The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 26 of 125
Huxley's chair like the Last Judgment
Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment—or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair—I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. Magnificent description that this was, and while I could recognize much of my own experience reflected there, I felt there was something missing. Huxley suggested such visions were purgatorial. “The literature of religious experience,” he continued, “abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum.”