“It was without question the most extraordinary and significant experience this side of the Beatific Vision,” Huxley wrote in a letter to his editor shortly after it happened. For Huxley, there was no question but that the drugs gave him access not to the mind of the madman but to a spiritual realm of ineffable beauty. The most mundane objects glowed with the light of a divinity he called “the Mind at Large.” Even “the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’” he tells us, before dilating on the beauty of the draperies in Botticelli’s paintings and the “Allness and
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