When Aldous Huxley took mescalin to study human consciousness, he expected to have inner visions and was thunderstruck by the unfamiliar outer world he saw instead. He was astonished by the richness of what there is to see, its significance, and by how radically the mind deletes information. Huxley experienced the eye as a door. He reflected on the insights sight offers: surprising discovery; awareness of things in themselves, their being and becoming; a shift from the perception of discrete things to feeling their correlations; enhanced empathy; a sacramental vision of reality.