1960
Letters
Huxley lectured widely this year, at colleges on both coasts and at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka. His growing popularity as a lecturer can probably be attributed both to his unique and charming intelligence, and to his subject matter, of which Visionary Experience was only one compelling topic. Cancer was discovered but quickly destroyed by radium needle treatment There was time for two psychedelic sessions: an LSD experiment in June, in which he contemplated the Hindu and Buddhist interpretations of love (attachment/detachment—“both kinds of nirvana). Then, in November, he and Humphry Osmond journeyed to Cambridge where they met Dr. Timothy heavy and his colleagues who were then conducting large-scale experiments at Harvard (the Psychedelic Research Project). There Huxley took psilocybin for the first time, in a group consisting of five other persons.
TO DR. HUMPHRY OSMOND [SMITH 842]
3276 Deronda Dr.,
L.A. 28, Cal.
17 July, 1960
MY DEAR HUMPHRY,
Thank you for your good letter [….]
Your work with imagers sounds very interesting. Have you any idea why some people visualize and others don’t? I don’t, except when my temperature touches 103°. Even LSD—at least in 100 µ doses—doesn’t make me see things with my eyes shut. I took some LSD 3 or 4 weeks ago and had some interesting experiences of the way in which, as the Indians say, the thought and the thinker and the thing thought about are one—and then of the way in which this unowned experience becomes something belonging to me; then no me any more and a kind of sat chit ananda, at one moment without karuna or charity (how odd that the Vedantists say nothing about Love, whereas the Mahayana Buddhists insist that unless prajnaparamita (the wisdom of the other shore) has karuna as the reverse of the medal, nirvana is, for the Bodhisattva, no better than hell). And in this experience with LSD, I had an inkling of both kinds of nirvana—the loveless being-consciousness-bliss, and the one with love and, above all, a sense that one can never love enough.
I liked the things you said for Dr. Raynor Johnson’s chapter on drugs and spiritual experience in his latest book.1 An interesting book—tho’ perhaps he multiplies spiritual entities beyond what is strictly necessary. But perhaps Ockham’s razor isn’t a valid scientific principle. Perhaps entities sometimes ought to be multiplied beyond the point of the simplest possible explanation. For the world is doubtless far odder and more complex than we ordinarily think.
I hope your administrative difficulties have been resolved and that you are now free to get on with something more interesting. Im glad to hear that the Russians have picked up your [adrenochrome] work.
Ever yours,
Aldous