Moksha

… I have done a great deal of work—having finished a short novel,¹ which is to come out next April or May, and a volume of essays,² including the one on visionary experience and the Other World, which you saw last spring, and which has now been greatly enlarged so as to include a discussion of visionary art.

And, talking of visions, I took mescalin yesterday, for the second time. This experience was no less remarkable than the first—but entirely different; for since I was in a group, with three other people, the experience had a human content, which the earlier, solitary experience, with its Other Worldly quality and its intensification of aesthetic experience, did not possess. For five hours I was given a series of luminous illustrations of the Christian saying, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” and the Buddhist saying, ‘To set up what you like against what you dislike, this is the disease of the mind.” Incidentally some remarkable developments are now taking place in the field of mescalin. A group of psychologists and social workers in Vancouver and Seattle have developed techniques for using mescalin therapeutically. It acts in the opposite way to narcosynthesis. When psychological treatment is done under barbiturates, the ego is made drowsy and it becomes possible to get at some of the contents of the personal subconscious. But with mescalin consciousness is not narrowed, it is enormously enlarged, and the whole gamut of the psyche, up to the highest superconscious levels, is opened up. The first treatment is negative in its nature, the second positive. And the results in the cases hitherto treated (they are still rather few) have been spectacular. Delinquent boys have been totally transformed in a single sitting, and the metanoia has persisted. Meanwhile a considerable number of academic persons and of professional and business men have taken the stuff—and all, without exception, have declared it to be the most significant experience of their lives and have found, particularly when it is taken in groups, that mescalin brings about a profound and lasting change of outlook. There is some prospect of a mixed commission—doctors, psychologists, philosophers, social workers—being created to consider the whole subject. As the man whose book was largely responsible for the great increase of interest in mescalin, I hope to participate in the work of this commission.

Have the dialogues yet appeared?³ And what are you working on now? (as though your hospital work were not real work!) And how is Alice’s family? And the Hellous?

TO DR. HUMPHRY OSMOND [SMITH 678]

740 North Kings Rd.,

Los Angeles 46, Cal.

12 January, 1955

DEAR HUMPHRY,

It was good to hear your voice⁴ so clearly across the intervening spaces. Your nice Captain tried a new experiment—group mescalinization. It worked very well for Gerald Heard and myself, hardly at all for [–––], who was given a small dose (200 mgs to our 300) and who had a subconscious resistance of tremendous power, and rather poorly for Hub-bard, who tried to run the group in the way he had run other groups in Vancouver, where the drug has worked as a device for raising buried guilts and traumas and permitting people to get on to better terms with themselves. Gerald and I evaded him and went somewhere else—but not to the remote Other Worlds of previous experiments. In both cases, albeit in different ways, it was a transcendental experience within this world and with human references. I hope to write something about my experience and will send you a copy in due course. Meanwhile I am hopeful that the good Captain, whose connections with Uranium seem to serve as a passport into the most exalted spheres of government, business and ecclesiastical polity, is about to take off for New York, where I hope he will storm the United Nations, take Nelson Rockefeller for a ride to Heaven and return with millions of dollars. What Babes in the Wood we literary gents and professional men are! The great World occasionally requires your services, is mildly amused by mine; but its full attention and deference are paid to Uranium and Big Business. So what extraordinary luck that this representative of both these Higher Powers should (a) have become so passionately interested in mescalin and (b) be such a very nice man.

I am enclosing a letter from France, which I mislaid and have just recovered from the depths of a coat pocket. I have asked this pharmacological lady to send you a copy of her thesis direct. It might be of some interest… .

Yours,

Aldous

TO DR. HUMPHRY OSMOND [SMITH 679]

740 North Kings Road,

Los Angeles 46, Cal.

16 January, 1955

MY DEAR HUMPHRY,

Thank you for your letter and the script of the talk, which I like very much indeed. All I can suggest by way of change is an addition of a line or two, indicating a little more specifically than you do what may be expected from systematic research with mescalin and similar substances. One would expect, for example, that new light might be shed on the workings of artistic and scientific insight, and perhaps some control gained over the otherwise random and gratuitous process of inspiration. One would also expect light to be shed on the problems of parapsychology. Also on those of philosophy and religion.

Gerald and I had another day with Al Hubbard, down at Long Beach. He has provided us both with a stock of carbon dioxide and oxygen mixture.⁵ I have tried this stuff before, without much effect. But I suspect it was not administered properly, and maybe there will, after all, be something to be learned by means of this simple and harmless procedure. Hubbard himself swears by it… .

Yours,

Aldous

TO DR. HUMPHRY OSMOND [SMITH 713]

Newcomb House, Clapboard Hill Rd.,

Guilford, Conn.

26 July, 1955

DEAR HUMPHRY,

I am two long good letters in your debt. No excuse, except that I have been trying to catch up with vast arrears of correspondence and to finish the series of appendices which will be published with the essay on “Visionary Experience and Visionary Art,” when it comes out next January.⁶ The publisher’s deadline is August the first; so I have to keep very busy. I have done one of the appendices on popular visionary art—e.g. fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacle, magic lantern shows (very important in the past) and certain aspects of the cinema. A curious and interesting subject. One of the striking facts is the close dependence of such arts on technology. For example, the progress in artificial lighting since 1750—spermaceti candles, Argand’s burners for oil lamps, gaslight, limelight from 1825 onwards, parabolic reflectors from 1790, electric light after the ‘eighties—has immensely heightened the magical power of pageantry and the theatrical spectacle. Elizabeth II’s coronation was better than anything of the kind in the past, because of floodlights. It could also be preserved on film—whereas all previous pageants were ephemeral shows and could only hope “to live in Settle’s numbers one day more.” The producers of Jacobean masques were hopelessly handicapped by having no decent lighting. Magic lanterns are very interesting. The fact that Kircher’s invention was christened “magic” and that the name was universally accepted is highly significant. Intense light plus transparent colour equals vision. And did you realize that the word “phantasmagoria” was coined in 1802 by the inventors of a new and improved magic lantern which moved on wheels back and forth behind a semi-transparent screen and could project images of varying sizes, which were kept in focus by an automatic focusing device? I cannot help believing that many features in the Romantic imagination were derived from the magic lantern show with its “dissolving views” (produced by two lanterns with convergent images and shutters that could be stopped down and opened up in correspondence with one another), its “phantasmagorias,” its “chrometropic slides” (producing three dimensional moving patterns, very like those of mescalin). One sees hints of the lantern show in Shelley and, in another aspect, in Keats, in Fuseli and John Martin. And, talking of lanterns—did I tell you that my friend Dr. [L. S.] Cholden ⁷ had found that the stroboscope improved on mescalin effects, just as Al Hubbard did? His own geometrical visions turned, under the flashing lamp, to Japanese landscapes. How the hell this fits in with the notion that stroboscopic effects result from the interference of two rhythms, the lamp’s and the brain waves’, I cannot imagine. And anyhow what on earth are the neurological correlations of mescalin and LSD experiences? And if neurological patterns are formed, as presumably they must be, can they be reactivated by a probing electrode, as [Wilder] Penfield reactivates trains of memories, evoking complete vivid recall?

I too have had a birthday, this very day.

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of age,

Stol’n on his wing my first and sixtieth year!

Affectionately,

Aldous

TO MRS. EILEEN J. GARRETT [SMITH 717]

Guilford, Conn.

27 August, 1955

MY DEAR EILEEN,

… I spent some days, earlier this month, at Glen Cove, in the Strange household assembled by Puharich—Alice [Bouverie] and Mrs. P[uharich], behaving to one another in a conspicuously friendly way; Elinor Bond, doing telepathic guessing remarkably well, but not producing anything of interest or value in the mediumistic sitting she gave me; Frances Farrelly, with her diagnostic machine—which Puharich’s tests have shown to be merely an instrument, like a crystal ball, for concentrating ESP faculties; Harry, the Dutch sculptor, who goes into trances in the Faraday cages and produces automatic scripts in Egyptian hieroglyphics; Narodny, the cockroach man, who is preparing experiments to test the effects of human telepathy on insects. It was all very lively and amusing—and, I really think, promising; for whatever may be said against Puharich, he is certainly very intelligent, extremely well-read and highly enterprising. His aim is to reproduce by modern pharmacological, electronic and physical methods the conditions used by the shamans for getting into a state of travelling clairvoyance and then, if he succeeds, to send people to explore systematically “the Other World.” This seems to be as good a new approach to the survival problem (along with a lot of other problems) as any of the rest, and may yield some interesting results. Meanwhile, to everyone’s immense delight, they have found specimens of Amanita muscaria actually growing on the estate—having received instructions where to find them via the ouija board, while trying to contact Mr. [Gordon] Wasson’s curandera, who was under mushroom trance at the moment, in Mexico. This is all the more remarkable as the literature of the mycological society of New England records only one previous instance of the discovery of an Amanita in Maine. At Glen Cove they have now found eight fine specimens on the same spot. The effects, when a piece as big as a pin’s head, is rubbed for a few seconds into the skin of the scalp are quite alarmingly powerful, and it will obviously take a lot of very cautious experimentation to determine the right psienhancing dose of the mushroom.

I go to New York on Monday, shall stay with Anita Loos and talk with my director and producer about my play [The Genius and the Goddess], then fly to Los Angeles on Thursday. Ellen and Matthew send love.

Affectionately,

Aldous