OUTSIGHT: The Greatest Thing that Never Happened in Psychedelia

Outsight was a bold plan to bring together and give mescaline and/or LSD to fifty to a hundred of the world’s pre-eminent minds, including Einstein, Jung, A. J. Ayer, and Graham Greene. The intention was that “of changing the intellectual climate,” (26 June 1953) as lead instigator Osmond put it to fellow organiser, Huxley. The greater intention was that of changing Western civilisation, away from “the materialist way of life” (ibid.) to one where a transcendental dimension was registered, not by faith but by experience and experiment, not by religion but by science and philosophy.