1955
Letters
TO DR. HUMPHRY OSMOND [SMITH 724]
740 North Kings Road,
Los Angeles 46, Cal.
24 October, 1955
DEAR HUMPHRY,
I fear we shall not meet in New York, unless perhaps on your return from Europe. I do not expect to be in the East until the last days of December—and perhaps later: one never knows, where the theatre is concerned. How long do you propose to stay in Switzerland and England? It would be a happy thing if our trajectories were to intersect on your way home.
I had another most extraordinary experience with mescalin the other day.1 After reading an account by one of Al’s patients—a young Canadian engineer, who had recovered all kinds of buried and chronically debilitating traumatic material under LSD, worked it off with appropriate abreactions and had a beatific vision thrown in as a bonus, so that his whole life was transformed overnight—after reading this, I decided it might be interesting to find out why so much of my childhood is hidden from me, so that I cannot remember large areas of early life. So I sat down to a session with a woman who has had a good deal of experience with eliciting recalls and working off abreactions by methods of dianetics—which do in many cases produce beneficial results, in spite of all that can and must be said against the theorists of dianetics and many of its practitioners. I took half the contents of a 400 mg capsule at ten and the other half about forty minutes later, and the effects began to be strong about an hour and a half after the first dose. There was little vision with the eyes closed, as was the case during my experiment under your auspices, but much transfiguration of the outer world. Dianetic procedures were tried, along the lines described in the account given by Al’s patient; but there was absolutely no recall. Instead there was something of incomparably greater importance; for what came through the closed door was the realization—not the knowledge, for this wasn’t verbal or abstract—but the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains. (It was the same fact, evidently, as that which Indians discover in their peyote ceremonies.) I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been. The result was that I did not, as in the first experiment, feel cut off from the human world. I was intensely aware of it, but from the standpoint of the living, primordial cosmic fact of Love. And the things which had entirely occupied my attention on that first occasion I now perceived to be temptations—temptations to escape from the central reality into false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge. I talked a good deal about these temptations; commented on the light this realization threw on the legend of St. Anthony, on the Zen statement that, for a Bodhisattva, the Samadhi of Emptiness, Nirvana apart from the world, apart from love, compassion and sentient beings, is as terrible as the pains of hell. And I remember that I quoted the remark of Pascal, that the worship of truth without charity is idolatry, for truth is merely God’s idol, which we have no right to worship. And of course the same is true in regard to beauty. (Actually the Platonic trinity of the good, the true and the beautiful is a faulty expression of the facts. Good implies bad and so perpetuates dualism. Love reconciles all the opposites and is the One.)
I also spoke a good deal, to my own subsequent enlightenment, about objects and subjects. How easy, I kept saying, to turn whatever one looked at, even a human face, into a pure object—an object of the most magical beauty, strangeness, intensity of thereness, of pure existence! Do you remember that account given by Blake of seeing a fold of lambs in the corner of a field, and how he approached and suddenly saw that the lambs were pieces of the most exquisite sculpture? This is a good description of the process of objectification. It is a kind of Gorgon’s-head effect—you look at a thing solely with a view to seeing truth and beauty, and ir turns into stone—living, changing, self-luminous stone, but still stone, still sculpture. Love de-objectifies the perceived thing or person. At the same time it de-subjectifies the perceiver, who no longer views the outside world with desire or aversion, no longer judges automatically and irrevocably, is no longer an emotionally charged ego, but finds himself an element in the given reality, which is not an affair of objects and subjects, but a cosmic unity of love. The thought of my own and other people’s constant effort to impose objectivity and subjectivity on the cosmic fact, thereby creating untold miseries for all concerned, filled me for a moment with intense sadness. But that too, I saw, was a temptation to subjectivity on a higher level, a larger scale.
I looked at some picture books, and was struck especially by a full length portrait by Boucher, of a lady in court dress of the time of Louis XV. It seemed the most perfect example of objectification. The couturier’s function is to turn women into objects—objects for men and objects for themselves. Looking at the object they have been turned into by the fashion designer and by their own bovaristic craving to be something other than what in fact they are, the women become self-satisfied and self-dissatisfied subjects, purring with quiet glee or caterwauling with self-pity or spitting and scratching because somebody has blasphemed against the object which is their idol and so has offended the subject which worships the object. And of course the same is true of men—only there didn’t happen to be any pictures of masculine fancy dress to remind me of the fact.
I also looked at a volume of photographs of nudes—a lot of them very tricky, bits of bodies taken from odd angles and under queer conditions of light. Objects again. Lust is sexual relations with an object for the benefit of a subject-who may also enjoy, as a kind of bonus, the manifestations of subjective enjoyment proceeding from the object. Love de-objectifics and de-subjectifies, substitutes the primordial fact of unity and the awareness of mutual immanence for a frenzy heightening to despair by the impossibility of that total possession of the objects, at which the subject mistakenly aims.
Among the by-products of this state of being the given fact of love was a kind of intuitive understanding of other people, a “discernment of spirits,” in the language of Christian spirituality. I found myself saying things about my dianetic operator, which I didn’t know but which, when I said them, turned out to be true. Which, I suppose, is what one would expect if one happens to be manifesting the primordial fact of unity through love and the knowledge of mutual immanance.
Another thing I remember saying was that I now understood such previously incomprehensible events as St. Francis’s kissing of the leper. Explanations in terms of masochistic perversion etc. are ridiculous. This sort of thing is merely the overflow of a cosmic fact too large, so to speak, for the receptacle, fashioned by the subjective ego in its life-long relations with objects and not yet completely melted away, so that the new fact finds itself constricted by the old confining habits, with the result that it boils over, so to speak, under pressure and has to express itself in ways which, though not particularly desirable, are completely understandable and even, in the particular context, logical.
Another thing I remember saying and feeling was that I didn’t think I should mind dying; for dying must be like this passage from the known (constituted by life-long habits of subject-object existence) to the unknown cosmic fact.
I have not retained the intensity of my experience of the state of love; but something certainly remains and I hope I shall not allow myself to eclipse it by succumbing to old bad habits. I hope and think that by awareness of what is doing from moment to moment, one may be able to remain out of one’s own light.
What emerges as a general conclusion is the confirmation of the fact that mescalin does genuinely open the door, and that everything including the Unknown in its purest, most comprehensive form can come through. After the theophany it is up to the momentarily enlightened individual to “cooperate with grace”—not so much by will as by awareness.
Yours affectionately
Aldous
TO DR. HUMPHRY OSMOND
740 North Kings Road,
Los Angeles 46, Cal.
29 October, 1955
DEAR HUMPHRY,
How strange that our letters should have crossed! I shall be much interested to hear the details of your joint experiment and to repeat the procedure with Gerald and Al, when the latter comes to Los Angeles. From my own experience I cannot see that it is necessary for anyone to do anything to keep the mescalin consciousness on a high level—it stays there by itself, all the time, as far as I’m concerned. A director or master of ceremonies would be useful, as far as I can see, only if you want to keep the consciousness away from the highest level, only if you want to have it directed into other channels on the side, so to speak, to lead it into such “psychic” areas as telepathy etc., or into an awareness of archetypes (if they exist, which I sometimes wonder!) of shadows, animas or animuses as the case may be (all of them, so far as I personally am concerned, entirely hypothetical and Pickwickian entities). It is, of course, perfectly legitimate and desirable to make such experiments, provided of course that one remembers the warnings of the mystics, the only people who know anything about the subject. First, that though miracles take place, of course, they are gratuitous graces, not saving graces, and have ultimately no importance, or anyhow no more importance than anything else—everything being, naturally, infinitely important if you approach it in the right way. Second, that siddhis or odd powers, are fascinating and, being fascinating, dangerous to anyone who is interested in liberation, since they are apt to become, if too much attention is paid to them, distracting impediments. However rich and rewarding, an expedition into the areas on the side of the direct route to the Clear Light, must never be treated idolatrously, as though it had reached the final goal. My own view is that it would be important to break off experimentation from time to time and permit the participants to go, on their own, towards the Clear Light. But perhaps alternation of experimentation and mystical vision would be psychologically impossible; for who, having once come to the realization of the primordial fact of unity in Love, would ever want to return to experimentation on the psychic level? So it will be better to close the proceedings with undirected ascent towards the unknown highest awareness. In this way there will be no need to interrupt the experience of what is supremely important to each participant, in order to bring him back to experiences of lower, ambiguous value. My point is that the opening of the door by mescalin or LSD is too precious an opportunity, too high a privilege to be neglected for the sake of experimentation. There must be experimentation, of course, but it would be wrong if there were nothing else. There is a point where the director must stop directing and leave himself and the other participants to do what they want, or rather what the Unknown Quantity which has taken their place wants to do. Direction can come only, or mainly, from accumulated notional memories of past experience, from the conceptually known; but the highest mystical awareness comes only when there is freedom from the known, when there is no purpose in view, however intrinsically excellent, but pure openness. God’s service is perfect freedom and, conversely, perfect freedom is God’s service—and where there is a director with a scientific or even an ethical purpose, perfect freedom cannot exist. In practice, I would say, this means that, for at least the last hour of mescalin-induced openness, the director should step aside and leave the unknown quantities of the participants to do what they want. If they want to say things to one another, well and good. If they don’t, well and good too. François de Sales’s advice to Mme. de Chantal, in regard to “spiritual exercises,” was not to do anything at all, but simply to wait. Every experiment, I feel very strongly, should terminate or (if this should be felt to be better) should be interrupted, by a period of simple waiting, with no direction either from the outside or from within. If we don’t do this, we shall be, I feel, committing a kind of sin against the Holy Ghost. Direction necessarily excludes the Holy Ghost. Let us give the Unknownest Quantity at least one hour of our openness. The remaining three or four can go to directed experimentation.
And now let me ask you a favour. There is an unfortunate man in this town (I don’t know him personally, but he is a friend of a friend), who has been using peyote on himself and other people who want to explore the remoter regions of their consciousness, get rid of traumas and understand the meaning of Christian charity. He is, apparently, a very worthy, earnest fellow; but, unwittingly, he has committed a felony. For in the state of California it is a felony to be in possession of the peyote cactus, and this man had a consignment of the plants sent to him from a nursery gardener in Texas, where peyote is legal. He will have to plead guilty, for he has undoubtedly broken the law. But meanwhile he can make a statement about peyote not being a dangerous drug. He has some of the references and I have given some others. Can you, without too much trouble, supply other references, medical, anthropological and psychological? I’d be most grateful if you would send me any references you know, so that I can pass them on to this poor fellow who is liable, under this law, to be sent to San Quentin for five years, but who may, if character witnesses are good (which they are) and if expert evidence can be marshalled to show that the stuff is not a dangerous drug, get off with a fine and probation.
My love to the family.
Affectionately,
Aldous
740 North Kings Rd.,
Los Angeles 46, Cal.
23 December, 1955
MY DEAR HUMPHRY,
I was very glad to get your long, good, most interesting letter. You certainly succeeded in doing an astonishing number of things in a very short time.
We had our LSD experiment last week, with Al, Gerald and my self taking 75 micrograms and [–––] taking about thirty. I found the stuff more potent from a physical point of view than mescalin—e.g. it produced the feelings of intense cold, as though one were in shock, which Maria had with the full dose of mescalin. The psychological effects, in my case, were identical with those of mescalin, and I had the same kind of experience as I had on the previous occasion- transfiguration of the external world, and the understanding, through a realization involving the whole man, that Love is the One, and that this is why Atman is identical with Brahman, and why, in spite of everything, the universe is all right. I had no visions with my eyes shut—even less than I had on the first occasion with mescalin, when the moving geometries were highly organized and, at moments, very beautiful and significant (though at others, very trivial). This time even the patterns were poorly organized, and there was nothing corresponding to what Al and [–––] and his pilot friend [–––] (isn’t that the name?) have described. Evidently, if you are not a congenial or habitual visualizer, you do not get internal visions under mescalin or LSD—only external transfiguration. (Gerald had no visions either. I have not had an opportunity to discuss with him in detail the nature of his experience; but certainly visions with the eyes closed were not part of it.) Time was very different. We played the Bach B-minor suite and the “Musical Offering,” and the experience was overpowering. Other music (e.g. Palestrina and Byrd) seemed unsatisfactory by comparison. Bach was a revelation. The tempo of the pieces did not change; nevertheless they went on for centuries, and they were a manifestation, in the plane of art, of perpetual creation, a demonstration of the necessity of death and the self-evidence of immortality, an expression of the essential all-rightness of the universe—for the music was far beyond tragedy, but included death and suffering with everything else in the divine impartiality which is the One, which is Love, which is Being or Istigkeit. Who on earth was John Sebastian? Certainly not the old gent with sixteen children in a stuffy Protestant environment. Rather, an enormous manifestation of the Other—but the Other canalized, controlled, made available through the intervention of the intellect and the senses and emotions. All of us, I think, experienced Bach in the same way. One can imagine a ritual or initiation, in which a whole group of people transported to the Other World by one of the elixirs, would sit together listening to, say, the B-minor Suite and so being brought to a direct, unmediated understanding of the divine nature. (One of the other records we tried was one of traditional Byzantine music—the Greek version of Gregorian. To me at least, this seemed merely grotesque. The single voice bawling away its Alleluias and Kyries seemed like the voice of a gigantic flunkey kowtowing before a considerably magnified Louis XIV. Only polyphony and only the highly organized polyphony (structurally organized and not merely textually organized, as with Palestrina) can convey the nature of reality, which is multiplicity in unity, the reconciliation of opposites, the not-twoness of diversity, the Nirvana-nature of Samsara, the Love which is the bridge between objective and subjective, good and evil, death and life.) On this occasion I did not have any spontaneous psi awareness, and our attempt to induce psi deliberately seemed after a few minutes so artificial and bogus that we gave it up. Al reported psi awareness of the others in the group, and Gerald exhibited the same kind of prophetic discernment of spirits, which characterized his first mescalin experience. Whether I personally shall ever be able to do psi experiments under LSD or mescalin, I don’t know. Certainly, if future experiments should turn out to be like these last two, I should feel that such experiments were merely childish and pointless. Which I suppose they are, for purposes of Understanding—though not at all so, for purposes of Knowledge. Meanwhile let me advise you, if ever you use mescalin or LSD in therapy, to try the effect of the B-minor suite. More than anything, I believe, it will serve to lead the patient’s mind (wordlessly, without any suggestion or covert bullying by doctor or parson) to the central, primordial Fact, the understanding of which is perfect health during the time of the experience, and the memory of the understanding of which may serve as an antidote to mental sickness in the future. I feel sure, however, that it would be most unwise to subject a patient to sentimental religious music or even good religious music, if it were tragic (e.g., the Mozart or Verdi “Requiems,” or Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis”). John Sebastian is safer because, ultimately, truer to reality.
To return to your letter. Of course the stroboscope effect is not retinal. One of the stroboscopic effects, as experienced by my friend Dr. Cholden, was that the patterns he was seeing under LSD turned, when he sat under the stroboscope, into ineffably beautiful Japanese landscapes.
I wish old Jung were not so hipped on symbols. The trouble with Germans is that they always remember the silliest line in Goethe—“alles Vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.” A bigger lie was never uttered. All transiences are timelessly themselves and, being themselves, are manifestations of the One, which is totally present in any particular—if we could only see it. The symbol business has been a very smelly red herring, leading him off the trail of Given Realities “out there” in the mind (just as they are out there in the material world, in spite of Berkeley etc.), and leading it into the jungle, about which he and his followers write in that inimitably turgid and copious style, which is the Jungian hallmark.
The play seems to be in process of being postponed—the produce) having made such a muddle that production at the date contracted for seems now out of the question. As the postponement will be to an election season, which is notoriously the worst possible theatrical season, I am not too happy. But this is what happens when one gets into the clutches of theatrical people. One asks for trouble and, by heaven, one gets what one asks for.
Give my love to Jane and the poetess. I hope the coming year will bring you all contentment, happiness, growth, understanding.
Yours affectionately,
Aldous