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selection which is likely to be practically useful.” We thus have access to a flood of perception, even total perception, “but,” Huxley explained, “in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle, but the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.”4 On top of this atrocious narrowing of reality, humanity invented languages, which are not only systems of speech, but also hidden philosophical systems, and assumptions about what constitutes similarity and difference. Huxley’s claim was that workaday consciousness is a slim and selective vision of reality. Peyote gave you a world so different, you couldn’t believe your brain could put on a show like that. It becomes clear that this brain of yours is putting on a show all the time. If you experience a complex and entirely convincing hallucination—say, your horse talking to you in the language of the Plains Cree—you know something new about perception and about the world.

Take the drug, and “all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen.”5 Huxley listened to the recordings of his conversation under the influence of the drug, and unlike James reported, “I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times.” Instead “the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood”; also fun was that interest in space and time falls almost to zero. A drawback to the drug was that “the mescaline taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular.” That was a problem in part because the trip lasted a bit too long for our culture. (We like a party to last one night.) Charmingly, he put the conundrum in terms established by Jesus: “Mescaline opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation—but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action.”6 If you haven’t read your Christian Bible lately, Mary wants the bliss of truth, and Martha wants to be a good hostess and get everyone lunch:

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:38–42)

Huxley said we couldn’t just be Marys, seeking truth all the time, that we have got to be Marthas, too, for the sake of civilization. It is a telling mid-twentieth-century line, as if Jesus were so obviously wrong here that he should be casually corrected, like a silly schoolchild. The Kingdom sounds terrific, but we’ve got to set the table or nobody eats. Let us at least consider that Jesus was right here, and that contemplation of the true reality of existence might sometimes be allowed to take precedence over household chores.

It was scary to face a “reality greater than a mind,” but this fear is part of what excited Huxley: “The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum.” Amazingly, he announces:

All I am suggesting is that the mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call “a gratuitous grace,” not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed