[In the following essay, Gill discusses Aldous Huxley's experimentations with LSD as a means of reaching spiritual enlightenment, concluding that Huxley ultimately failed because of his inability to overcome his "intellectual baggage. "]

Aldous Huxley's Interest in psychedelics stems from his deep-rooted concern for the spiritual malaise of modern life. Though he started his literary career on a note of agnosticism,¹ adopted an attitude of "pawky playfulness" toward eternal verities,² and debunked mysticism as an ideal,³ his later writings affirm his belief in the Ultimate Reality. His analysis of the human situation brought about the conviction that modern man is spiritually sick because he has alienated himself from the Divine Reality or the Godhead that, according to Huxley, is "the unmanifested principle of all manifestation" and that "to realize this supreme identity is the final end and purpose of human existence."⁴ As an advocate of mysticism, Huxley suggests mediation as a method "for acquiring knowledge about the essential nature of things, a method for establishing communion between the soul and the integrating principle of the universe."⁵ But his experience also showed him that contemplation, as J. B. Coates puts it, "becomes increasingly more difficult in an age whose tempo is determined by the machine."⁶ So, he tried to explore the avenues of spiritual reality through psychedelics with a view to discovering an easy means to self-transcendence for modern man. He recorded his psychedelic experiences in The Doors of Perception (1954), which, according to Bernard S. Aaronson and Humphry Osmond, "marks the beginning of the modern psychedelic movement."⁷ Because he was the first well-known writer to assert that chemicals can lead to self-transcendence, his assertions have raised the most fundamental question about the possibility of synthetic sainthood.

Laura Archera Huxley points out that "One of Aldous's chief aims in life was the extension of consciousness."⁸ He experimented with mind-manifesting drugs only to ascertain their impact on consciousness. His conclusions, however, led some critics to brand him as the prophet of LSD who found God in a bottle and whose advocacy of LSD led to the promotion of hippie culture. R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston observe that the "contemporary quest for the artificial induction of religious experiences through the use of psycho-chemicals became a controversial issue with the publication of Huxley's Doors of Perception in 1954."⁹ This paper is an attempt to examine Huxley's assertions with regard to the spiritual nature of a chemically-induced experience and to ascertain the possibility of synthetic sainthood.

The idea that chemical means to transcendence are perhaps as good as the traditional methods of fasting and prayer also occurs in Huxley's early fiction. As an agnostic, Huxley believed that the fruit of spiritual life was ecstasy and that to induce ecstasy one need not sit on the gazelle skin and squint at the top of one's nose for hours, because ecstasy can be chemically produced. He comments on the artificial production of the state of mystical trance: "Every symptom of the trance, from the 'sense of presence' to total unconsciousness, can be produced artificially in the laboratory."¹⁰ Miles Fanning, the central character in the story "After the Fireworks," echoes his author's idea that opium is "as good a way of becoming supernatural as looking at one's nose or one's naval, or not eating, or repeating a word over and over again."¹¹

Moreover, it was Huxley's intense longing to seek enternity that made him experiment with drugs that, at least temporarily, led to some kind of self-transcendence. In Antic Hay (1923) Huxley raises the question: "Who lives longer; the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water, and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time."¹² Because drugs induce a state of timelessness, bring elation to the user, and lead to an experience that shares some attributes of the mystical experience, it has been assumed by the advocates of psychedelics that these drugs lead to a genuine spiritual experience. The modern neophyte need not undergo the traditional ascetical discipline to prepare himself for the mystical experience; the pharmacist can help him seek the experience of the Divine Reality without all those physical discomforts that have been regarded by mystics as the most indispensable requirement for such experience.

Huxley goes back to the religious rites of primitive peoples to show that intoxicants had been an essential part of their religious worship. He points out that "the drug-induced experience has been regarded by primitives and even by the highly civilized as intrinsically divine."¹³ R. G. Wasson and V. Wasson certify in their monumental study Mushrooms, Russia and History (1957) that the plants containing psychedelic substances have been a part of the religious worship of peoples belonging to cultures widely distributed over the world. There is no denying the fact that the intoxicants have been an important part of the religious rites of ancient peoples. But the drug alone was never considered sufficient to generate the required mystical experience. It merely acted as a stimulant to make the mind suggestive to religious prayers. Soma was, of course, used by the Aryans as a help to mystical experience, and the drug is addressed in the highest strains of adulation and veneration in the Rigveda. But soma alone was never sufficient to give them the experience of Ultimate Reality. Adolf Kaegi aptly observes that "Indra, the ruler of battles, takes no pleasure in the Soma offered without prayer; he scorns the sacrifical food prepared without a song."¹⁴ Even in Vedic times, prayer, or the mortification of the self, was considered an essential precondition to attain a union with the Brahman. Moreover, the Vedas are a record of the mystical utterances of the ancient Aryans, and some of the sublimest utterances are mixed with the superstitious character of these archaic people. When we come to the Upanishads, which mark a more philosophical and speculative stage of Indian thought, we do not find any specific importance given to soma as a means of mystical experience. In the Bhagavad-Gita, soma is referred to only in a single sloka (IX:20),¹⁵ and it does not enjoy any specific importance as a means of God-realization. The Bhagavad-Gita stresses three ways to seek the mystical experience: the Karma Marga (the way of action), the jña na marga (the way of knowledge), and the Bhakti Marga (the way of love). Huxley, too, in his anthology of mysticism, The Perennial Philosophy (1936), nowhere talks about drugs as the valid means of seeking salvation. No doubt the use of certain hemp derivatives such as hashish, bhang, or ganja is still prevalent in India. These intoxicants form a part of the religious worship of certain tantric cults. For instance, hashish is smoked by the Shaivites who worship Shiva, the Creator and Destroyer, Who Himself is said to have smoked hashish. Similarly, the Nihangs, a militant sikh sect, use bhang as a part of their daily ritual. But it is difficult to justify Masters and Houston's claim that "an estimated ninety percent of the Indian holy men use hemp, often along with other drugs."¹⁶ And then, there is no evidence to suggest that the tantric yogis or the Nihangs undergo any kind of spiritual transformation by taking hashish or bhang.

Huxley was not the first Western intellectual to experiment with mind-changing drugs. Before him William James and Havelock Ellis had tried these drugs to learn about their impact on consciousness. Writing about his own experience under nitrous oxide, James asserts that his experience was one of reconciliation, with all conflicts melting into unity. It brought him "intense metaphysical illumination." James writes: "The centre and periphery of things seem come together. The ego and its objects, the meum and tuum are one."¹⁷ James, however, does not try to interpret his experience in religious terms, As an empiricist, he states just facts as he finds them. Like Huxley, he does not attempt to equate his experience with the genuine mystical experience.

There are, of course, a number of important writers to whom the psychedelic experience seems of utmost spiritual significance. Allen Ginsberg insists that marijuana consciousness shifts attention from "second-hand ideological interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopically minute, engagement with sensing phenomena during the high moments or hours after one has smoked."¹⁸ Alan Watts also points out that during the LSD experience he found himself "going through states of consciousness that corresponded precisely with every description of major mystical experience."¹⁹ John W. Aiken, the founder of the Church of the Awakening, also claims that "a properly oriented psychedelic experience can be a deep and genuine religious experience."²⁰ Walter N. Pahnke's laboratory experiments with drugs suggest that some subjects under the drug reported that they had undergone profound spiritual experience.²¹ Masters and Houston also observe that "out of their total of 206 subjects, six have had the mystical experience."²²

There are also writers who claim that the drug can never promote any genuine religious experience. It is difficult for them to accept Timothy Leary's claim that the "LSD kick is a spiritual esctasy" and the LSD trip "a religious pilgrimage."²³ For example, R. C. Zaehner does not give any credit to drug-induced experience because his own mescalin experience ushered him into "a world of nonsensical fantasy." He experienced neither esctasy nor eternity during his mescal experience. Zaechner says that "the experience was in a sense 'anti-religious' and that 'self-transcendence' of a sort did take place, but transcendence into a world of farcical meaninglessness."²⁴ The effort here has been made to suggest that there is no unanimity among the intelligent with regard to the nature of psychedelic experience.

Huxley took mescalin because it had always seemed possible to him that "by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about."²⁵ He admits that the experience proved of infinite value to him. Under the impact of the drug, he realized that being and becoming, nirv na and sams ra, are one and the same thing. Mescalin gave him a peep into that "other world" about which he had been writing so emphatically for so many years. Huxley says, "The Beatific Vision, Sat, Chit, Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to" (Doors, p. 18).

He describes his experience under mescalin as "the sacramental vision of reality" (Doors, p. 22). Whereas the first experience showed no interest in human affairs, the second experience has "a human content, which the earlier solitary experience with its Other Worldly quality . . . did not possess."²⁶ Another mescalin experience made him realize that love is the fundamental cosmic fact, that Nirvana apart from the world, apart from Mahakaruna for sentient beings, is as terrible as the pains of hell. As his experiences under the drug increase, the generalizations about experience become more bold, and the earlier cautious attitude is replaced by confident, assertive statements. Moreover, he is more emphatic about it in his private correspondence than in his literary writings. About the psychedelic experience, he wrote to his friend Dr. Humphry Osmond: "What emerges as a general conclusion is the confirmation of the fact that mescalin does genuinely open the door and that everything including the Unknown in its purest, most comprehensive form can come through" (Letters, p. 771). In a letter to Victoria Ocampo, Huxley affirms that mescalin took him "beyond the realm of vision to the realm of what the mystics call Obscure knowledge,' insight into the nature of things." He admits that the drug also brought him "the realization that, in spite of pain and tragedy, the Universe is all right, in other words that God is Love" (Letters, p. 802). Father Merton wrote to Huxley, raising a number of objections to the validity of the psychedelic mystical experience. Like Dean Inge,²⁷ Merton found it hard to accept drugs as a means to religious experience. Huxley's reply to him again affirms his positive attitude toward the drug-induced experience. He writes:

In the course of the last five years I have taken mescalin twice and lysergic acid three or four times. My first experience was mainly aesthetic. Later experiences. . . helped me to understand many of the obscure utterances to be found in the writings of the mystics, Christian and Oriental. An unspeakable sense of gratitude for the privelege of being born into this universe. . . . A transcendence of the ordinary subject-object relationship. A transcendence of the fear of death. A sense of solidarity with the world and its spiritual principle . . . an understanding, not intellectual, but in some sort total, an understanding with the entire organism, of the affirmation that God is Love. (Letters, p. 863)

Similarly, in a letter to Margaret Isherwood (Letters, p. 874), Huxley reiterates his stand on mescalin. He tells her that he was able to go beyond vision into the genuine mystical experience. From his correspondence, it becomes quite evident that his psychedelic experiences confirmed his conviction that drugs can generate a genuine mystical experience. It is precisely for this reason that he advocates psychedelics in his "pragmatic dream," Island, which, according to Huxley, contains "practical instructions for the imagined and desirable harmonization of European and Indian insights become a fact" (Letters, p. 944). In this novel, Huxley seems to give his valedictory message to his readers. He exhorts people to try LSD, which he names "the moksha-medicine, the realityrevealer, the truth-and-beauty pill."²⁸ The inhabitants of Island use this moksha-medicine to get experience of Divine Reality, the Clear Light of the Void. Robert Macphail, the chief spokesman of the philosophy of Island, is, like Huxley, quite anxious to defend the use of psychedelics by the inhabitants of the island. He asserts that they are not "a set of self-indulgent dope-takers, wallowing in illusions and false samadhis."²⁹ He urges Will Farnaby, the neurotic, Western journalist who is totally skeptical about the existence of Ultimate Reality, to try the drug to know its effect. Will takes the moksha-medicine and experiences a new level of consciousness. From the description of his experience, it seems that Will gets a direct, unconceptual understanding of Ultimate Reality. Such an assertion raises the most fundamental question: can we place Will Farnaby and Huxley in the category of mystics because they describe their psychedelic experiences in religious terms?

Huxley's advocacy of psychedelics in Island has been bitterly criticized by the Establishment, which has accused him of corrupting youth. Masters and Houston observe that, to some extent, the responsibility for the seduction of the innocent lies with authors like Huxley and Alan Watts who "in their various writings imposed upon the psychedelic experience essentially Eastern ideas and terminology."³⁰ Huxley had absolutely no intention of misleading anybody. His chief mission in life was to dispel ignorance and to make men aware of the light within them. His refusal to appear on television in connection with drugs shows that he never wanted to be the prophet of LSD.³¹ But the fact remains that he came to believe that drugs are potent enough to generate a mystical experience. To justify his claim that psychedelics really lead to a genuine religious experience, he offers a scientific explanation of the mystical experience.

Huxley accepts the Bergsonian theory of memory and perception, which states that the function of the brain and nervous system is in the main eliminative, not productive.³² Man is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him, and he can perceive everything that is everywhere happening in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to save man from being overwhelmed by useless and irrelevant knowledge, by allowing only as much perception to come to surface as is essential for his biological survival. The enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to brain cells and enable the brain to work as an efficient reducing valve to check the full and free flow of perception. Mescalin inhibits the production of enzymes, and this lowers the amount of glucose needed by the brain and thus impairs its efficiency. The result is that strange things seem to happen to the drug-taker. Huxley says:

In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an "obscure knowledge" that All is in all—that All is actually each. (Doors, p. 26)

If rational consciousness is just a fragment of that larger consciousness, of which we become aware at certain levels—aesthetic, visionary or mystical—and if the lowering of the biological efficiency of the brain can give us entry into that larger consciousness, then the whole matter depends on the change in one's body chemistry. Huxley says that Yogic practices—fasts, prayers, flagellation, and other physical and mental austerities that the traditional mystics advocated as the most important requirements of the seeker of truth—were just the means to change body chemistry. Because drugs are available now, the novice need not undergo rigorous ascetical discipline. What he needs is a pill that will produce the required change in his body without any physical discomforts. Huxley gives a rationale of yogic breathing exercises:

Practised systematically, these exercises result, after a time, in prolonged suspensions of breath. Long suspensions of breath lead to a high concentration of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood, and this increase in the concentration of CO² lowers the efficiency of the brain as a reducing valve and permits the entry into consciousness of experiences visionary or mystical, from "out there."⁵³

The psalm singing of the Christians, the mantra intoning of the Buddhist monks, and the japam of the Hindus have one aim—to increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood, which results in the lowering of the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve, which allows the doors of perception to open wide. Huxley observes that the "way to the super-conscious is through the sub-conscious and the way . . . to the sub-conscious is through the chemistry of individual cells" (Heaven, p. 63). In defense of the chemically-induced experience, and as an answer to those who would not cherish a scientific explanation of fasting, hymn singing, and mental prayer, Huxley suggests:

A similar conclusion will be reached by those whose philosophy is unduly "spiritual". God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshipped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely "spiritual", purely "intellectual", purely "aesthetic", it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence. Furthermore, it is a matter of historical record that most contemplatives worked systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a view to creating the internal conditions favorable to spiritual insight. . . . Today we know how to lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve by direct chemical action, and without the risk of inflicting serious damage on the psycho-physical organism. (Heaven, pp. 73-74)

If spirituality means just a change in the body chemistry, then surely the vast, degenerate majority could be brought back to the path of peace and joy. And that this is not so raises one's doubt with regard to the possibility of synthetic sainthood. Huxley's conclusions are, however, in conformity with the findings of the specialists in the fields of psychology and pharmacology. William Sargant, for instance, suggests the possibility of mechanical sainthood. He observes that if political indoctrination is a success, and if human reflexes can be reconditioned, then a lecutomy operation could bring about a religious conversion. But such conclusions are at variance with the tenets of all religions. Man is said to be superior to animal creation because he has a will, which is the true mark of his freedom. If chemical or mechanical conversion can bring about an involuntary change in man's religious beliefs, human will then loses its entire significance. Sargant stresses the point that "little scientific support has been found that any individual can resist for an indefinite period the physiological stress imposed on his body and mind." He suggests that we "only delude ourselves if we think that any but the most rare individuals can endure unchanged to the very end."³⁴

To identify a psychedelic experience with a genuine mystical experience is perhaps to go too far. To justify Frank Barron's claim that "chemical technology has made available to millions the experience of transcendence of the individual ego which a century ago was available to the disciplined mystic,"³⁵ it is necessary to look into the nature of a genuine mystical experience. The only empirical test a student of mysticism can apply to ascertain whether a particular mystic's experience is genuine or not is to see the effect such an experience produces upon the mystic's personality. "Wherefore by their fruits Ye shall know them" (St. Matthew 7:20), not by their roots. There can be no objection to chemicals as means of transcendence if the experience under them can bring saintliness, the most coveted fruit of a mystic's pursuit. The mystical experience brings equanimity, resignation, fortitude, humility, and unbounded love and compassion to the mystic. There is no evidence to suggest that the drug user suffers such a transformation of personality. Psychedelic experience brings elation, but falls short of the ecstasy of a mystic. The drug-induced experience merely intensifies the senses, but the mystical experience is essentially supersensuous in nature. If the true test of a genuine mystical experience is the annihilation of the ego, as Huxley emphasizes in The Perennial Philosophy, then the psychedelic experience fails to qualify as a genuine mystical experience because it inflates the self rather than effaces it. The psychedelic experience does not prove of much value because it does not provide any new outlook on life, P. J. Saher aptly observes that mysticism "through mescalin resembles paper currency during inflation; it was valid, yet its validity was a joke for it was without value."³⁶

W. T. Stace, however, employs the "principle of Causal Indifference"³⁷ to ascertain whether a psychedelic experience can be classed as a genuine mystical experience. According to this principle, if the phenomenological descriptions of the two experiences, the drug-induced and the mystical, are similar, then the two experiences are certainly one, and the drug-induced experience is as valid as the experience of those who have attained it after years of arduous mental and moral discipline. It has been noted earlier that the descriptions of the various drug-induced experiences are not similar. Whereas some claim that they had the experience of ineffable bliss, others brand their experiences as mere hallucinations, nonsensical fantasy. On the other hand, mystics all over the world are unanimous with regard to the outcome of their religious experience.

The psychedelics, it seems, are potent enough to give us a peep into the world of enhanced beauty and wonder that our senses are not accustomed to perceive in their ordinary way. At the most, these can produce a kind of visionary experience, but "visionary experience," as Huxley puts it, "is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm" (Heaven, p. 56). Drugs, it seems, can never provide a genuine mystical experience. J. Krishnamurti questions "the necessity of taking drugs at all—drugs that promise a psychedelic expansion of the mind, great visions and intensity," and emphasizes that "no golden pill is ever going to solve our human problems."³⁸ To attain to a level of mystical consciousness, the disciplining of the apelike, restless mind is an imperative necessity. The effort is a costly one and requires years of mental and moral struggle. In this context S. Radhakrishnan affirms the oriental stance: "No tricks of absolution or payment by proxy, no greased paths of smooth organs and stained glass windows can help us much."³⁹ Surely no golden pill can take man to the City of God. It may be an aid to the goal, but it cannot be an exclusive means of attaining saintliness. Even Walter Pahnke concedes that "the drug is only a trigger, a catalyst or facilitating agent," and that "mystical experiences are hardest, certainly not automatic, even under optimal conditions."⁴⁰

While on his death bed, Huxley took LSD, perhaps to facilitate his entry into what he often termed the Clear Light of the Void. Under the impact of LSD, Huxley, however, realized that he had been wrong in claiming that drugs can produce a genuine mystical experience. His tape-recorded conversation seems to be a confession of his failure. He was wrong when he thought that he was making an absolute "cosmic gift" (psychedelics) to the world and that he had a sort of "star role" (as the advocate of psychedelics) (TM, p. 268). He realized that "when one thinks one's got beyond oneself, one hasn't" (TM, p. 269). Huxley realized his error and concluded that "there must be no magic tricks," that we must learn to "come to reality without the enchanter's wand and his book of words" (TM, pp. 289-290). Huxley's last words, comments R. C. Zaecher, "are his recantation and his last will and testament, a warning [against the belief] . . . that psychedelic experience is not merely similar to mystical experience but is identical with it."⁴¹ Surely, the psychedelic "magic trick" will never do, and there can be no short cut to eternity.

Huxley had never had any first-hand genuine mystical experience. Julian Huxley testifies that "Aldous was never a mystic in any exclusive or wooly sense, though he was keenly interested in the facts of mystical experience."⁴² Jerome Meckier also observes, "To Huxley himself, the consciousness of being no more separate, of having attained union with the Divine Ground, probably never came."⁴³ He could never attain to the state of nonattachment that he advocates as the precondition for God-realization. He was never able to rise above the ordinary worldly level and was often disturbed by the failures and successes of temporal life. This is quite evident from his correspondence in later life, which expresses his professional anxiety for what early theatrical success could never gain.⁴⁴ Laurence Brander also suggests that Huxley is "like most Westerners, incapable of that 'holy indifference' to which he often refers."⁴⁵ He did genuinely knock at the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven, but the Kingdom of Heaven never revealed its celestial glory to him. He was a pilgrim who was encumbered by heavy intellectual baggage he could never throw away to enter the straight and narrow gate of this kingdom. He could never renounce his formidable intellect, which always came between him and the Beatific Vision. Drugs simply revealed to him a world of visionary beauty, and the visionary experience affirmed his belief that beyond the visionary world there lies a world of spiritual experience. LSD is no panacea for the spiritual maladies of mankind. Huxley's quest for mystical experience through psychedelics fails, and there seems to be, for him at least, no possibility of synthetic sainthood.

¹ In the essay "One and Many" Huxley concedes that, officially speaking, he is an agnostic. Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will, Collected Edition (1929; rpt. London; Chatto & Windus, 1956), p. 1.

² Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies, Collected Edition (1927; rpt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 175.

³ In a letter (22 August 1939) to Dilipkuma Roy, Pondichey, Huxley wrote that his early interest in mysticism was "predominantly negative" and that he "read a good deal of Western and Eastern writing, always with intense interest, but always with a wish to 'debunk' them." Sirirkumar Ghose, Aldous Huxley: A Cynical Savationist (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962), p. 187n. This letter is not found in Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969).

⁴ Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop (1944; rpt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), p. 289.

⁵ Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, Collected Edition (1937; rpt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 286.

⁶ J. B. Coates, The Critics of the Human Person: Some Personalist Interpretations (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), p. 41.

⁷ "Introduction," Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs, ed. Bernard S. Aaronson and Humphry Osmond (London: The Hogarth Press, 1971), p. 10. Hereafter to be cited as Psychedelics.

⁸ Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 11. Henceforth referred to parenthetically in text as TM.

⁹ R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (London: Turnstone Books, 1973), pp. 252-253.

¹⁰ Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate, Collected Edition (1926; rpt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 191.

¹¹ Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles: Four Stories, Collected Edition (1930; rpt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), p. 246.

¹² Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (1923; rpt. New York: The Modern Library, 1951), p. 293.

¹³ Aldous Huxley, "Appendix," The Devils of Loudun (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), p. 362.

¹⁴ Adolf Kaegi, The Rigveda: The Oldest Literature of the Indians, trans. R. Arrowsmith, Indian Edition (New Delhi: Amarko Book Agency, 1972), pp. 78-79.

¹⁵The Bhagavad-Gita (Gorakhpur: Gita Press, n.d.).

¹⁶ Masters and Houston, The Varieties, p. 37.

¹⁷ William James, The Will to Believe, Human Immortality and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 295n.

¹⁸ Allen Ginsberg, "First Manifesto to End the Bringdown," Voices of Revelation, ed. Nancy H. Deane (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), p. 345.

¹⁹ Alan Watts, "Psychedelics and Religious Experience," Psychedelics, p. 133.

²⁰ John W. Aiken, "The Church of the Awakening," Psychedelics, p. 174.

²¹ Walter N. Pahnke, "Drugs and Mysticism," Psychedelics, p. 162.

²² Masters and Houston, p. 307.

²³ Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (London: Palladin, 1970), p. 286.

²⁴ R. C. Zachner, "Appendix B, Mysticism Sacred and Profane: An Enquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 226.

²⁵ Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), p. 14. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically in text as Doors.

²⁶ Aldous Huxley, Letters of Aldous Huxley, p. 720. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically in text as Letters.

²⁷ W. R. Inge, Mysticism in Religion (London: Rider & Co. 1969), p. 36.

²⁸ Aldous Huxley, Island (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), p. 136.

²⁹Island, p. 140.

³⁰ Masters and Houston, p. 260.

³¹ In a letter to Dr. Humphry Osmond, Huxley suggests his friend maintain secrecy about the LSD experience and its effects. See Letters, p. 803.

³² Huxley accepts the Bergsonian model of the human mind. See his letter to Humphry Osmond, Letters, p. 668.

³³ Aldous Huxley, "Appendix I," Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), p. 62. Hereafter to be cited parenthetically in text as Heaven.

³⁴ William Sargant, Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain Washing (London: William Heinemann, 1957), p. 231.

³⁵ Frank Barron, "Motivational Patterns in LSD Usage," LSD, Man and Society, ed. Richard C. Debold and Russell C. Leaf (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 9.

³⁶ P. J. Saher, Eastern Wisdom and Western Thought: A Comparative Study In the Modern Philosophy of Religion (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), p. 172.

³⁷ W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 29.

³⁸ J. Krishnamurti, The Only Revolution, ed. Mary Lutyens (London: Victor Gollancz, 1970), p. 175.

³⁹ S. Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957), p. 113.

⁴⁰ Walter Pahnke, "LSD and Religious Experience," LSD, Man & Society, p. 65.

⁴¹ R. C. Zaechner, Drugs, Mysticism and Make-Believe (London: Collins, 1972), p. 109.

⁴² Julian Huxley, ed., Aldous Huxley—1894-1963: A Memorial Volume (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), p. 21.

⁴³ Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), p. 152.

⁴⁴ George Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 265.

⁴⁵ Laurence Brander, Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969), p. 154.