The Doors of Perception — Aldous Huxley

Huxley's 1954 essay, an account of a single afternoon on mescaline, gave the twentieth-century psychedelic movement much of its vocabulary. 'Doors of perception,' 'the mind at large,' the frame of the brain as reducing valve — all of it enters the popular discourse through this slim, lucid book.

Read now, it is more thoughtful and less credulous than its reputation suggests. Huxley is not proselytizing. He is describing, carefully, what happened, and considering what it might mean about the ordinary human perceptual apparatus.

It is short. It is a starting point rather than a destination. It remains a starting point worth taking.