Does anyone remember the name Aldous Huxley? For those who don’t, he was a writer and philosopher of the early part of the last century, probably best known for his novel “Brave New World,” about a techno- totalitarian future. He was also the author of a book called “The Perennial Philosophy,” which was an attempt to describe the basis of all world religions, and to reduce them to certain principles made explicit in eastern thought.
The phrase perennial philosophy is not unique to him. It goes back several hundred years, and often appears in statements struggling with what I think of as a basically Unitarian idea—that of finding links between apparently divergent ideas of God, the universe and everything. Huxley was an adventurous man, one of those like William James who was willing to experiment with chemicals to find religious truth.
I remember Huxley for another, less well-known book he wrote in the fifties, called “The Doors of Perception.” This was the story of an experiment he conducted using mescaline, the active ingredient of “magic mushrooms” with a young British psychiatrist. In those days the taking of chemical substances for mystical experiences was all but unknown. Remember, this was a decade and a half before hippies, acid rock and the Summer of Love. The subject of the experiment described what he was experiencing in profound and poetic language. Describing three flowers in a vase on the desktop, the subject who had been given mescaline said:
“… a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light, and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged-- a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being.”
These and other such writings were very important to me as a young seeker. They were clues in a mystery that has involved many people over the centuries—you might even say a mystery that involves every one of us. The language used here is evocative of the language used by mystics from every persuasion and tradition. Huxley himself equated it with the writings of the great mystic Meister Eckhart, who used the term istigheit, or “isness” to describe the real state of everything that lies just beneath its normal, flat appearance. This “isness” both makes meaningful the objects seen, and at the same time, points to a oneness that underlies everything. Glimpses of this “isness” can occur to anybody at almost any time. It is something that accompanies so-called mystical experience and is universally described in writings as diverse as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Plato’s Republic. The fact that it occurred to the young psychiatrist in an altered state brought upon by the use of a mushroom extract makes it no less intriguing.
These glimpses of a world that underlies the pedestrian one we normally inhabit led Huxley on to his rather grander attempt to make unifying statements about the great world religions. It spoke of a view of the universe that ultimately resolves itself into a state of oneness, and the nearest thing he could think of in traditional world theology was the Hindu notion that all souls are drops in the ocean of one soul, only apparently separate and ultimately destined to return.
Now this notion is next to impossible to explain, since words themselves tend to flatten out the meaning. But I’ll try anyway and give you my own version (fasten your seat belts, please):
Once upon a time, so long ago, perhaps that it never really happened, everything in every direction forever was asleep. Everything: space, time, consciousness, existed only in potential, and what there was was void. In this great sleeping void, a question surged, at the place Hindus call the Om Point, and this vastness asked itself, “Who am I?”
And there poured from this great ocean of unconsciousness an infinite number of wrong answers: suns and galaxies and universes, filling nothingness with everythingness. You can call it the Big Bang if you like, but that’s just sound effects. And the suns cooled and planets formed and oceans appeared. In the Bible this was the second day, right after light and darkness. And things began to creep and swim and slither, and the consciousness known as creation grew. Fins became limbs and wings, and eyes saw and clumps of neural flesh became brains with memories and thoughts and dreams and at a certain point began to give voice to the original question, “Who am I?” And they came to Unitarian churches and sat through sermons, asking this question, which was the whole point of creation really, and gave the wrong answer in a million ways in a zillion days, but they are all heading for the right answer, the realisation that they are all that one infinite being who always was and always will be.
Sometimes they see the way back to the source, just catch a glimpse through the fluttering curtain, and this fills them with peace, and for a fleeting second they know that all is truly well, and not only well but interesting and exciting and full of joy, but then they forget again until the next time. Those with better memories, whose eyes are a bit wider open, perhaps, are adored and become the occasion for religions until they are crucified or forgotten. But that doesn’t matter really, because everything does finally work out. So what remains is this: the occasional opportunity to see through appearances to the heart of things, to its “isness.” In time this perception becomes the object of heartfelt desire. Its other name is love.
If you’re still with me, I count that an act of great loyalty. Thank you. The trip we just went on is probably the shortest lesson in Eastern mysticism that there ever was. I have probably done a great disservice to Huxley and thousands of years of Eastern thinkers, but I’ve brought myself back to the point where I started, with the young British psychologist and his vase of flowers that pointed to the oneness of everything.
But the plot thickens: Later I went to work for that same young British psychiatrist. If there is such a thing as co-incidence, then this is one of them. His name was Humphrey Osmond, and he was head of a neuro-psychiatric research institute near Princeton, New Jersey. I was a young underpaid researcher in one of his departments. When I went to work there, I didn’t even know that he was that man. I wouldn’t have, either, if he hadn’t been a very approachable person, one who welcomed the half-baked theories of a young man who had also experimented with mescaline, and who had also seen briefly through that curtain of so-called reality.
We used to talk when I wasn’t doing my paid work -- observing how schizophrenics sat at table in the cafeteria through a one-way glass. And when Dr. Osmond wasn’t dealing with grant applications and other paperwork. His life had been changed through the experience with Huxley, and he tried to enlighten all his other research through memories of it. It was he who coined that word we all used to hear so often: psychedelic. He was an early colleague of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, now known as Ram Dass. He was experimenting with the use of LSD in the cure of alcoholism. The year was 1968, so we can forgive ourselves a little naivety. We never foresaw how the use of chemical substances to seek the truth would become heavy metal music, paisley wallpaper and drug abuse.
Humphrey Osmond, Aldous Huxley and a few others had seen a glimpse of something that—in one sense—made everything else irrelevant. You can call this mystical experience if you like, or—for the cynic—a drug-induced illusion. It wasn’t theology—Huxley went off on that tangent alone. Nor was it scientific research, however hard Osmond tried to integrate it into his work. It was a simple direct perception of a truth. It was recognisable as the same perception that has been held by a multitude of writers through the ages. Huxley called his book “The Doors of Perception” after a line by William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear as it is—eternal.”
By the time I met Humphrey Osmond, I had already given up the search for reality through chemicals. Peyote and mescaline and LSD had become illegal the year before, and I was involved with a spiritual teacher who said that reality was too great to be found through any pill. And of course that is right. A glimpse of something that special needs to be prepared for, even earned, or its effect is lost. It’s no good imitating the biochemical changes in the brain that might well happen during authentic mystical experience; it must take place from the inside out. But it left behind certain impressions that could not be erased, of the possibility of seeing and experiencing a reality that transcends this one; one that gives it final meaning.
A few years after leaving Princeton I was engaged in a retreat at a spiritual centre in South Carolina. I had spent the day in silence, which isn’t easy for a blown-in-the-glass talk artist like me. I had done a lot of praying and meditating as well. All this had worn me out, and so I turned in early, about nine o’clock. I was staying in a little one-person cabin near a pond, and the frogs and night noises were keeping me awake. I couldn’t sleep, but I wasn’t really awake, either. I think they call this a hypnogogic state. Anyway, I suddenly had a kind of vision. There were no angels or bright lights involved, just a very clear mental image of a straw basket filled with rags. It seemed to have the same quality as that described by Osmond in Huxley’s book, of bursting with this quality of “isness.” I don’t know whether I had my eyes closed or not, so I don’t know if I was projecting the image into the room.
It made me sit bolt upright in bed, and for a time I was feeling that extraordinary peace that follows a “peak experience.” I had no idea what the image represented, whether it was symbolic or an actual glimpse of another reality, or what. It didn’t worry me though. I went right to sleep. From time to time I would think about it over the next few years, but it seemed just another interesting experience, like seeing a UFO or a ghost, and apart from the telltale feeling of peace, nothing more than that.
Some years later I ran across a book of Sufi stories collected by the Murshid Idries Shah. One in particular made a strong impact. In fact, it jolted me back to my vision in the cabin years before. I told a version of it two summers ago to the children, but I’ll tell it to you again now, because a good tale merits re-telling.
Once upon a time there was a certain King who had been in exile for many years, but who was soon to return to his kingdom. This was a cause of great rejoicing to the people, for the king was well loved. The grand vizier invited everyone to come and decorate the palace for the king’s arrival, and so they did, carrying garlands of flowers, wreaths and ribbons, and even gilt paint to make the palace even more ornate.
All except for one old man, who turned up the day before the king’s return. He wasn’t carrying flowers or wreaths or ribbons or gold paint, but only a basket full of rags. He was challenged by the populace: “What are you doing here with those rags, old man? What good are they for adorning the palace?”
The old man said, “The garlands and flowers and gold are wonderful, but it seems to me that there is nothing more beautiful than the sight of the king. I have brought these rags to clean the windows and doors of this place, so that his radiance may shine out onto the streets.”
When I came across this story, it occurred to me that my vision of the basket of rags had been explained. It goes back to Blake’s statement that the doors of perception need cleaning, so that everything is revealed as eternal. We have heard from the great mystics of the world a curious thing. They have universally agreed, from Buddhist “unlearning” to the invocation of the pure state of children by Jesus, that truth is not something to be learned. Rather it is something to be found after clearing away the false. This clearing away of the false is really the task of each of us. It explains why we have such strange errands in this life, the many experiences that need to be seen through as we grow.
The rags that we carry with us are scraps of experiences we have had, the remnants of former days that we have lived through, from which we have extracted a certain essence, and that we have let go. The basket, perhaps is the soul. We didn’t know at the time that the whole cloth of our experience would one day make these very useful rags, just as we now do not know that this time of our lives will also be used someday for cleaning our own doors of perception.
Paul said, “for now we see as through a glass darkly; but then, face to face.” This doesn’t make me sad; rather it fills me with a kind of quiet joy. It makes me speculate-- just as one day I shall truly know-- that nothing is lost, nothing is meaningless, and nothing is really accidental. That’s what the peep through the glass has taught me, covered though it is with the grime of self-love and the dust of ignorance.
It made me want to tell you about it.
And so I did.
Rev.Art Lester