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Rating: The year is 1953. Let us imagine a morning brightened by a revitalizing May sun blazing sovereign in a clear and liberating sky. Aldous Huxley welcomes into his home the arrival of British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, an expert in hallucinogenic substances, also known for coining the term psychedelic.
The two shake hands with admiration, exchange a few pleasantries, some jokes to eliminate the last remnants of embarrassment, and finally, under the observant and proud eye of Huxley's wife, Osmond administers a dose of mescaline to him.
The meeting between the two intellectuals finds its justification in a shared vision of ideas and purposes supported by both. Osmond considered mescaline and similar hallucinogenic substances as a connective bridge between the ordered state of things—a healthy brain in full capacity—and the disordered state of things—a brain affected by a pathology or mental disorder. Osmond noted that the ingestion of mescaline had the power to emulate in the individual to whom it was administered the principal of psychoses: schizophrenia. From these considerations, the psychiatrist understood that it would be necessary to administer mescaline on himself in an attempt to integrate, with a pinch of empiricism, his studies and analyses.
The use of mescaline and its curious yet interesting implications extended into other fields such as sociology, philosophy, religion, and thus art, fueled Huxley's interest and brought the two intellectuals closer until their vis-à-vis encounter.
When Huxley swallows four-tenths of a gram of mescaline, his expectation was to obtain “[...] visions of multicolored geometries, animated architectures, rich in gems and fabulous beauties of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas perpetually flickering on the brink of ultimate revelation”. But he emerged, so to speak, betrayed. Indeed: “The other world that mescaline introduced me to was not the world of visions: it existed outside of it, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact.”
Under the effect of the hallucinogen, existence reveals itself to him bare, as it is, essential in its profound yet atavistic essence. Pure existence.
The process of altered decoding of reality is the offspring of an equally altered state of the senses: “The mind perceives in terms of intensity of existence, depth of meaning, relationships within a pattern [...] The mind was concerned, above all, not with measures and placements but with being and meaning.”
Under Osmond’s guidance, his gaze first falls on some books, then on furniture in the living room. Under the effect of mescaline, Huxley escapes the typically utilitarian approach characterizing the relationship between man and the objects surrounding him, and he tests their essence, explores their forms, becomes helplessly enchanted in the geometries of a chair which reveals itself in all its splendor “[...] these chair legs were chair legs and were St. Michael and all the angels.” There is a kind of poetry in this definition… a poetry that embraces all five senses in an ecstasy of life and Big Bang and Universe. And in the same preternatural manner appears the famous painting by Botticelli, Judith. Mescaline leads Huxley to penetrate the painting with senses in lively ferment, transcending the apparent and objective beauty of the painting but feeding on revealing details of the Infinite. In Judith’s skirt, in the drapery of her dress, Huxley sees the true artistic power and hidden genius of Botticelli. He marvels at how all his time he has looked at things mostly with the superficial and utilitarian eye, the systematic and rational eye accustomed to conceptualizing with the imperative not to dismantle the simplicity of things into Beauty.
Mescaline acts by subtraction. More specifically: if on one hand it throws open the doors of perception allowing one to see everything for how it should be seen, on the other hand, it acts as a “restrictive agent,” barring the doors to human relationships and the ordinary events of life.
“This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary and necessary interests of human existence, especially those related to people.”
Huxley embarks on a philosophical inquiry searching for the possible causes of this depersonalization of the Self under the effect of mescaline, to reach the conclusion that “[…] people are selves, and in a certain sense, I now was a Non-Self. […] To this new Non-Self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the Self, which had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its former companions, seemed not at all unpleasant but enormously irrelevant.”
More concretely: mescaline frees Huxley from the straitjacket of utilitarian considerations, preconceived judgments—and thus prejudices—morality, presumption, self-assertion, and all those notions that “trap” man in a petty reality of little spiritual significance. The individual is prone to a constant search for an escape route to evade the gray reality that welcomes him every morning just after waking up. Alcohol primarily, followed by drugs (including cigarettes) represents the escape routes to attempt a vain and brief flight from the world of the Self and soar with mind and senses into the paradisiacal world of the Non-Self.
But if alcohol and drugs can cause serious addiction, on the contrary, mescaline does not lead the consumer to return to it with greed and discomfort translated into physical need.
According to Huxley's peculiar vision, hallucinogenic substances like mescaline deserve to be recognized as the “ideal” products to satisfy man's unrelenting mania for transcendence. Trampled by alcohol and cigarettes, offspring of an inherent system manipulated by the ferocious capitalist machine, mescaline is still little known today and almost never integrated for the research in clinical settings and the purely social and “didactic” recreational mechanisms.
Alcohol and cigarettes generate profit; mescaline could overturn the conception of life and reality: mescaline is dangerous. The stupor of an alcohol binge and our poor habit as white people to conceal our personal inner nudity with some philosophy that seemingly eases the feeling of inadequacy and deep misunderstanding of things and the world are preferred.
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