JULIAN HUXLEY 
the status of real entities, thinking that there is any such thing 
as “truth” or “‘virtue”’. 
We need co-ordinated research on all methods of attaining 
states of self-transcendent experience: on yoga, both physical 
and psychological; on directed meditation; on hypnotism 
in all its extraordinary manifestations; on dreams and their 
possible control; on apparent “‘possession”’ by an alien person- 
ality or spirit, as in medicine-men or shamans, or as in Haitian 
voodoo; on ecstatic or trance-like experiences produced by 
dancing, as in many tribal societies. In many cases, joint 
participation enhances and socializes the effect; this is so in 
voodoo, in tribal dances, and in the confraternities of dancing 
dervishes. 
Meanwhile, physiology and biochemistry are indicating new 
areas for us to explore. For instance, it has now been shown 
that in man as well as in animals, electric stimulation of a 
particular area in the brain can produce an overwhelming 
sense of happiness or well-being in the whole organism. It has 
even been found possible to make one half of the body feel 
happy, while the other half remains in its normal state. To 
some people this seems somehow too materialistic; but after all, 
electric happiness 1s still happiness, and happiness is very much 
more important than the physical happenings with which it is 
correlated. 
Perhaps even more exciting possibilities are being opened up 
by drugs, like mescalin, lysergic acid, and psilocybin, which can 
produce astonishing results in minute doses. They are called 
““psychedelics”’ because they reveal new capacities of the human 
psyche. They appear to do this by modifying the psychometa- 
bolic machinery which builds up our perceptual world. In 
schizophrenia, some chemical substance, itself possibly due to 
a genetic error of metabolism, is apparently interfering with 
this process, so as to produce disorderly perception. Psychedelic 
drugs, on the other hand, seem to release the process from the 
need to check its results against outer experience. No longer 
forced to achieve coherence with the outer world of sense, it 
can produce inner experiences of great intensity and variety, 
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