How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

This is British parliamentarian Christopher Mayhew, friend of Aldous Huxley, in Benny Shanon, The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 227–28. Jonathan Bricklin fills in more details in Jonathan Bricklin, The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’s Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016). He tells us that Mayhew’s experience was on mescalin, which he took for a British documentary that was never aired, lest it offend the religious. Bricklin also points out that Mircea Eliade called this same account a “prodigious document” and confessed that he “trembled with joy” when he read it, since