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In the early 1950s, distinguished novelist Aldous Huxley ingested mescaline and wrote about the experience in The Doors of Perception. For Timothy Leary, the Merry Pranksters, Jim Morrison (who named the Doors after the book), and a whole generation of psychedelic seekers, Huxley's account became an essential touchstone.

Today, Huxley's insights into the psychedelic experience remain as fresh and provocative as ever. By taking mescaline, he hoped to experience, from the inside out, the sort of visionary mysticism that inspired artists such as William Blake. What Huxley discovered was something else altogether. Instead of a luminous inner world, he found himself transcending his own consciousness and becoming one with the outer world, where everything -- the desk, the chair, the flower vase -- "shone with an Inner Light and was infinite in its significance."

Huxley concluded that although psychedelic drugs did not offer enlightenment as to life's ultimate purpose, they could open the door to self-transcendence, offering a sacramental vision of everyday reality akin to the Catholic concept of "gratuitous grace." Lambasting his contemporaries' lack of curiosity about mescaline's potential as a spiritual catalyst, he worte, "The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same man who wnet out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance but better equipped to understand the relationship of words to hings, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."