LSD — My Problem Child
Albert Hofmann
8. Meeting with Aldous Huxley
In the mid-1950s, two books by Aldous Huxley appeared, The
Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, dealing with inebriated
states produced by hallucinogenic drugs. The alterations of sensory perceptions
and consciousness, which the author experienced in a self-experiment with
mescaline, are skillfully described in these books. The mescaline experiment was
a visionary experience for Huxley. He saw objects in a new light; they disclosed
their inherent, deep, timeless existence, which remains hidden from everyday
sight.
These two books contained fundamental observations on
the essence of visionary experience and about the significance of this manner of
comprehending the world—in cultural history, in the creation of myths, in the
origin of religions, and in the creative process out of which works of art
arise. Huxley saw the value of hallucinogenic drugs in that they give people who
lack the gift of spontaneous visionary perception belonging to mystics, saints,
and great artists, the potential to experience this extraordinary state of
consciousness, and thereby to attain insight into the spiritual world of these
great creators. Hallucinogens could lead to a deepened understanding of
religious and mystical content, and to a new and fresh experience of the great
works of art. For Huxley these drugs were keys capable of opening new doors of
perception; chemical keys, in addition to other proven but laborious " door
openers" to the visionary world like meditation, isolation, and fasting, or like
certain yoga practices.
At the time I already knew the earlier
work of this great writer and thinker, books that meant much to me, like
Point Counter Point, Brave New World, After Many a Summer, Eyeless in
Gaza, and a few others. In The Doors of Perception and Heaven and
Hell, Huxley's newly-published works, I found a meaningful exposition of the
experience induced by hallucinogenic drugs, and I thereby gained a deepened
insight into my own LSD experiments.
I was therefore delighted
when I received a telephone call from Aldous Huxley in the laboratory one
morning in August 1961. He was passing through Zurich with his wife. He invited
me and my wife to lunch in the Hotel Sonnenberg.
A gentleman
with a yellow freesia in his buttonhole, a tall and noble appearance, who exuded
kindness—this is the image I retained from this first meeting with Aldous
Huxley. The table conversation revolved mainly around the problem of magic
drugs. Both Huxley and his wife, Laura Archera Huxley, had also experimented
with LSD and psilocybin. Huxley would have preferred not to designate these two
substances and mescaline as "drugs," because in English usage, as also by the
way with Droge in German, that word has a pejorative connotation, and
because it was important to differentiate the hallucinogens from the other
drugs, even linguistically. He believed in the great importance of agents
producing visionary experience in the modern phase of human evolution.
He considered experiments under laboratory conditions to be
insignificant, since in the extraordinarily intensified susceptibility and
sensitivity to external impressions, the surroundings are of decisive
importance. He recommended to my wife, when we spoke of her native place in the
mountains, that she take LSD in an alpine meadow and then look into the blue cup
of a gentian flower, to behold the wonder of creation.
As we
parted, Aldous Huxley gave me, as a remembrance of this meeting, a tape
recording of his lecture "Visionary Experience," which he had delivered the week
before at an international congress on applied psychology in Copenhagen. In this
lecture, Aldous Huxley spoke about the meaning and essence of visionary
experience and compared this type of world view to the verbal and intellectual
comprehension of reality as its essential complement.
In the
following year, the newest and last book by Aldous Huxley appeared, the novel
Island. This story, set on the utopian island Pala, is an attempt to
blend the achievements of natural science and technical civilization with the
wisdom of Eastern thought, to achieve a new culture in which rationalism and
mysticism are fruitfully united. The moksha medicine, a magical drug
prepared from a mushroom, plays a significant role in the life of the population
of Pala (moksha is Sanskrit for "release," "liberation"). The drug could be used
only in critical periods of life. The young men on Pala received it in
initiation rites, it is dispensed to the protagonist of the novel during a life
crisis, in the scope of a psychotherapeutic dialogue with a spiritual friend,
and it helps the dying to relinquish the mortal body, in the transition to
another existence.
In our conversation in Zurich, I had
already learned from Aldous Huxley that he would again treat the problem of
psychedelic drugs in his forthcoming novel. Now he sent me a copy of
Island, inscribed "To Dr. Albert Hofmann, the original discoverer of the
moksha medicine, from Aldous Huxley."
The hopes that
Aldous Huxley placed in psychedelic drugs as a means of evoking visionary
experience, and the uses of these substances in everyday life, are subjects of a
letter of 29 February 1962, in which he wrote me:
. . . I have good hopes that this and similar work will result in
the development of a real Natural History of visionary experience, in all its
variations, determined by differences of physique, temperament and profession,
and at the same time of a technique of Applied Mysticism—a technique for
helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and
to make use of the insights from the "Other World" in the affairs of "This
World." Meister Eckhart wrote that "what is taken in by contemplation must be
given out in love." Essentially this is what must be developed—the art of
giving out in love and intelligence what is taken in from vision and the
experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the Universe....
Aldous Huxley and I were together often at the
annual convention of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences (WAAS) in Stockholm
during late summer 1963. His suggestions and contributions to discussions at the
sessions of the academy, through their form and importance, had a great
influence on the proceedings.
WAAS had been established in
order to allow the most competent specialists to consider world problems in a
forum free of ideological and religious restrictions and from an international
viewpoint encompassing the whole world. The results: proposals, and thoughts in
the form of appropriate publications, were to be placed at the disposal of the
responsible governments and executive organizations.
The 1963
meeting of WAAS had dealt with the population explosion and the raw material
reserves and food resources of the earth. The corresponding studies and
proposals were collected in Volume II of WAAS under the title The Population
Crisis and the Use of World Resources. A decade before birth control,
environmental protection, and the energy crisis became catchwords, these world
problems were examined there from the most serious point of view, and proposals
for their solution were made to governments and responsible organizations. The
catastrophic events since that time in the aforementioned fields makes evident
the tragic discrepancy between recognition, desire, and feasibility.
Aldous Huxley made the proposal, as a continuation and complement of the
theme "World Resources" at the Stockholm convention, to address the problem
"Human Resources," the exploration and application of capabilities hidden in
humans yet unused. A human race with more highly developed spiritual capacities,
with expanded consciousness of the depth and the incomprehensible wonder of
being, would also have greater understanding of and better consideration for the
biological and material foundations of life on this earth. Above all, for
Western people with their hypertrophied rationality, the development and
expansion of a direct, emotional experience of reality, unobstructed by words
and concepts, would be of evolutionary significance. Huxley considered
psychedelic drugs to be one means to achieve education in this direction. The
psychiatrist Dr. Humphry Osmond, likewise participating in the congress, who had
created the term psychedelic (mind-expanding), assisted him with a report
about significant possibilities of the use of hallucinogens.
The convention in Stockholm in 1963 was my last meeting with Aldous Huxley. His
physical appearance was already marked by a severe illness; his intellectual
personage, however, still bore the undiminished signs of a comprehensive
knowledge of the heights and depths of the inner and outer world of man, which
he had displayed with so much genius, love, goodness, and humor in his literary
work.
Aldous Huxley died on 22 November of the same year, on
the same day President Kennedy was assassinated. From Laura Huxley I obtained a
copy of her letter to Julian and Juliette Huxley, in which she reported to her
brother- and sister-in-law about her husband's last day. The doctors had
prepared her for a dramatic end, because the terminal phase of cancer of the
throat, from which Aldous Huxley suffered, is usually accompanied by convulsions
and choking fits. He died serenely and peacefully, however.
In
the morning, when he was already so weak that he could no longer speak, he had
written on a sheet of paper: "LSD—try it—intramuscular—100 mmg." Mrs. Huxley
understood what was meant by this, and ignoring the misgivings of the attending
physician, she gave him, with her own hand, the desired injection-she let him
have the moksha medicine.
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