In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley has given us a superbly written account
of the effects of mescaline upon a highly sensitive person. It was a record
of his first experience of this remarkable transformation of consciousness,
and by now, through subsequent experiments, he knows that it can lead to far
deeper insights than his book described. While I cannot hope to surpass Aldous
Huxley as a master of English prose, I feel that the time is ripe for an account
of some of the deeper, or higher, levels of insight that can be reached through
these consciousness-changing "drugs" when accompanied with sustained philosophical
reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding.
I should perhaps add that, for me, philosophical reflection is barren when divorced
from poetic imagination, for we proceed to understanding of the world upon two
legs, not one.
It is now a commonplace that there is a serious lack of communication
between scientists and laymen on the theoretical level, for the layman does
not understand the mathematical language in which the scientist thinks. For
example, the concept of curved space cannot be represented in any image that
is intelligible to the senses. But I am still more concerned with the gap between
theoretical description and direct experience among scientists themselves. Western
science is now delineating a new concept of man, not as a solitary ego within
a wall of flesh, but as an organism which is what it is by virtue of its inseparability
from the rest of the world. But with the rarest exceptions even scientists do
not feel themselves to exist in this way. They, and almost all of us,
retain a sense of personality which is independent, isolated, insular, and estranged
from the cosmos that surrounds it. Somehow this gap must be closed, and among
the varied means whereby the closure may be initiated or achieved are medicines
which science itself has discovered, and which may prove to be the sacraments
of its religion.
For a long time we have been accustomed to the compartmentalization
of religion and science as if they were two quite different and basically unrelated
ways of seeing the world. I do not believe that this state of doublethink can
last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the world which is neither
religious nor scientific but simply our view of the world. More exactly, it
must become a view of the world in which the reports of science and religion
are as concordant as those of the eyes and the ears.
But the traditional roads to spiritual experience seldom appeal
to persons of scientific or skeptical temperament, for the vehicles that ply
them are rickety and piled with excess baggage. There is thus little opportunity
for the alert and critical thinker to share at first hand in the modes of consciousness
that seers and mystics are trying to express-often in archaic and awkward symbolism.
If the pharmacologist can be of help in exploring this unknown world, he may
be doing us the extraordinary service of rescuing religious experience from
the obscurantists.
To make this book as complete an expression as possible of the
quality of consciousness which these drugs induce, I have included a number
of photographs which, in their vivid reflection of the patterns of nature, give
some suggestion of the rhythmic beauty of detail which the drugs reveal in common
things. For without losing their normal breadth of vision the eyes seem to become
a microscope through which the mind delves deeper and deeper into the intricately
dancing texture of our world.
| Alan W. Watts San Francisco, 1962 |