All good. But the most important takeaway for me was in a letter he wrote afterwards. I’m paraphrasing because I read it very long ago. He said something like, I experienced the beatific vision, it was all there as the saints described it…on the other hand it could have been a…mental breakdown. Google search says it was a letter to the Salisbury Times. It wasn’t just the Isness of the chair leg and the flannel folds, it was that they led him to that beatific vision, to seeing the infinite and absolute, the All and the One, the universal in the particular. In “The Trip to the Moon Episode” of my novel, Divine Madness - The Quantum Mechanics of the Soul, the protagonist and his girlfriend (future wife), at her urging, take a mescaline trip as part of her research on her senior thesis project, using chaos theory to understand the nature of God.
The doubt is in the book too, which I think makes it stronger rather than a later retraction.
Huxley spends a stretch of Doors on schizophrenia, and the point he keeps returning to is that the schizophrenic cannot get back out. Same door, same removal of the filter, and what decides whether it is beatific or unbearable is not the chemistry but what the person brings to it.
So the letter reads to me as consistent rather than a recantation. He never claimed the valve opening was automatically good news.
Then your protagonist has the harder version of it.
Huxley could write about not getting back out precisely because he always did, and that is the one safety the book never names.
Your setup gives her a reason to go in and a reason to come back, and the thesis is the rope. He never had to invent that structure, because for him the mescaline wore off and the chair leg went back to being a chair leg.
All good. But the most important takeaway for me was in a letter he wrote afterwards. I’m paraphrasing because I read it very long ago. He said something like, I experienced the beatific vision, it was all there as the saints described it…on the other hand it could have been a…mental breakdown. Google search says it was a letter to the Salisbury Times. It wasn’t just the Isness of the chair leg and the flannel folds, it was that they led him to that beatific vision, to seeing the infinite and absolute, the All and the One, the universal in the particular. In “The Trip to the Moon Episode” of my novel, Divine Madness - The Quantum Mechanics of the Soul, the protagonist and his girlfriend (future wife), at her urging, take a mescaline trip as part of her research on her senior thesis project, using chaos theory to understand the nature of God.
The doubt is in the book too, which I think makes it stronger rather than a later retraction.
Huxley spends a stretch of Doors on schizophrenia, and the point he keeps returning to is that the schizophrenic cannot get back out. Same door, same removal of the filter, and what decides whether it is beatific or unbearable is not the chemistry but what the person brings to it.
So the letter reads to me as consistent rather than a recantation. He never claimed the valve opening was automatically good news.
My characters mention that. I posted the two chapters about the mescaline trip on my profile. I’ll link them here for you.
https://substack.com/@joeynostrils/note/c-355026079?r=1g7i8f&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Then your protagonist has the harder version of it.
Huxley could write about not getting back out precisely because he always did, and that is the one safety the book never names.
Your setup gives her a reason to go in and a reason to come back, and the thesis is the rope. He never had to invent that structure, because for him the mescaline wore off and the chair leg went back to being a chair leg.