The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 123 of 125
Love as the primary cosmic fact
Shortly after that momentous May morning in the Los Angeles hills, Aldous Huxley’s wife, Maria, had died of cancer. Huxley nursed her devotedly through her last days, but during the months following her death he found himself increasingly attracted to a younger woman, Laura Archera. During this period Huxley had a second mescaline trip in the company of two friends, though this appears to have fallen far short of the intensity of the first one; and for his third experiment he asked Laura to sit for him. Nominally this was because Laura was a psychotherapist, and Huxley, who could remember next to nothing of his early childhood, wanted her to help him probe for these lost years. Predictably enough, no such thing took place. A few days after the session, Huxley wrote to Humphry Osmond, the doctor who had supervised his first mescaline trip and subsequently become a close friend, as to the distance separating that first session from what had just happened. Instead there was something of incomparably greater importance; for what came through the closed door was the realization—not the knowledge, for this wasn’t verbal or abstract—but the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains. I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been.