The Menace of Mescalin

Extract

Mr Aldous Huxley has recently published yet another book. It is not a very good book; nor is it a very attractive book; but it is, alas, in its way an important book. Its importance consists in this: that anyone who may feel an inclination to enjoy, here and now, what Christians call the Beatific Vision or the experience which the Zen Buddhists call satori, has merely to buy himself three-pennyworth of mescalin at the nearest chemist’s, and behold, the ineffable vision is his. Whether or not the drug is available in this country in commercial quantities, I am afraid I have been too idle to find out. However, there it is for any who may care to make the experiment—heaven in a capsule.

It may be surprising to learn that Mr Huxley, who has for so long written in a tone of such great authority on mysticism and the mystical experience, confesses that before he achieved ‘liberation’ though mescalin, he had not actually had a mystical experience of any kind himself. ‘For’, says he, ‘until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humble, its more ordinary forms—as 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.’