Altered States

As a latchkey kid in the 70s and 80s, I had a significant amount of time where I was left to my own devices.  Additionally, as the youngest child in a family of five, I had experiences not likely shared by my classmates.  I remember watching Midnight Express with one of my older brothers. As children of the 1970s, my brothers dabbled in recreational drugs. One of my brothers introduced me to the writings of Carlos Castaneda.  Around the same time as I learned of Carlos Castaneda and his "Yaqui Way of Knowledge", I watched the 1980 film Altered States. 
Directed by Ken Russell with a screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, it starred William Hurt and Blair Brown. Hurt plays Eddie Jessup, a Harvard Psychology professor who uses a sensory deprivation tank and hallucinogenic drugs to attempt to reach "altered states of consciousness."  I would guess Jessup's character is loosely based on men like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert/Ram Dass who were both once Harvard professors whose path led to an exploration of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs.
When I first watched Altered States, I struggled to understand the film and I found some of the latter stages of the movie to be rather far-fetched and comical.  Nevertheless, with some experience with Castaneda, I left the film intrigued about the possibility of their being other realms of consciousness or altered states.  It would be years later that I would do some of my own "pharmacological field work", though not to the extent of men like Ram Dass or Leary.  However, I know had empirical data of my own to attempt to make sense of. 
The first study of hallucinogens and altered states was Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent, which is the account of a Stanford-trained academic taking ayahuasca with an indigenous Amazon shaman.  Narby's focus was to argue that perhaps this indigenous knowledge and the paradigmatic concept of DNA are not as far apart as it might first appear. 
I am fairly certain that sitting on one of my bookshelves as I devoured The Cosmic Serpent was Aldous Huxley's concise The Doors of Perception.  More time intervened between me tackling Huxley's text.  I read further into the social issues surrounding drugs like LSD.  Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond does an admirable job of situating LSD into American political, cultural, and social history.  I highly recommend it. 
Finally, after reading those works I finally read Huxley's work. In fewer than 80 pages, Huxley documents his own experiments with mescaline.  If you know Huxley only through Brave New World, this is an entirely different work published more than a decade after that novel. Huxley begins with a short history of Western study of mescaline and its effects. He gleefully reports how mescaline, "To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing." (9)
In this work, Huxley endeavors to recount his conscious experience with mescalin as he ingests a pill under the supervision of someone deemed "the investigator." The entire experience was recorded to help Huxley recall some of his "trip."  I find this to be credible as part of the problem is when under the influence, it is difficult to extricate yourself from the experience to provide analysis.  His initial response was that the experience was not easily categorized.  "'Neither agreeable or disagreeable, I answered. 'It just is.'" (17)  What asked what he saw and how he perceived spatial relationship, Huxley had the following answer: "In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity and existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern." (20) 
After his experiment, Huxley spends the rest of the text discussing what he experienced and the implications of this experience. In discussing then-current brain research and philosophy, Huxley argues that while we should be capable of remembering all of our experiences, the argument went that the brain protected us from this type of holistic overload. "The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by the mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge,  . . . leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." (22-23).
Huxley claims under mescaline, we lose our will to accomplish tasks we previously found important.
Huxley writes of a state of egolessness where "there is an 'obscure knowledge' that All is in all-that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to 'perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.'" (26) This mystical state Huxley refers to as "the Mind at Large."
Traces of the pessimism found in Brave New World pop up at points in Doors.  According to Huxley, "Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul." (62).  In the 1950s, this sort of monotonous life might have something to do with the emerging counterculture who seeks to experience life more intensely and more purposefully. 
Huxley, perhaps following the lead of Nietzsche, does devote a couple of pages to the relationship between Christianity and religious drunkenness or intoxication.  With the exception of the Native American Church, Huxley finds Christianity incompatible with this religious intoxication as he contrasts this with the Dionysian rites of the Greeks.  Though the drug of choice for this Native American Church is peyote, Huxley sees correspondence with the use of mescalin.  Though states of euphoria or enthusiasm (from the Greek mean "god within") in Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity is not connected to drug use, I think Huxley overlooks the fact that certain forms of Christianity can approach these ecstatic states without the use of drugs. 
Huxley concludes on an encouraging note as he speaks of a someone who has gone through the Door in the wall and has returned utterly transformed. "He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, or systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend." (79).
I wish I had read this work sooner, as it is full of wisdom and humility, much like the man described by Huxley in the concluding paragraph of this earnest work of science, anthropology, philosophy, and religion.  What I most admire is Huxley's desire to fully explore the mescalin experience, but without situating himself or Western learning in a place of supremacy or privilege.  Such an attitude is rare in our world and was perhaps even more so in the 1950s.  The Doors of Perception is a gem of a work and worth reading, though it does make better sense if you have ever being in an altered state of some kind.
Czar