LSD intensifies perceptions, vivifies colours, re-animates long-forgotten memories. A common experience with it duplicates one that comes to mystics. It is as if one part of the man is entirely outside the other part, as if he were two persons. As mind, pure "I"-consciousness, he is invisible. As physical body, he is the object looked at a short distance in front of the "I." Some subjects found the experience horrible and would have no more of it. But others found it delightful and could not get too much.
The normal safe dose of LSD is 100 micrograms, hardly a pinhead. The tremendous power of this chemical drug far exceeds all the old natural drugs hitherto known.
In The Island, his last novel, Aldous Huxley seemed to recommend drug-taking as a means of procuring spiritual glimpses, and to assert that there is no difference in result between them and orthodox ones. This is no more correct than the assertion that there is no difference between a real object and its duplicate in a glass mirror.
Drugs destroy character, weaken the will, and sabotage the memory. They pervert the reasoning faculty. Drugs taken long enough turn the taker into an addict. In the end, when dependence is complete, he will be a nervous, moral, or physical wreck, depending on the kind of person he is.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 11 : Fanaticism, Money, Powers, Drugs > # 140
