When Aldous Huxley wrote his book The Doors of Perception, he made several statements that quickly generated response, especially concerning religion. Huxley himself spent time studying Vedanta, a branch of Hindu philosophy. In The Doors of Perception, Huxley asserted that mescaline would allow users to “participate in a common being”, or come closer to experiences typically associated with religion or spiritualism. As you can imagine, people of faith tended to take offense to that claim. Many stated that using mescaline or other psychoactive drugs like LSD did not create enlightenment; instead drugs create a “strictly private sphere”, according to a Jewish religious expert. Huxley’s relationship with his spiritual guide at the Vedanta Society of Southern California, Swami Prabhavananda, began to decline as Huxley experimented with drugs and wrote more about those experiences.
Several people wrote extended responses to The Doors of Perception, most directly
Robert Charles Zaehner. Zaehner, an Oxford professor, thought
that Huxley was dead wrong in his statements on religion. He wrote a book, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, in which
he stated his case against Huxley’s claims. Citing passages from the Catholic
bible pertaining to drunkenness in church, Zaehner claimed that drug-induced states
of euphoria were not the same as having an encounter with a god. He also took
offense to the connections that the psychological world was making between
mescaline and psychosis. To many doctors and researchers, mescaline and other
psychoactive drugs offered the best insight into a psychoactive episode that
they had to date. Zaehner thought that if a mescaline trip was like having a
psychotic episode, and also like having a spiritual experience, then that meant
the visions of the prophets of Christianity were comparable to the ravings of
psychotic lunatics.
Regardless of the public reaction, The Doors of Perception heightened awareness and interest not only
in mescaline, but other drugs as well. Research inspired by Huxley has spurred
advances in medicine, science, and of course, philosophy.
There's actually a growing body of evidence, from researchers like Andrew Newberg, suggesting that the brain may indeed come pre-loaded with a spiritual "hot-spot" that for some is activated by religion, for others by psychoactive experiences, etc.
ReplyDelete