The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 25 of 125
LSD's power to terrify
The next morning I sat staring blankly at the trip journal. What on Earth had happened? Was that Grof’s “transpersonal realm”? If so, describing it as “multilayered and multidimensional” was putting it mildly. How did such an amalgam of diverse elements—astoundingly sophisticated communication, buffoonery, and stone-cold terror—belong together? Above all, what got through to me was the fear. So nothing had really changed. LSD still had the power to terrify me in a way nothing else had ever done, with a quality of the supernatural, of metaphysical damnation nothing else could command, and that an intervening lifetime had done nothing to diminish. At the heart of LSD was something that scared the living daylights out of me . . . but what was it? Confused and upset, I turned to Aldous Huxley and reread The Doors of Perception and found, much to my surprise, that Huxley had gone through something very similar. I had forgotten a key passage in his essay. His trip had not, as I remembered, peaked in the living room, the is-ness of which had been so miraculously revealed to him. Not in his perception of his books, nor his vase of flowers, nor his furniture . . . no, the climax had come just after that. Huxley had wandered out of the living room into the garden, dazzling in the L.A. sunshine, and been stopped dead in his tracks by the explosion of terrifyingly beautiful color into which a garden chair had turned.