How to Change Your Mind

“It was without question the most extraordinary and significant
experience this side of the Beatific Vision,” Huxley wrote in a letter to his
editor shortly after it happened. For Huxley, there was no question but
that the drugs gave him access not to the mind of the madman but to a
spiritual realm of ineffable beauty. The most mundane objects glowed
with the light of a divinity he called “the Mind at Large.” Even “the folds
of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’” he tells us, before
dilating on the beauty of the draperies in Botticelli’s paintings and the
“Allness and Infinity of folded cloth.” When he gazed upon a small vase of
flowers, he saw “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the
miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence . . . flowers shining with
their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the
significance with which they were charged.”
“Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind.” For
Huxley, the drug gave him unmediated access to realms of existence
usually known only to mystics and a handful of history’s great visionary
artists. This other world is always present but in ordinary moments is
kept from our awareness by the “reducing valve” of everyday waking
consciousness, a kind of mental filter that admits only “a measly trickle of
the kind of consciousness” we need in order to survive. The rest was a
gorgeous superfluity, which, like poetry, men die every day for the lack
thereof. Mescaline flung open what William Blake had called “the doors
of perception,” admitting to our conscious awareness a glimpse of the
infinite, which is always present all around us—even in the creases in our
trousers!—if only we could just see.
Like every psychedelic experience before or since, Huxley’s did not
unfold on a blank slate, de novo, the pure product of the chemical, but
rather was shaped in important ways by his reading and the philosophical
and spiritual inclinations he brought to the experience. (It was only when
I typed his line about flowers “shining with their own inner light” and “all
but quivering under the pressure” of their significance that I realized just
how strongly Huxley had inflected my own perception of plants under the
influence of psilocybin.) The idea of a mental reducing valve that
constrains our perceptions, for instance, comes from the French
philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson believed that consciousness was not
generated by human brains but rather exists in a field outside us,
something like electromagnetic waves; our brains, which he likened to