Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. With that said, I’ve decided to honour the free spirit in Huxley with this extensive collection of insightful quotes and excerpts from his influential book(s) on consciousness, spirituality and psychedelics, namely The Doors of Perception which was first published in 1954 and Heaven and Hell published in 1956, two works which have since often been published together as one book. Huxley’s last wish was the climax of ten years of experimentation with psychedelics. He felt his ego dissolve and and thus transcended his own sense of separate self. Things and objects appeared in their most basic forms, pure shapes and colors, similar to paintings by famous Cubists. Spatial relations and conceptual meaning that he would normally project unto the physical world was no more, he describes this further by comparing and mentioning how Adam would have seen the world for the first time. Huxley believed that he gained insight into the true nature of reality and objects. It lasted for 5-6 hours and Huxley described a certain type of transcendence taking place, a mystical experience if you will, alongside the expected alteration and intensification of the senses. The experience did not disappoint nor underwhelm.
Huxley invited Osmond to his home later the same year and tried a mescaline session under Osmond’s supervision. His fascination of psychedelics began later, when he was nearing his sixties, in 1953, when he read an article by an English psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, who argued that the naturally occurring psychedelic mescaline could prove useful for the understanding of mental disorder schizophrenia.
On it he wrote:īorn in 1894 to a well-known and wealthy English family, Huxley was intrigued and drawn to religious mysticism since early adulthood. The day is November 22, 1963, and Aldous Huxley is lying on his deathbed, in the last terminal stages of a metastatic laryngeal cancer, unable to speak he then suddenly hints at his wife Laura to fetch him a piece of paper.
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