Psychedelics are having quite the moment right now, with many people claiming, or at least implying that they can provide a chemical shortcut to the kind of numinous affect that has traditionally been the purview of conventional religious practice, whether it’s praying in the celestial room while fasting, focusing on the Eucharist in a perpetual adoration chapel, or meditating under the Bodhi tree. 

As you can imagine, I’m skeptical. Warm fuzzies are definitely part of religion, but it’s not the main thing. Christ didn’t die for us to feel the spirit, he died to redeem us and to pave the way for us to inherit all the Father hath. However, to be intellectually honest, having never done psychedelics, I also don’t know to what extent psychedelics can replicate the feeling of the spirit, or whether it’s an obvious counterfeit. 

On that note, the closest thing to doing psychedelics is reading about them from people who know how to write and describe the kind of difficult-to-describe feelings inherent in chemical trips, and to that end I recently finished Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. 

It wasn’t what I was expecting. My previous experience with a psychedelic memoir was Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was…fun. I definitely see why the kind of angsty white kid really into the Beat Poets and Gonzo journalism would want to do drugs, even if I hope they also become aware of the much darker and painful Hunter S. Thompson drug after story, and wash it down with a few grungy addiction memoirs and movies like Beautiful Boy, Requiem for a Dream, or Trainspotting. 

I’m going to trust Stephen King that the sort of pop wisdom that drugs and alcohol make you a better writer is a myth (as he would know), and it isn’t some higher road to creativity. (We Latter-day Saints can create our own Shakespeares just fine without drugs thank you).

So with all those caveats out of the way, Huxley’s account was surprising in that I never got any sense of hippie new-ageishness from his drug-induced spirituality. Indeed, he actually went out of his way to connect the themes from psychedelics to very traditional religious ones, from Michelangelo to Buddhist Stupas, as if he was a bow-tied, horn-rimmed glass and sweater vest wearing academic writing a comparative religion piece, and not a Joe Rogan (“the Burning Bush was an acacia tree man”). For example, he goes on for pages and pages about the role of bright light, powerful colors, and gemstones in religions across the world using the sort of grand, sweeping knowledge that’s been lost in the age of iPhones and hyperspecialization. 

Given D&C’s language that taps into these concepts as well as our own temple aesthetic that relies on bright light, crystal chandeliers, and reflecting mirrors this is something that should interest us. 

The gate through which the heirs of that kingdom will enter was like unto circling flames of fire

…His eyes were as a flame of fire… his countenance shone above the brightness of the sun.

The earth… will be a Urim and Thummim… a white stone mentioned in Revelation 2:17… on which there is a new name written.

saw the beautiful streets of that kingdom, which had the appearance of being paved with gold.

I already wrote a (admittedly somewhat speculative) post on divine color; here Huxley quotes Socrates’ Phaedo that may have inspired CS Lewis’ description of heaven in The Great Divorce: “In this other earth the colors are much purer and much more brilliant than they are here…the very mountains, the very stones have a richer gloss a lovelier transparency and intensity and hue.” 

Again, it’s worth noting here that Huxley is not using the religious and spiritual roles of bright, profound colors to leverage a thesis that psychedelics are a replacement for religion. Instead, he is using psychedelics as a launching point for discussion about the religious and spiritual roles of bright, profound colors. He’s not being a polemicist for drug decriminalization; throughout you’re not even sure what his perspective on drug legislation would be. 

Some further insightful passages along with my commentary. 

• Half of all morality is negative and consists of keeping out of mischief….The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but to make up for it , he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do.  

This is one reason why Buddhism and other Eastern religions whose raison d’être is overcoming desire and finding restful peace don’t sit as well with me as the restored gospel. Of course there’s nothing wrong with restful peace, but Mormonism has a particularly generative dimension where creation and expansion is divine and not something to overcome. So while calmness and “fear not” has its place, so too does blood-pumping excitement. 

• Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories. I remember what an old friend, dead these many years, told me about his mad wife. One day in the early stages of the disease, when she still had her lucid intervals he had gone to talk to her about their children. She listened for a time, then cut him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of absent children, when all that really mattered, here and now was the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in his brown tweed jacket, every time he moved his arms? Alas, this paradise of cleansed perception, of pure one-sided contemplation, was not to endure. The blissful intermissions became rarer, become briefer, until finally there were no more of them; there was only horror. 

I like the idea that the banal and everyday has a sort of unspeakable divine glory if we saw it through the right eyes. This calls to mind CS Lewis’ point on this.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship

For all his faults like not telling his sexual partners he had AIDS, I find inspirational (even if it’s not factually correct, I don’t know, I wouldn’t put it past him to make it up), Foucault’s writings about how the Middle Age Christians saw the mentally ill as having a special connection to Christ since the atonement was itself considered “crazy” or unprofitable. 

• By John of Patmos and his contemporaries walls of glass were conceivable only in the New Jerusalem. Today they are a feature of every up-to-date office, building, and bungalow. And this glut of glass has been parallel by a glut of chrome and nickel, of stainless steel and aluminum and a host of alloys old and new…Those rich convex reflections, which so fascinated Rembrandt that he never tired of rendering them in paint, are now the commonplaces of home and street and factory…What was once a needle of visionary delight has now become a piece of disregarded linoleum. 

Another reminder that so much that we don’t think twice about today, be it cinnamon, stained glass windows, ochre, or colored dyes, were objects of unspeakable beauty or value that caused wars and hero’s [trading] journeys. 

I went into Huxley on the defensive, ready to defend against the implication that psychedelics were some sort of replacement for faith, but he simply used it as an excuse to write a homage to the beauty of the everyday and the holiness of the visual.