The Man in the Garden Chair

“In the garden, Huxley found himself facing 'a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair', and on the brink of panic.”

The flowers are the scene The Doors of Perception is best known for. Huxley took his pill at eleven on a May morning in 1953, and an hour and a half later he was sitting in his study, looking at a small glass vase that held a rose, a carnation and an iris. He writes that he was no longer looking at an unusual flower arrangement. He was seeing 'what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation', which he calls 'the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.' He asks himself whether Istigkeit was the word Meister Eckhart liked to use, and he translates it as 'Is-ness.' That passage is beautiful and famous. The scene that matters most to me comes later, after he has listened to music, when the investigator suggests a walk in the garden.

Huxley goes out through the French window and under a pergola. Sun comes through its laths and throws zebra-like stripes of shadow across the seat and back of a garden chair. He gazes at the chair for what seems an immensely long time. At any other time, he says, he would have seen a chair barred with light and shade, but that day 'the percept had swallowed up the concept.' The sight is so wonderful that it comes close to terrifying him, and he writes that he suddenly had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. Two paragraphs later comes the sentence this piece is about. Confronted by a chair that looked like the Last Judgment, or, to be more accurate, by 'a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair', he found himself all at once 'on the brink of panic.'

Huxley names the emotion. Looking back, he says the fear was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind used to living among symbols could bear. He adds that the going was toward greater beauty and deeper significance, and that it still felt like going too far. He sets the fear beside religious writing. The literature of religious experience, he says, is full of the terrors of people who come too suddenly face to face with the Mysterium tremendum, and he points to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul shrinks in agony from the Pure Light of the Void.

The chair also tests the theory Huxley had laid out earlier in the essay. Quoting the Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad on Bergson, he proposes that the brain and nervous system work mainly to eliminate, shutting out most of what we might perceive and leaving a small selection useful for survival. He calls the filter the 'reducing valve' and what lies behind it 'Mind at Large.' Mescaline, in his view, impairs the efficiency of the valve and lets more through. He is explicit that a temporary by-pass does not abolish the valve. What arrives is more than usual and different from usual, and Huxley allows that some of it can be terrifying. His account of how the drug loosens the valve, by lowering the sugar supply to the brain, is not the mechanism the current consensus describes, which is action as an agonist or partial agonist at serotonin 2A receptors (Nichols, 2016). Researchers have also discussed reduced sensory gating, with the thalamus as one candidate site, and Carhart-Harris and Friston mention that proposal in their 2019 REBUS paper. These remain hypotheses. The valve was a metaphor, and nothing in Huxley's essay measures a thalamus.

The essay also makes a larger claim. Near its close Huxley writes that being shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception is 'an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.' In the pages around the chair he asserts that the drug brings hell and purgatory only to people with a recent case of jaundice, periodic depression or chronic anxiety, and that a reasonably healthy person goes in without fear. In those pages these are Huxley's assertions, offered without data. Both statements are in the book, and so is his report of reaching the brink of panic.

Phenomenology offers a vocabulary for what he describes. Edmund Husserl, who laid out his method in an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, taught a deliberate suspension of the 'natural attitude' in which we take the world's reality for granted. He called it the epoché, often glossed as bracketing. Huxley does not mention Husserl in the essay, and the epoché is a discipline practiced by a person who is awake and working at it. The resemblance to a percept swallowing a concept is worth noticing. It does not show that mescaline performs the epoché.

The self does not vanish in the garden. On the way out, Huxley reports that it felt odd that 'I' was not the same as his arms and legs. At the chair, someone is still there to be frightened, someone who afterward analyzes the fear and who spent that long time working to recognize what he was looking at. The self is thinner than usual and it is present.

He does not describe working his way through the fear. 'None too soon', he writes, he was steered away from the disquieting splendors of the chair. The ivy on the hedge shone with a jade-like radiance, a clump of red hot pokers seemed to strain upward into the blue, and a large pale blue automobile at the curb made him laugh until the tears ran down his cheeks. The episode ends because he was steered away from it, in his words.

The book holds all of it: the vase and the chair, the Is-ness of the flowers and the Last Judgment in the garden. Huxley wrote down the panic along with the bliss, and a reader who quotes only the flowers has read part of his account. In his account, the doors of perception did not sort what came through by whether it was pleasant.

Sources

• Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
• Nichols, Psychedelics, Pharmacological Reviews (2016)
• Carhart-Harris & Friston, REBUS and the Anarchic Brain, Pharmacological Reviews (2019)
• Husserl, Phenomenology (Encyclopaedia Britannica article), trans. Palmer, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1971)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edmund Husserl