One bright May morning in 1953, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes, everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his grey flannel trousers, was completely transformed. "A bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light. Those folds - what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his own creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence."
With an astonishing immediacy, Aldous Huxley described his first experience of this new sacramental vision of reality in his famous 1954 essay 'The Doors Of Perception'. In its 1956 sequel, 'Heaven And Hell', Huxley, reflecting on his earlier mescalin experience, went on to explore the history and nature of mystics and mysticism. Hugely influential, still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, these intense and illuminating writings remain one of the most extraordinary accounts of the visionary experience every written.
