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Like Aldous Huxley he had taken mescalin, but Zaehner came to a different conclusion. In his 1957 book Mysticism. Sacred and Profane. An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience, he aims to uphold a distinction between an amoral monism on the one hand and theistic mysticism on the other. In part he relies on a personal experience recorded by Martin Buber. Here and elsewhere, he thus sets himself against Huxley's adoption of the Perennial Philosophy.
In his later book Our Savage God, especially in his essay "Rot in the Clockwork Orange", Zaehner argued against aspects of an ancient monism which he saw as leading logically to excess, not only of the kind propagated by Timothy Leary, or even earlier by Aleister Crowley, but perhaps eventually, ultimately to the criminal depravity of Charles Manson. Here Zaehner provides a warning how the misuse of theology can result in horror.
Read more about this topic: Robert Charles Zaehner
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