And here I think of that passage in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception where he describes the sense that he experienced in his first mescalin adventure of his mind opening to ranges of wonder such as he had never before even imagined. Reflecting on my experience [Huxley wrote], I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr.

The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind.

That is the sense, also, of the saying of the poet William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

there is the no less troublesome doctrine of a universal God whose eye is on but one Chosen People of all in his created world. The fruit of such ethnocentric historicism is poor spiritual fare today; and the increasing difficulties of our clergies in attracting gourmets to their banquets should be evidence enough to make them realize that there

“All of us living beings belong together,” he there declares, “in as much as we are all in reality sides or aspects of one single being, which may perhaps in western terminology be called God while in the Upanishads its name is Brahman.”8

Leo Frobenius,

There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds.

Not economics, in other words, but celestial mathematics were what inspired the religious forms, the arts, literatures, sciences, moral and social orders which in that period elevated mankind to the task of civilized life—again fooling us out of our limits, to achievements infinitely beyond any aims that mere economics, or even politics, could ever

There is always in the adventure great danger of what is known to psychology as “inflation,” which is what overtakes the psychotic. He identifies himself either with the visionary object or with its witness, the visionary subject. The trick must be to become aware of it without becoming lost in it: to understand that we may all be saviors when