More on Huxley
Page 3 about the Shulgins
(quoting from the above passage again) "some hint at least of a not excessively uncommon experience."
I mean by this that the exploration of inner space is at least as vast and mysterious a study as that of outer space -- and that in the former we were lucky to have had an Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond aboard as investigators. It is as if we had sent poets that first time to the moon!
. . . then, but it probably would have been forgotten had not Shulgin been taken by the beauty of its molecular structure some 65 years later. By 1985, even Newsweek had found out about it, and publicized it in what soon became a heavy media barrage. By the end of that summer, MDMA had been banned.
What are the chances that some of these semi-synthetics will become "drugs of choice" to a sizable percentage of the population, even of, say, one percent of 16- to 24-year-old persons? Will some of these be used in ways like or unlike Shulgin's anticipations? Are these likely to be socially benign in their effects? Could any of them turn out horrific? How do they stack up against Sasha's assessments of what he does and why he does it?
It took Huxley 70 pages to describe what had happened on that first trip, to give some hint of this "not excessively uncommon experience," as when he wrote that "All at once I saw what Guardi had seen and (with what incomparable skill) had so often rendered in his paintings -- a stucco wall with a shadow slanting across it, blank but unforgettably beautiful, empty but charged with all the meaning and the mystery of existence."
Compare just this fragment with the total remaining report from the
Harvard Psilocybin Project investigators -- when Huxley took 10 mg. psilocybin, and was observed: "No. 11 sat in contemplative calm thoughout; occasionally produced relevant epigrams; reported experience was an edifying philosophic experience."
There is much truth to the claim that to get the Aldous Huxley mescalinized experience you had to be Huxley -- especially if talking about the bringing back of souvenirs. Aldous Huxley, blind at the age of 20, after regaining his sight was probably not by accident to become the most listenable of all as to the content of the contrived visionary experience.
These phenethylamines are "soul drugs," little pieces of matter that can induce an air of "revelation"; substances that produce mirroring, rippling effects; things that intensify the experiences of individuals; "sacraments" that can make the user "fraught with thought and suffused with love." As Al Hubbard, one of the major Johnny Appleseeds, used to say: "If you don't believe the psychedelics work, just try one!"
After 1) use of dozens of "natural" psychedelics from prehistory until now; 2) dabbling in mescaline since its synthesis by Arthur Heffter, the first "artificially concocted psychedelic," at the end of the 19th century; 3) nearly half a century of LSD use since discovery of its psychoactivity in April, 1943; 4) massive acquaintance with psilocybin mushrooms from the 1970s on; and 5) a decade's substantial employment of MDMA . . . will additional "psychedelic waves" wash over us? Can we expect further psychedelic winners?
Phenethylamines are particularly fascinating in that they are only partially indolic, meaning they can be constructed reasonably easily, unlike the case with LSD, ibogaine, harmaline, psilocybin, DMT and other classic psychdelics. These molecules, which exhibit elements of both mescaline and amphetamines, all tend to enhance the qualities of "affinity" (though with different "tonalities").
Perhaps the most arresting idea suggestive of what might lie ahead in a kind of calculus about eventualities comes from computer whiz kid Steve Jobs. Asked why IBM with all its hired brains and money hadn't first come up with the personal computer, Jobs allegedly responded: "Perhaps they didn't take enough acid."
(even more yet)
That appeared principally in his two books on the subject, after only two or three experiments. What he thought of the rest -- which were quite different -- is here, in what should stand as an unparallelled guide to investigators.
Speculations and explanations provided by Huxley are based on wide-ranging inquiries he undertook after having been greatly energized by that initial experiment. Most of this seems fresh today. How odd it seems, for example, to hear him describe the work of John Lilly with dolphins, or that of those accumulating death and dying accounts.
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