While I’ve never done psychedelic drugs, my limited experience with the more-real-than-real world of lucid dreaming makes me sympathetic to this long-held and widely held belief. For one thing, when one beholds the bold sensory experiences that Huxley witnessed and contrasts them to the visualization of everyday consciousness, it’s hard not to believe that one is on a plane entirely outside the bonds of biology. memory, which is far more fallible than was thought in his day.) (Specific findings are probably accurate.) The thing is, Huxley was also a mystic and he viewed biology as a “reducing valve” that mitigated our experience of consciousness-a grand field existing wholly beyond the nervous system, such that our experience of it was hemmed in by biology-rather than being created by it. While Huxley was a scientifically minded fellow, his reporting on science errors on some of the grand scale issues (e.g.

Huxley devotes some space in both essays to discussing the science of these experiences, but I don’t see those parts as the strength of the volume. There is also a bit of discussion of the commonalities between schizophrenia and psychedelic experience. “Heaven & Hell” delves much more deeply into said linkages, and I was blown away by some of the ideas in the latter essay. “The Doors of Perception” is a mix of description and discussion of these linkages. It is when Huxley relates the psychedelic experience to the mystical, religious, and artistic experience that I found this volume to be the most intriguing. Huxley provides a steady diet of food-for-thought on these topics. However, much of these essays are about how what he witnessed mirrors art and the text of mystical religions. The book contains descriptions of what Huxley observed under the influence, such as the hallucinations of “sacred geometry” that are common among those consuming hallucinogens.

The two essays collected in this thin volume recount Aldous Huxley’s experience taking mescalin (a psychedelic drug / hallucinogen derived from a cactus root) in the 1950’s, and the insights derived from that experimentation. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley

The doors of perception heaven and hell