The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [56]
I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man…. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it.
For the uneducated, says James, drink “stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature,” and he also says that it is a great mystery that something so magnificent is available to so many of us “only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning.”2 He’s not missing that it is degrading, and a poison; he’s praising it anyway, as so many people do by their actions. Modern rhetoric is completely missing this part of the conversation.
James added that nitrous oxide and ether also stimulate a mystical consciousness.
Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness…. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.3
Philosophical insights about reality, James continued, suggest a secret that most of us do not usually have any sensory access to: “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.”
Aldous Huxley found mescaline helpful. His Doors of Perception (1954) took its title from a William Blake line: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it really is, infinite.” Just in case you are already thinking hippy: Huxley, a lithe man, small of shoulder, wore suits, glasses with thick circular lenses, and kept his dark hair swept neatly back from his forehead. He explained that scientists had noted a chemical similarity between mescaline and adrenaline (epinephrine), which made psychiatrists wonder if we were not all capable of producing the chemical. Mescaline-trip descriptions were very similar to the way schizophrenics described their reality. The question became “Are mental disorders due to chemical disorders?” Psychologists had begun trying the drug on themselves to see what their schizophrenic patients perhaps saw. Huxley decided to try it, too, in the spring of 1953.
His experience led him to believe a notion he credited to Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad, but which we can see proposed earlier by Schopenhauer and others. In Huxley’s words: “The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special