How to Break on Through to the Other Side

The Doors released their first single in 1967: “Break on Through (to the Other Side),” a tribute of sorts to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.

Huxley had been trying to break on through to the other side for years. He put together a splendid book in the 1940s called The Perennial Philosophy, which looked at the conclusions of “empirical theology” over the millennia when it comes to the “macro” issues of our existence: God, truth, charity, suffering, etc. Think of the appendix to C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, then expand it by about 500.

It seems Huxley was always knocking on the door, trying to get through to something else that wasn’t part of everyday experience.

When he read about Dr. Humphry Osmond’s experiments with mescaline in Canada, Huxley, then living in Los Angeles, wrote to him about trying it. When Osmond was later in Los Angeles for a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Huxley brought him to his Hollywood home and Osmond administered the trip, which lasted from about 11:00 AM until 7:00 PM on May 4, 1953.

It was, said biographer Nicholas Murray, the most famous “English literary drug taking since DeQuincey” took opium.

Huxley later wrote about the experience in The Doors of Perception, which became a standard text among the 1960s counterculture. The Doors launched their recording career with it. The Beatles put Huxley on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (which featured people that the Beatles would invite to a party). It became Huxley’s second most-recognized book (after Brave New World). The 1960s drug generation loved Huxley.

In return, Huxley deplored that generation. That fact isn’t often recounted in our pop culture. And neither is the fact that Huxley didn’t think psychedelics were that great. He apparently tried them only once more before dying in 1963.

When he decided to try psychedelics, he was convinced that they would admit him “into the kind of inner world described by” William Blake.

They didn’t.

And Huxley knew it:

“I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable…