This guy knew how to party

Huxley! I met a guy named Huxley once at a Grateful Dead tribute show. He had dreadlocks and smelled of patchouli. He was always going on and on about good trips and bad trips, and talked about all the funky visuals he was picking while staring at the band. One time he claimed a giant portrait of Jerry Garcia hanging behind the band was singing all the lyrics of the song during the concert. I told him that I hadn’t experienced the same thing, and he just laugh and stumbled off.
For a moment I thought it was the same guy, because immediately when I starting reading this book, here was another guy going on and on about taking drugs and seeing and experiencing new things. But a quick check of the copyright date and further reading revealed that this Huxley had a better explanation for his trips then the funny looking hippie guy.
The Huxley in this book says there is a close chemical composition of mescaline (his drug of choice) and adrenalin. According to the research he was citing, he even went as far to say that, “each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness.” He notes that if this were true it might even better explain schizophrenia.
The Huxley in this book wouldn’t have ever seen Jerry Garcia singing at all. He explains that at first he though this is how his trips would go. “I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of many-colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I had not reckoned it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental make-up, the facts of my temperament, training and habits.”
It turns out that this Huxley wasn’t really a visual person. He instead experienced a deeper change, saying, “The other world to which mescaline admitted me was not the world of visions; it exited out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.”
The Huxley I met at the concert didn’t talk about any of this stuff at all. He was more interested in dancing with no rhythm beside girls that looked very uncomfortable.
I have to admit I really never met a guy named Huxley at a Grateful Dead Tribute concert. I met plenty of guys like him, but I was rather comparing the two to parallel popular misconception behind drug use and where Huxley breaks the mold. (On a side note, I love making fun of hippie, too.)
Ultimately I found the most interest aspects to The Doors of Perception were Huxley’s explanation for psychotropic effects. His interpretations of reality challenge most people’s existential philosophies. By symbolizing the mind as a filter of reality, he explains drugs like mescaline help to “open these doors of perception.”