All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call ‘a gratuitous grace’, not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual, For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe’s phrase, ‘the word is essentially fruitful’.

— The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley (Page 60)