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

he had long worked on “the possibility of abolishing time, and of putting oneself into a trans-temporal condition” (Bricklin, 235–36). Eliade is, of course, well known for his insistence on a version of the eternal return and endlessly bashed for his “anti-history.” That is what happens to someone who tries to write about time in ways beyond the positivist or postmodern order of knowledge.