ítre en tÙle vernie.

For Laurent Taillade the spectacle was merely obscene. But if
the retired rubber goods merchant had sat still enough, Vuillard
would have seen in him only the Dharma-Body, would have painted,
in the zinnias, the goldfish pool, the villa's Moorish tower and
Chinese lanterns, a corner of Eden before the Fall.
But meanwhile my question remained unanswered. How was this
cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with
human relations, with the necessary chores and duties, to say
nothing of charity and practical compassion? The age-old debate
between the actives and the contemplatives was being
renewedãrenewed, so far as I was concerned, with an unprecedented
poignancy. For until this morning I had known contemplation only
in its humbler, its more ordinary formsãas discursive thinking; as
a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient
waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest
writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses,
in Nature, of Wordsworth's "something far more deeply interfused";
as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an "obscure
knowledge." But now I knew contemplation at its height. At its
height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its fullness the way
of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak, to
its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts
the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplationãbut
to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with
the will to action, the very thought of action. In the intervals
between his revelations the mescalin taker is apt to feel that,
though in one way everything is supremely as it should be, in
another there is something wrong. His problem is essentially the
same as that which confronts the quietist, the arhat and, on
another level, the landscape painter and the painter of human
still lives. Mescalin can never solve that problem; it can only
pose it, apocalyptically, for those to whom it had never before
presented itself. The full and final solution can be found only by
those who are prepared to implement the right kind of
Weltanschauung by means of the right kind of behavior and the
right kind of constant and unstrained alertness. Over against the
quietist stands the active-contemplative, the saint, the man who,
in Eckhart's phrase, is ready to come down from the seventh heaven
in order to bring a cup of water to his sick brother. Over against
the arhat, retreating from appearances into an entirely
transcendental Nirvana, stands the Bodhisattva, for whom Suchness
and the world of contingencies are one, and for whose boundless
compassion every one of those contingencies is an occasion not
only for transfiguring insight, but also for the most practical
charity. And in the universe of art, over against Vermeer and the
other Painters of human still lives, over against the masters of
Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, over against Constable
and Turner, against Sisley and Seurat and CÈzanne, stands the
all-inclusive art of Rembrandt. These are enormous names,
inaccessible eminences. For myself, on this memorable May morning,
I could only be grateful for an experience which had shown me,
more clearly than I had ever seen it before, the true nature of
the challenge and the completely liberating response.
Let me add, before we leave this subject, that there is no
form of contemplation, even the most quietistic, which is without
its ethical values. Half at least of all morality is negative and
consists in keeping out of mischief. The Lord's Prayer is less
than fifty words long, and six of those words are devoted to
asking God not to lead us into temptation. The one-sided
contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but
to make up for it, he refrains from doing a host of things he
ought not to do. The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much
diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.
The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have
to stay in his room. He can go about his business, so completely
satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that
he will never even be tempted to indulge in what Traherne called
"the dirty Devices of the world." When we feel ourselves to be
sole heirs of the universe, when "the sea flows in our veins...
and the stars are our jewels," when all things are perceived as
infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or
self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of
pleasure? Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or
procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance,
or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the
faces of the poor. And to these enormous negative virtues we may
add another which, though hard to define, is both positive and
important. The arhat and the quietist may not practice
contemplation in its fullness; but if they practice it at all,
they may bring back enlightening reports of another, a
transcendent country of the mind; and if they practice it in the
height, they will become conduits through which some beneficent
influence can how out of that other country into a world of
darkened selves, chronically dying for lack of it.
Meanwhile I had turned, at the investigator's request, from
the portrait of CÈzanne to what was going on, inside my head, when
I shut my eyes. This time, the inscape was curiously unrewarding.
The field of vision was filled with brightly colored, constantly
changing structures that seemed to be made of plastic or enameled
tin.
"Cheap," I commented. "Trivial. Like things in a
five-and-ten."
And all this shoddiness existed in a closed, cramped universe.

"It's as though one were below decks in a ship," I said. "A
five-and-ten-cent ship."
And as I looked, it became very clear that this
five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human
pretensions, with the portrait of CÈzanne, with A.B. among the
Dolomites overacting his favorite character in fiction. This
suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal
self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal
contributions to the universe.
I felt the lesson to be salutary, but was sorry, none the
less, that it had had to be administered at this moment and in
this form. As a rule the mescalin taker discovers an inner world
as manifestly a datum, as self-evidently "infinite and holy," as
that transfigured outer world which I had seen with my eyes open.
From the first, my own case had been different. Mescalin had
endowed me temporarily with the power to see things with my eyes
shut; but it could not, or at least on this occasion did not,
reveal an inscape remotely comparable to my flowers or chair or
flannels "out there." What it had allowed me to perceive inside
was not the Dharma-Body, in images, but my own mind; not Suchness,
but a set of symbolsãin other words, a homemade substitute for
Suchness.
Most visualizers are transformed by mescalin into visionaries.
Some of themãand they are Perhaps more numerous than is generally
supposedãrequire no transformation; they are visionaries all the
time. The mental species to which Blake belonged is fairly widely
distributed even in the urban-industrial societies of the present
day. The poet-artist's uniqueness does not consist in the fact
that (to quote from his Descriptive Catalogue) he actually saw
"those wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the
Cherubim." It does not consist in the fact that "these wonderful
originals seen in my visions, were some of them one hundred feet
in height ... all containing mythological and recondite meaning."
It consists solely in his ability to render, in words or (somewhat
less successfully) in line and color, some hint at least of a not
excessively uncommon experience. The untalented visionary may
perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and
significant than the world beheld by Blake; but he lacks
altogether the ability to express, in literary or plastic symbols,
what he has seen.
From the records of religion and the surviving monuments of
poetry and the plastic arts it is very plain that, at most times
and in most places, men have attached more importance to the
inscape than to objective existents, have felt that what they saw
with their eyes shut possessed a spiritually higher significance
than what they saw with their eyes open. The reason? Familiarity
breeds contempt, and how to survive is a problem ranging in
urgency from the chronically tedious to the excruciating. The
outer world is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is
the place where, willy-nilly, we must try to make our living. In
the inner world there is neither work nor monotony. We visit it
only in dreams and musings, and its strangeness is such that we
never find the same world on two successive occasions. What
wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have
generally preferred to look within! Generally, but not always. In
their art no less than in their religion, the Taoists and the Zen
Buddhists looked beyond visions to the Void, and through the Void
at "the ten thousand things" of objective reality. Because of
their doctrine of the Word made flesh, Christians should have been
able, from the first, to adopt a similar attitude towards the
universe around them. But because of the doctrine of the Fall,
they found it very hard to do so. As recently as three hundred
years ago an expression of thoroughgoing world denial and even
world condemnation was both orthodox and comprehensible. "We
should feel wonder at nothing at all in Nature except only the
Incarnation of Christ." In the seventeenth century, Lallemant's
phrase seemed to make sense. Today it has the ring of madness.
In China the rise of landscape painting to the rank of a major
art form took place about a thousand, in Japan about six hundred
and in Europe about three hundred, years ago. The equation of
Dharma-Body with hedge was made by those Zen Masters, who wedded
Taoist naturalism with Buddhist transcendentalism. It was,
therefore, only in the Far East that landscape painters
consciously regarded their art as religious. In the West religious
painting was a matter of portraying sacred personages, of
illustrating hallowed texts. Landscape painters regarded
themselves as secularists. Today we recognize in Seurat one of the
supreme masters of what may be called mystical landscape painting.
And yet this man who was able, more effectively than any other, to
render the One in the many, became quite indignant when somebody
praised him for the "poetry" of his work. "I merely apply the
System," he protested. In other words he was merely a pointilliste
and, in his own eyes, nothing else. A similar anecdote is told of
John Constable. One day towards the end of his life, Blake met
Constable at Hampstead and was shown one of the younger artist's
sketches. In spite of his contempt for naturalistic art, the old
visionary knew a good thing when be saw it-except of course, when
it was by Rubens. 'This is not drawing," he cried, "this is
inspiration!" "I had meant it to be drawing," was Constable's
characteristic answer. Both men were right. It was drawing,
precise and veracious, and at the same time it was
inspirationãinspiration of an order at least as high as Blake's.
The pine trees on the Heath had actually been seen as identical
with the Dharma-Body. The sketch was a rendering, necessarily
imperfect but still profoundly impressive, of what a cleansed
perception had revealed to the open eyes of a great painter. From
a contemplation, in the tradition of Wordsworth and Whitman, of
the Dharma-Body as hedge, and from visions, such as Blake's, of
the "wonderful originals" within the mind, contemporary poets have
retreated into an investigation of the personal, as opposed to the
more than personal, subconscious and to a rendering, in highly
abstract terms, not of the given, objective fact, but of mere
scientific and theological notions. And something similar has
happened in the held of painting, where we have witnessed a
general retreat from landscape, the predominant art form of the
nineteenth century. This retreat from landscape has not been into
that other, inner divine Datum, with which most of the traditional
schools of the past were concerned, that Archetypal World, where
men have always found the raw materials of myth and religion. No,
it has been a retreat from the outward Datum into the personal
subconscious, into a mental world more squalid and more tightly
closed than even the world of conscious personality. These
contraptions of tin and highly colored plasticãwhere had I seen
them before? In every picture gallery that exhibits the latest in
nonrepresentational art.
And now someone produced a phonograph and put a record on the
turntable. I listened with pleasure, but experienced nothing
comparable to my seen apocalypses of flowers or flannel. Would a
naturally gifted musician hear the revelations which, for me, had
been exclusively visual? It would be interesting to make the
experiment. Meanwhile, though not transfigured, though retaining
its normal quality and intensity, the music contributed not a
little to my understanding of what had happened to me and of the
wider problems which those happenings had raised.
Instrumental music, oddly enough, left me rather cold.
Mozart's C-Minor Piano Concerto was interrupted after the first
movement, and a recording of some madrigals by Gesualdo took its
place.
"These voices," I said appreciatively, "these voicesãthey're a
kind of bridge back to the human world."
And a bridge they remained even while singing the most
startlingly chromatic of the mad prince's compositions. Through
the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course,
never sticking to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo,
that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological
disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a
tendency inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The
resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by
the later Schoenberg.
"And yet," I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to
these strange products of a Counter-Reformation psychosis working
upon a late medieval art form, "and yet it does not matter that
he's all in bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual
fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The
Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is
present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps,
than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren't lulled
into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely
fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of
the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have
its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous.
Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos..."
From Gesualdo's madrigals we jumped, across a gulf of three
centuries, to Alban Berg and the Lyric Suite.
"This" I announced in advance, "is going to be hell."
But, as it turned out, I was wrong. Actually the music sounded
rather funny. Dredged up from the personal subconscious, agony
succeeded twelve-tone agony; but what struck me was only the
essential incongruity between a psychological disintegration even
completer than Gesualdo's and the prodigious resources, in talent
and technique, employed in its expression.
"Isn't he sorry for himself!" I commented with a derisive lack
of sympathy. And then, "Katzenmusikãlearned Katzenmusik." And
finally, after a few more minutes of the anguish, "Who cares what
his feelings are? Why can't he pay attention to something else?"
As a criticism of what is undoubtedly a very remarkable work,
it was unfair and inadequateãbut not, I think, irrelevant. I cite
it for what it is worth and because that is how, in a state of
pure contemplation, I reacted to the Lyric Suite.
When it was over, the investigator suggested a walk in the
garden. I was willing; and though my body seemed to have
dissociated itself almost completely from my mindãor, to be more
accurate, though my awareness of the transfigured outer world was
no longer accompanied by an awareness of my physical organismãI
found myself able to get up, open the French window and walk out
with only a minimum of hesitation. It was odd, of course, to feel
that "I" was not the same as these arms and legs "out there," as
this wholly objective trunk and neck and even head. It was odd;
but one soon got used to it. And anyhow the body seemed perfectly
well able to look after itself. In reality, of course, it always
does look after itself. All that the conscious ego can do is to
formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it
controls very little and understands not at all. When it does
anything moreãwhen it tries too hard, for example, when it
worries, when it becomes apprehensive about the futureãit lowers
the effectiveness of those forces and may even cause the
devitalized body to fall ill. In my present state, awareness was
not referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own. This
meant that the physiological intelligence controlling the body was
also on its own. For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in
waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.

From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola
covered in part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one
inch wide with half an inch of space between them. The sun was
shining and the shadows of the laths made a zebra-like pattern on
the ground and across the seat and back of a garden chair, which
was standing at this end of the pergola. That chairãshall I ever
forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery,
stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an
incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that
they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an
immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing
to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would
have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the
percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed
in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could
not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight,
shadowãthese were no more than names and notions, mere
verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the
event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors
separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly
wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying.
And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.
Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and
purgatories. I remember what an old friend, dead these many years,
told me about his mad wife. One day in the early stages of the
disease, when she still had her lucid intervals he had gone to
talk to her about their children. She listened for a time, then
cut him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of
absent children, when all that really mattered, here and now, was
the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in this brown
tweed jacket, every time he moved his arms? Alas, this Paradise of
cleansed perception, of pure one-sided contemplation, was not to
endure. The blissful intermissions became rarer, became briefer,
until finally there were no more of them; there was only horror.
Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of
schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those
who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from
periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other
drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously
toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause
anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that,
so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that
its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no
hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose.
Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment
without fearãin other words, without any disposition to convert an
unprecedentedly strange and other than human experience into
something appalling, something actually diabolical.
Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgmentãor,
to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time
and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chairãI found
myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt,
was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into
intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze it in
retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a
pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most
of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. The
literature of religious experience abounds in references to the
pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly,
face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum.
In theological language, this fear is due to the in-compatibility
between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's
self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God. Following
Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls,
the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a
burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be
found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is
described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void,
and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush
headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn
human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of
hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated
Realityãanything!
The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but
desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the
inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane
person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common
senseãthe strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols
and socially acceptable conventions. The schizophrenic is like a
man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore
unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not
holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it
is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never
permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares
him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning
intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even
cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate
countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale
to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. And once
embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be
able to stop. That, now, was only too obvious.
"If you started in the wrong way," I said in answer to the
investigator's questions, "everything that happened would be a
proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be
self-validating, You couldn't draw a breath without knowing it was
part of the plot."
"So you think you know where madness lies?"
My answer was a convinced and heartfelt, "Yes."
"And you couldn't control it?"
"No I couldn't control it. If one began with fear and hate as
the major premise, one would have to go on to the conclusion."
"Would you be able," my wife asked, "to fix your attention on
what The Tibetan Book of The Dead calls the Clear Light?"
I was doubtful.
"Would it keep the evil away, if you could hold it? Or would
you not be able to hold it?"
I considered the question for some time. "Perhaps," I answered
at last, "perhaps I couldãbut only if there were somebody there to
tell me about the Clear Light. One couldn't do it by oneself.
That's the point, I suppose, of the Tibetan ritualãsomeone sitting
there all the time and telling you what's what."
After listening to the record of this part of the experiment,
I took down my copy of Evans-Wentz's edition of The Tibetan Book
of the Dead, and opened at random. "O nobly born, let not thy mind
be distracted." That was the problemãto remain undistracted.
Undistracted by the memory of past sins, by imagined pleasure, by
the bitter aftertaste of old wrongs and humiliations, by all the
fears and hates and cravings that ordinarily eclipse the Light.
What those Buddhist monks did for the dying and the dead, might
not the modern psychiatrist do for the insane? Let there be a
voice to assure them, by day and even while they are asleep, that
in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion,
the ultimate Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same
substance as the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented
mind. By means of such devices as recorders, clock-controlled
switches, public address systems and pillow speakers it should be
very easy to keep the inmates of even an understaffed institution
constantly reminded of this primordial fact. Perhaps a few of the
lost souls might in this way be helped to win some measure of
control over the universeãat once beautiful and appalling, but
always other than human, always totally incomprehensible-in which
they find themselves condemned to live.
None too soon, I was steered away from the disquieting
splendors of my garden chair. Drooping in green parabolas from the
hedge, the ivy fronds shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like
radiance. A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom,
had exploded into my field of vision. So passionately alive that
they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the
flowers strained upwards into the blue. Like the chair under the
laths, they protected too much. I looked down at the leaves and
discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights
and shadows, pulsing with undecipherable mystery.

Roses :
The flowers are easy to paint,
The leaves difficult.

Shiki's haiku (which I quote in R. H. Blyth's translation)
expresses, by indirection, exactly what I then feltãthe excessive,
the too obvious glory of the flowers, as contrasted with the
subtler miracle of their foliage.
We walked out into the street. A large pale blue auto-mobile
was standing at the curb. At the sight of it, I was suddenly
overcome by enormous merriment. What complacency, what an absurd
self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest
enamel! Man had created the thing in his own imageãor rather in
the image of his favorite character in fiction. I laughed till the
tears ran down my cheeks.
We re-entered the house. A meal had been prepared. Somebody,
who was not yet identical with myself, fell to with ravenous
appetite. From a considerable distance and without much interest,
I looked on.
When the meal had been eaten, we got into the car and went for
a drive. The effects of the mescalin were already on the decline:
but the flowers in the gardens still trembled on the brink of
being supernatural, the pepper trees and carobs along the side
streets still manifestly belonged to some sacred grove. Eden
alternated with Dodona. Yggdrasil with the mystic Rose. And then,
abruptly, we were at an intersection, waiting to cross Sunset
Boulevard. Before us the cars were rolling by in a steady
streamãthousands of them, all bright and shiny like an
advertiser's dream and each more ludicrous than the last. Once
again I was convulsed with laughter.
The Red Sea of traffic parted at last, and we crossed into
another oasis of trees and lawns and roses. In a few minutes we
had climbed to a vantage point in the hills, and there was the
city spread out beneath us. Rather disappointingly, it looked very
like the city I had seen on other occasions. So far as I was
concerned, transfiguration was proportional to distance. The
nearer, the more divinely other. This vast, dim panorama was
hardly different from itself.
We drove on, and so long as we remained in the hills, with
view succeeding distant view, significance was at its everyday
level, well below transfiguration point. The magic began to work
again only when we turned down into a new suburb and were gliding
between two rows of houses. Here, in spite of the peculiar
hideousness of the architecture, there were renewals of
transcendental otherness, hints of the morning's heaven. Brick
chimneys and green composition roofs glowed in the sunshine, like
fragments of the New Jerusalem. And all at once I saw what Guardi
had seen and (with what incomparable skill) had so often rendered
in his paintingsãa stucco wall with a shadow slanting across it,
blank but unforgettably beautiful, empty but charged with all the
meaning and the mystery of existence. The revelation dawned and
was gone again within a fraction of a second. The car had moved
on; time was uncovering another manifestation of the eternal
Suchness. "Within sameness there is difference. But that
difference should be different from sameness is in no wise the
intention of all the Buddhas. Their intention is both totality and
differentiation." This bank of red and white geraniums, for
exampleãit was entirely different from that stucco wall a hundred
yards up the road. But the "is-ness" of both was the same, the
eternal quality of their transience was the same.
An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the
World's Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home,
and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly
unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind."

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with
Artificial
Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the
worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that
the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only
for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal
appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia,
dancing and listening to oratoryãall these have served, in H. G.
Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, far
everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the
vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on
trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed
from rootsãall, without exception, have been known and
systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to
these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added
its quota of syntheticsãchloral, for example, and benzedrine, the
bromides and the barbiturates.
Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken
except under doctor's orders, or else illegally and at
considerable risk. For unrestricted use the West has permitted
only alcohol and tobacco. All the other chemical Doors in the Wall
are labeled Dope, and their unauthorized takers are Fiends.
We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend
on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to
escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone
almost all the time. The urge to do something for the young is
strong only in parents, and in them only for the few years during
which their children go to school. Equally unsurprising is the
current attitude towards drink and smoke. In spite of the growing
army of hopeless alcoholics, in spite of the hundreds of thousands
of persons annually maimed or killed by drunken drivers, popular
comedians still crack jokes about alcohol and its addicts. And in
spite of the evidence linking cigarettes with lung cancer,
practically everybody regards tobacco smoking as being hardly less
normal and natural than eating. From the point of view of the
rationalist utilitarian this may seem odd. For the historian, it
is exactly what you would expect. A firm conviction of the
material reality of Hell never prevented medieval Christians from
doing what their ambition, lust or covetousness suggested. Lung
cancer, traffic accidents and the millions of miserable and
misery-creating alcoholics are facts even more certain than was,
in Dante's day, the fact of the Inferno. But all such facts are
remote and unsubstantial compared with the near, felt fact of a
craving, here and now, for release or sedation, for a drink or a
smoke.
Ours is the age, among other things, of the automobile and of
rocketing population. Alcohol is incompatible with safety on the
roads, and its production, like that of tobacco, condemns to
virtual sterility many millions of acres of the most fertile soil.
The problems raised by alcohol and tobacco cannot, it goes without
saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present
urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the
currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is
to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women
to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones.
Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological
in nature, others religious or psychological, others dietetic,
educational, athletic. But the need for frequent chemical
vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings
will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a 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. Such a drug must
be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it does not
possess these qualities, its production, like that of wine, beer,
spirits and tobacco will interfere with the raising of
indispensable food and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or
cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences
than alcohol or the barbiturates, less inimical to heart and lungs
than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. And, on the positive
side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting,
more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess,
delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition.
To most people, mescalin is almost completely innocuous.
Unlike alcohol, it does not drive the taker into the kind of
uninhibited action which results in brawls, crimes of violence and
traffic accidents. A man under the influence of mescalin quietly
minds his own business. Moreover, the business he minds is an
experience of the most enlightening kind, which does not have to
be paid for (and this is surely important) by a compensatory
hangover. Of the long-range consequences of regular mescalin
taking we know very little. The Indians who consume peyote buttons
do not seem to be physically or morally degraded by the habit.
However, the available evidence is still scarce and sketchy.*
Although obviously superior to cocaine, opium, alcohol and
tobacco, mescalin is not yet the ideal drug. Along with the
happily transfigured majority of mescalin takers there is a
minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory. Moreover,
for a drug that is to be used, like alcohol, for general
consumption, its effects last for an inconveniently long time. But
chemistry and physiology are capable nowadays of practically
anything. If the psychologists and sociologists will define the
ideal, the neurologists and pharmacologists can be relied upon to
discover the means whereby that ideal can be realized or at least
(for perhaps this kind of ideal can never, in the very nature of
things, be fully realized) more nearly approached than in the
wine-bibbing past, the whisky-drinking, marijuana-smoking and
barbiturate-swallowing present.
The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have
said, a principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason,
men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship,
good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to
religion's chemical surrogates-alcohol and "goof pills" in the
modern West, alcohol and opium in the East, hashish in the
Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central America,
alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and the barbiturates in the
more up-to-date regions of South America. In Poisons SacrÈs,
Ivresses Divines Philippe de Felice has written at length and with
a wealth of documentation on the immemorial connection between
religion and the taking of drugs. Here, in summary or in direct
quotation, are his conclusions. The employment for religious
purposes of toxic substances is "extraordinarily widespread....
The practices studied in this volume can be observed in every
region of the earth, among primitives no less than among those who
have reached a high pitch of civilization. We are therefore
dealing not with exceptional facts, which might justifiably be
overlooked, but with a general and, in the widest sense of the
word, a human phenomenon, the kind of phenomenon which cannot be
disregarded by anyone who is trying to discover what religion is,
and what are the deep needs which it must satisfy."
Ideally, everyone should be able to find self-transcendence in
some form of pure or applied religion. In practice it seems very
unlikely that this hoped for consummation will ever be realized.
There are, and doubtless there always will be, good churchmen and
good churchwomen for whom, unfortunately, piety is not enough. The
late G. K. Chesterton, who wrote at least as lyrically of drink as
of devotion, may serve as their eloquent spokesman.
The modern churches, with some exceptions among the Protestant
denominations, tolerate alcohol; but even the most tolerant have
made no attempt to convert the drug to Christianity, or to
sacramentalize its use. The pious drinker is forced to take his
religion in one compartment, his religion-surrogate in another.
And perhaps this is inevitable. Drinking cannot be sacramentalized
except in religions which set no store on decorum. The worship of
Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and disorderly
affair. The rites of Christianity are incompatible with even
religious drunkenness. This does no harm to the distillers, but is
very bad for Christianity. Countless persons desire
self-transcendence and would be glad to find it in church. But,
alas, "the hungry sheep look up and are not fed." They take part
in rites, they listen to sermons, they repeat prayers; but their
thirst remains unassuaged. Disappointed, they turn to the bottle.
For a time at least and in a kind of way, it works. Church may
still be attended; but it is no more than the Musical Bank of
Butler's Erewhon. God may still be acknowledged; but He is God
only on the verbal level, only in a strictly Pickwickian sense.
The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole
religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent
euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail.
We see, then, that Christianity and alcohol do not and cannot
mix. Christianity and mescalin seem to be much more compatible.
This has been demonstrated by many tribes of Indians, from Texas
to as far north as Wisconsin. Among these tribes are to be found
groups affiliated with the Native American Church, a sect whose
principal rite is a kind of Early Christian agape, or love feast,
where slices of peyote take the place of the sacramental bread and
wine. These Native Americans regard the cactus as God's special
gift to the Indians, and equate its effects with the workings of
the divine Spirit.
Professor J. S. Slotkin, one of the very few white men ever to
have participated in the rites of a Peyotist congregation, says of
his fellow worshipers that they are "certainly not stupefied or
drunk.... They never get out of rhythm or fumble their words, as a
drunken or stupefied man would do.... They are all quiet,
courteous and considerate of one another. I have never been in any
white man's house of worship where there is either so much
religious feeling or decorum." And what, we may ask, are these
devout and well-behaved Peyotists experiencing? Not the mild sense
of virtue which sustains the average Sunday churchgoer through
ninety minutes of boredom. Not even those high feelings, inspired
by thoughts of the Creator and the Redeemer, the Judge and the
Comforter, which animate the pious. For these Native Americans,
religious experience is something more direct and illuminating,
more spontaneous, less the homemade product of the superficial,
self-conscious mind. Sometimes (according to the reports collected
by Dr. Slotkin) they see visions, which may be of Christ Himself.
Sometimes they hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Sometimes they
become aware of the presence of God and of those personal
shortcomings which must be corrected if they are to do His will.
The practical consequences of these chemical openings of doors
into the Other World seem to be wholly good. Dr. Slotkin reports
that habitual Peyotists are on the whole more industrious, more
temperate (many of them abstain altogether from alcohol), more
Peaceable than non-Peyotists. A tree with such satisfactory fruits
cannot be condemned out of hand as evil.
In sacramentalizing the use of peyote, the Indians of the
Native American Church have done something which is at once
psychologically sound and historically respectable. In the early
centuries of Christianity many pagan rites and festivals were
baptized, so to say, and made to serve the purposes of the Church.
These jollifications were not particularly edifying; but they
assuaged a certain psychological hunger and, instead of trying to
suppress them, the earlier missionaries had the sense to accept
them for what they were, soul-satisfying expressions of
fundamental urges, and to incorporate them into the fabric of the
new religion. What the Native Americans have done is essentially
similar. They have taken a pagan custom (a custom, incidentally,
far more elevating and enlightening than most of the rather
brutish carousals and mummeries adopted from European paganism)
and given it a Christian significance.
Though but recently introduced into the northern United
States, peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become
important symbols of the red man's right to spiritual
independence. Some Indians have reacted to white supremacy by
becoming Americanized, others by retreating into traditional
Indianism. But some have tried to make the best of both worlds,
indeed of all the worldsãthe best of Indianism, the best of
Christianity, and the best of those Other Worlds of transcendental
experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and of
like nature with the divine. Hence the Native American Church. In
it two great appetites of the soulã the urge to independence and
self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence-were fused
with, and interpreted in the light of, a thirdãthe urge to
worship, to justify the ways of God to man, to explain the
universe by means of a coherent theology.

Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind
Clothes him in front, but leaves him bare behind.

But actually it is we, the rich and highly educated whites, who
have left ourselves bare behind. We cover our anterior nakedness
with some philosophyãChristian, Marxian, Freudo-Physicalistãbut
abaft we remain uncovered, at the mercy of all the winds of
circumstance. The poor Indian, on the other hand, has had the wit
to protect his rear by supplementing the fig leaf of a theology
with the breechclout of transcendental experience.
I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the
influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the
future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate
purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I
am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic
theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation
but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made
available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to
be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world,
not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a
human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are
apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Largeãthis
is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially
to the intellectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man
for whom, in Goethe's phrase, "the word is essentially fruitful."
He is the man who feels that "what we perceive by the eye is
foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." And yet,
though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of
language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of
the word. "We talk," he wrote in middle life, "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 window sill 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." We can never dispense with language and the other
symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their
means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the
level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as
well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to
handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve
and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world
directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts,
which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness
of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.
Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our
education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to
accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming
children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the
natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the
primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of
the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone
else's.
Gestalt psychologists, such as Samuel Renshaw, have devised
methods for widening the range and increasing the acuity of human
perceptions. But do our educators apply them? The answer is, No.
Teachers in every field of psyche-physical skill, from seeing
to tennis, from tightrope walking to prayer, have discovered, by
trial and error, the conditions of optimum functioning within
their special fields. But have any of the great Foundations
financed a project for coordinating these empirical findings into
a general theory and practice of heightened creativeness? Again,
so far as I am aware, the answer is, No.
All sorts of cultists and queer fish teach all kinds of
techniques for achieving health, contentment, peace of mind; and
for many of their hearers many of these techniques are
demonstrably effective. But do we see respectable psychologists,
philosophers and clergymen boldly descending into those odd and
sometimes malodorous wells, at the bottom of which poor Truth is
so often condemned to sit? Yet once more the answer is, No.
And now look at the history of mescalin research. Seventy
years ago men of first-rate ability described the transcendental
experiences which come to those who, in good health, under proper
conditions and in the right spirit, take the drug. How many
philosophers, how many theologians, how many professional
educators have had the curiosity to open this Door in the Wall?
The answer, for all practical purposes, is, None.
In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly
educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious
attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money
for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of
research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem:
Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of
technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal
humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of
our existence, ale almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a
bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versifier's
ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexesãany
genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial
support: But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our
children and grand-children, may become more perceptive, more
intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the
Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves
physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic
nervous systemãwhen it comes to any form of non-verbal education
more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use)
than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really
respectable university or church will do anything about it.
Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the
given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that "what we
perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such
and need not impress us deeply." Besides, this matter of education
in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the
established pigeonholes. It is not religion, not neurology, not
gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental
psychology. This being so the subject is, for academic and
ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may safely be ignored
altogether or left, with a Patronizing smile, to those whom the
Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and
unqualified amateurs.
"I have always found," Blake wrote rather bitterly, "that
Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.
This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic
reasoning."
Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species
or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to
remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the
more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into
which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which
passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in
some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to
another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a
felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is
to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness-to
be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an
animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever
expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we
have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task
exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are
gratuitous graces in the form of partial and fleeting
realizations. Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal
system of education than ours, every Angel (in Blake's sense of
that word) would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be
urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip
through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of
transcendental experience. If it terrified him, it would be
unfortunate but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but
timeless illumination, so much the better. In either case the
Angel might lose a little of the confident insolence sprouting
from systematic reasoning and the consciousness of having read all
the books.
Near the end of his life Aquinas experienced Infused
Contemplation. Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his
unfinished book. Compared with this, everything he had read and
argued about and writtenãAristotle and the Sentences, the
Questions, the Propositions, the majestic Summasãwas no better
than chaff or straw, For most intellectuals such a sit-down strike
would be inadvisable, even morally wrong. But the Angelic Doctor
had done more systematic reasoning than any twelve ordinary
Angels, and was already ripe for death. He had earned the right,
in those last months of his mortality, to turn away from merely
symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of actual and substantial
Fact. For Angels of a lower order and with better prospects of
longevity, there must be a return to the straw. But the man who
comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the
same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure,
happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his
ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of
words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable
Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

---------------------------------

*See the following papers: "Schizophrenia. A New Approach." By
Humphry Osmond and John Smythies. Journal of Mental Science. Vol.
XCVIII. April, 1952.

"On Being Mad." By Humphry Osmond. Saskatchewan Psychiatric
Services Journal. Vol. I. No. 2. September. 1952.

"The Mescalin Phenomena." By John Smythies. The British Journal of
the Philosophy of Science. Vol. III. February, 1953.

"Schizophrenia: A New Approach." By Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond
and John Smythies. Journal of Mental Science. Vol. C. No. 418.
January, 1954.

Numerous other papers on the biochemistry, pharmacology,
psychology and neurophysiology of schizophrenia and the mescalin
phenomena are in preparation.

(return to text)

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*In his monograph, Menomini Peyolism, published (December 1952) in
the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Professor
J. S. Slotkin has written that "the habitual use of Peyote does
not seem to produce any increased tolerance or dependence. I know
many people who have been Peyotists for forty to fifty years. The
amount of Peyote they use depends upon the solemnity of the
occasion; in general they do not take any more Peyote now than
they did years ago. Also, there is sometimes an interval of a
month or more between rites, and they go without Peyote during
this period without feeling any craving for it. Personally, even
after a series of rites occurring on four successive weekends. I
neither increased the amount of Peyote consumed nor felt any
continued need for it." It is evidently with good reason that
"Peyote has never been legally declared a narcotic, or its use
prohibited by the federal government." However, "during the long
history of Indian-white contact, white offcials have usually tried
to suppress the use of Peyote, because it has been conceived to
violate their own mores. But these at-tempts have always failed."
In a footnote Dr. Slotkin adds that "it is amazing to hear the
fantastic stories about the effects of Peyote and the nature of
the ritual, which are told by the white and Catholic Indian
officials in the Menomini Reservation. None of them have had the
slightest first-hand experience with the plant or with the
religion, yet some fancy themselves to be authorities and write
official reports on the subject." (return to text)

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