The Perennial Philosopher on Drugs

“Huxley had spent two decades arguing that all genuine mystical traditions converge on the same truth. Mescaline gave him the experiential evidence for a thesis he had previously argued only from texts.”

In 1945, Aldous Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy, a 300-page anthology of mystical writings from across traditions, organized by his argument that all genuine mystical experience converges on the same recognition: that an impersonal divine ground underlies all particular things, and that the purpose of spiritual practice is to bring this recognition into ordinary awareness.

He had argued this entirely from texts. He had read Eckhart, the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Desert Fathers, Sufi poetry. He had not, at the time of writing, had a mystical experience himself.

In 1953, the experience arrived chemically. The flowers were not flowers in the ordinary sense. The Suchness Meister Eckhart wrote about was not a philosophical concept but a perceptual quality that the flowers had and he was witnessing. The 'direct, total awareness from the inside of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact' that he described in a letter to Osmond after a later LSD session was not Vedanta as a doctrine but Vedanta as a report.

The Doors of Perception is, among other things, the story of a perennial philosopher getting evidence for his own thesis. This shapes the book's confident tone, which critics found frustrating, Huxley seemed to know what the experience meant before he had it, because he had spent twenty years studying what others who had it had said about it. He came to mescaline pre-theorized.

This is both the book's strength and its weakness. The strength: Huxley could articulate what he experienced in philosophical terms that placed it in a tradition, making it legible to readers who might otherwise dismiss it as individual hallucination. The weakness: the pre-existing framework may have shaped the experience itself, what you expect to find in altered states partially determines what you find, and Huxley arrived expecting Suchness.

The current clinical literature navigates this problem by using standardized measures, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, the Challenging Experience Questionnaire, that assess experience before the subject has been told what to expect. The evidence they generate is, in a sense, more controlled than Huxley's. It is also, inevitably, less eloquent.

Sources

• Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
• Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954)
• Yaden & Griffiths, ACS Pharmacol Transl Sci (2021)