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"If the
Doors of
Perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is,
infinite."
William Blake
"Whenever the
Secrets of Perception
are taught to anyone
his lips are sewn against speaking of the
Consciousness." -
Rumi
Human beings have an
almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Facts do not cease to exist because
they are ignored.
Words form
the thread on which we string our experiences.
The most valuable result of
conditioning is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when
it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
Great is
truth, but still greater, from a
practical point of view, is silence.
By simply not mentioning certain
subjects propagandists
influence opinion more
effectively than they could have by eloquent denunciations.
In the next generation or
so, a pharmacological
method of making people adore their servitude,
producing dictatorship without
tears, producing a category of painless concentration camp for entire
societies so that people will have their freedom taken away from them but
will rather enjoy it.
Aldous
Leonard Huxley, Prophecies
Mescalin has a position among
drugs of unique distinction.
Administered in suitable doses it
changes the quality
of consciousness more profoundly and yet is
less toxic than any
other substance.
A
philosopher would
take mescalin for the light it throws on such ancient, unsolved riddles such as
the place of mind in
nature and the relationship between brain
and consciousness.
The
chemical composition of mescalin and
adrenalin is
similar.
Further
research reveals lysergic
acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from
ergot, has a structural biochemical
relationship to the others.
Then came the discovery that adrenochrome,
a product of
decomposition of adrenalin, can
produce the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication.
Adrenochrome occurs spontaneously in the human body.
Each one of us is capable of manufacturing this chemical, minute doses
of which are known to cause profound changes in
consciousness.
One bright May morning, I
swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water
and sat down to wait for the results.
We
live together, we act on, and
react to, one another; but always and
in all circumstances we
are by ourselves.
Every
embodied spirit is doomed to
suffer and
enjoy in solitude.
Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and,
except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
We can pool information about
experiences, but never experience itself.
The
mental places inhabited by the insane and
the exceptionally gifted are
different from the places
where ordinary men and women live.
There is no
common ground of
memory to serve as a
basis for connection.
Words are uttered, but fail to
enlighten.
The symbols refer to
mutually exclusive realms of
experience.
The change which actually took place was in no way
revolutionary.
After swallowing mescalin I became
aware of a slow dance of golden lights.
A little later there were sumptuous
red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated
with a continuously changing, patterned life.
There is an inside to
experience as well as an outside, closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray
structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense
solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight.
The
reality to which mescalin admitted me was not the reality of visions.
Reality existed out there, in
what I could see with my eyes open.
I took the mescalin
at eleven.
A little later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently
at a small glass vase.
The vase contained only three flowers-a
full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base
of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and,
pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an
iris.
Fortuitous and provisional, the nosegay broke rules of
traditional good taste.
At
breakfast I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors.
But
that was now no longer the point.
I was not looking at an unusual
flower arrangement.
  
I was seeing what Adam had seen
on the morning of his creation, the
miracle, moment by moment, of
naked existence.
Istigkeit - wasn't
that the word Meister Eckhart liked
to use? "Is-ness."
The transience that is
eternal life,
a perpetual perishing
that is at the same time pure being.
Unique particulars in which, by
some unspeakable and yet self-evident
paradox, is to be seen the divine source of all existence.
The important fact was that
spatial relationships
ceased to matter.
My mind was perceiving
reality in other than spatial categories.
The mind perceives in terms of
intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a
pattern.
The mind is primarily concerned, not with measures and
locations, but with being and meaning.
My actual experience was of
an indefinite duration or alternatively
of a perpetual
present made up of one
continually changing apocalypse.
I was looking at my furniture, not
as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and
not as the cameraman or
scientific recorder, but as the
pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships
within the field of vision.
But as I looked, this purely aesthetic,
Cubist's eye view gave place to what I can only
describe as a sacramental vision of
reality.
The suggestion is that the function of the brain,
nervous system and
sense organs is in the main
eliminative and not productive.
Each individual is at each
moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him.
The function of the brain
and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by
this mass of largely
useless and irrelevant information, by shutting out most of what we sense
at any moment, leaving only that very small and special selection which is
likely to be useful.
What comes out at the other end is a measly
trickle of a category of
consciousness which will help us
to stay alive on the surface
of the Earth.
To formulate and express the
contents of this reduced awareness, man
has invented and endlessly elaborated symbol systems and
implicit philosophies
which we call languages.
Every
individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic
tradition into which he has been born.
The beneficiary inasmuch as
language gives access to the
accumulated records of other people's experiences.
The victim in so
far as it confirms in him the belief that reduced awareness is the only
awareness and as it bedevils his
sense of reality, so that he is all
too apt to take his
concepts for data,
his words for
actual things in reality.
That which, in the language of religion,
is called "this reality" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and,
as it were, petrified by language.
Most humans, most of the time,
know only what comes through reduced
awareness consecrated as genuinely reality by the local culture.
Certain individuals have been born with a
bypass that circumvents the reduction of awareness.
In others
temporary bypasses may be acquired spontaneously, as the
result of deliberate
"spiritual exercises" or by means of entheogens.
Through these
temporary bypasses there flows awareness which is more than, and above all,
different from, the carefully selected
utilitarian material individual minds regard as a sufficient image of
reality.
What happens to those who have taken mescalin can
be summarized as follows:
(1) The ability to remember and to "think straight" is little if at
all reduced.
Listening to the recordings of my conversation under the
influence I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary
times.
(3) Though
the intellect remains
unimpaired and though perceptual coherence is
enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change.
The mescalin
taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular for the good reason that
he has better things to think about.
(4) These better things may be experienced (as I
experienced them) "out there," or "in here," or in both worlds, the inner and
the outer, simultaneously or successively.
That they are better seems
to be self-evident to all
mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound liver and an untroubled
mind.
Some people discover a reality of
visionary beauty.
To others is revealed the glory,
the infinite value and
meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event.
In the final stage of egolessness there is knowledge
all is one and one is
all.
This is as
near as a finite mind can ever come to perceiving the
universe.
Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the
percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at
ordinary times, he is completely
blind.
A priceless gift of a new direct insight into the very
nature of things, together with the modest treasure of understanding
reality.
Such emblems are sources of
true knowledge
about the nature of things, and this
true knowledge may
serve to prepare the mind to accept immediate insights on its own account.
However
expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.
For
the moment, mescalin had delivered me from "the world of selves, of
time, of
moral judgements and
utilitarian considerations, the
world of self-assertion, of
cocksureness, of
overvalued words and
idolatrously worshiped
notions.
Nearly all overact
the part of our favorite character in fiction.
Mescalin can never
solve that problem; it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to whom it
had never before presented itself.
When we feel ourselves to be a part
of the universe, when "the sea flows in our veins ...
and the stars are our
jewels," when all things
are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for
covetousness or
self-assertion, for
the pursuit of power or
the drearier forms of
pleasure?
As a rule the mescalin taker discovers
an inner world as manifest
as reality, as self-evidently "infinite and holy," as the
transfigured outer
world.
Most
visualizers are transformed by mescalin into visionaires.
Some of
them, and they are perhaps more numerous than is generally supposed, require no
transformation;
they are visionaires all the time.
They belong to that archetypal
reality, where men have always found the raw materials of myth and religion.
They have engaged in a retreat from
rational
consciousness into mythical
consciousness.
Mythical consciousness balances
worldview by obscuring rational fragments that don't comfortably fit in.
More clearly present, perhaps, than in
a rationally coherent work.
My body seemed to have
dissociated itself almost completely from my mind.
Even though I
no longer had an awareness of
my physical organism with only a
minimum of hesitation I found myself able to get up,
open the French window and walk
through.
It was odd, of course,
to feel that "I" was not
the same as these arms and legs "out there," as this
wholly objective trunk and
neck and even head.
It was odd; but one soon got used to
it.
And anyhow the body seemed perfectly able to look after
itself.
In reality, of course, it always does look after itself.
All that the conscious ego
can do is to formulate wishes, which are then
carried out by forces
which it controls very little and understands not at all.
When it
does anything more - when it tries too hard, when it worries, when it becomes
apprehensive about the future - it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and
may even cause the devitalized body to fall ill.
In my present state,
ego did not focus awareness; it was on
its own.
The
physiological intelligence controlling the body was also on its own.
For the moment that
interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was
blessedly out of the way.
Where the shadows fell
on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing
indigo alternated with
stripes of intensely bright incandescence so that it was hard to believe that
they could be made of anything but blue fire.
I was so completely
absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not
be aware of anything else.
Garden furniture, lath, sunlight,
shadow - these were no more than
names and notions, mere verbalizations, for
utilitarian or scientific
purposes, after the event.
The event was this succession of azure
furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian.
It was
inexpressibly wonderful, to the point, almost, of being terrifying.
Most
takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of
schizophrenia.
Mescalin brings hell only to those who have had a recent
case of jaundice, or who suffer from
periodical
depressions or a chronic
anxiety.
If, like the other drug of remotely comparable power,
mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself,
to cause anxiety.
The
reasonably healthy individual knows in advance that mescalin is completely
innocuous, that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no
hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose.
Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without any
disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than normal human
experience into something appalling, something actually
diabolical.
This, I
suddenly felt, was going too far.
Too far, even though going into
intenser beauty, deeper significance.
The fear,
analyzed in retrospect, was of
being overwhelmed, of
disintegrating
under the pressure of a greater reality than I was accustomed to,
a cosy world of
symbols.
The literature of religious
experience abounds in references to
the pains and terrors
overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with a
manifestation of the
mysterium tremendum.
In theological language, this fear is due to
the incompatibility
between man's egotism and the
divine
purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness
and the Eternity of God.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead I opened at random.
"O
nobly born, let not
thy mind be distracted."
That was the problem - to remain
undistracted.
Undistracted by the
memory of past sins, by imagined pleasure, by
the bitter
aftertaste of old
wrongs and humiliations, by all the
fears and
hates and
cravings that
ordinarily eclipse the light.
Ultimate reality remains
unshakably itself and is of the
same substance as the
inner light.
A clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full
bloom, exploded into my field of vision.
So passionately alive, they
seemed to be standing on the
very brink of utterance,
the flowers strained
upwards into the blue.
I looked down at the leaves and discovered a
cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows, pulsing with
indecipherable mystery.
Roses. The
flowers are easy to paint. The
leaves difficult.
Shiki's haiku expresses, by indirection, exactly what
I then felt-the excessive, the too obvious
glory of the flowers, as contrasted with the subtler miracle of their foliage.
Effects of the mescalin were on the decline:
the flowers in the
gardens still trembled on the brink of being supernatural, the pepper trees
and carobs along the side streets still manifestly belonged to some sacred
grove.
Abruptly,
we were at an intersection, waiting to cross Sunset Boulevard.
The cars
were rolling by in a steady stream - thousands of them, all bright and shiny
like an advertiser's dream and each more
ludicrous than the last.
And all at once I saw what Guardi had seen and had so often rendered in
his paintings - a stucco wall with a shadow slanting across it, blank but
unforgettably beautiful, empty but charged with all the meaning and the mystery
of existence.
Revelation dawned and was
gone again within a fraction of a second.
An hour later, I had returned
to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right
mind."
That humanity at large will ever be
able to dispense with artificial
paradises seems very unlikely.
Most men and women lead lives at the
worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to
escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and
has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
All the
vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the
hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots-all, without
exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time
immemorial.
Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken
except under doctor's orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk.
For unrestricted use America has permitted only
alcohol and
tobacco.
Doors of Perception
are labeled dope, unauthorized takers are
"fiends".
To most people,
mescalin is almost completely innocuous.
Unlike alcohol, it does not
drive the taker into the
category of uninhibited action which results in brawls, crimes of violence and
traffic accidents.
A man
under the influence of mescalin quietly goes about his own business.
Indians who consume peyote buttons are not physically or morally
degraded.
The urge to transcend
self-consciousness is a principal appetite of the soul.
When, for whatever reason, men and women
fail to transcend themselves
by means of worship, good
works and spiritual
exercises, they are apt to resort to surrogates -
alcohol and "goof pills" in
modern North America,
alcohol and
opium in the East,
hashish in the
Mohammedan world,
alcohol and
marijuana in
Central America,
alcohol and
coca in the Andes,
alcohol and the
barbiturates in
the more up-to-date regions of South
America.
In Poisons Sacrés, Ivresses Divines Philippe
de Felice has written at length, with a wealth of documentation, on the
connection between religion and entheogens.
Ritual use of entheogens can
be observed in every culture on Earth.
I am
suggesting that the mescalin experience is what some
Catholic theologians
call "a gratuitous grace,"
to be accepted thankfully.
To be shaken out of
the ruts of ordinary
perception, to be
shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner reality, not as they
appear to an animal
obsessed with survival or to
a human being obsessed
with words and notions, but as they are apperceived, directly and
unconditionally.
This is an experience of inestimable
value especially to the intellectual.
We can never dispense with
language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by
their means, that we have raised
ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings.
Unfortunately we can as easily become the victims as well as the
beneficiaries of these systems.
We must learn how to handle
words effectively; but at the same time we must
intensify our
ability to look at reality directly and not through that
half opaque medium of
concepts, which distorts every
given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or
explanatory
abstraction.
This has been demonstrated by many tribes of Native
Americans.
Among these Native American tribes are to be found groups
affiliated with the Native American church, a sect whose principal rite is a
category of early Christian
Agápe, or compassion feast, where slices of peyote take the place of
the sacramental bread and
wine.
These Native Americans regard the cactus as God's special
gift to the Native Americans, and equate its effects with the workings of
Divine Spirit.
JS Slotkin, one of
the very few white men ever to have participated in the rites of a peyotist
congregation, says of his fellow worshipers:
are not stupefied or
drunk;
never get out of rhythm or fumble words;
all are quiet,
courteous and considerate of one another.
For
these Native Americans, sychronized
religious experience is more
direct and illuminating,
more spontaneous,
less the product of the
superficial, self-conscious mind.
Sometimes they see visions, which
may be of Jesus Himself.
Sometimes they hear the
voice of the Great Spirit.
They become aware of the
Presence of God and of
those personal shortcomings which must be corrected to stay within the
Will of God.
The
practical consequences of these entheogen openings of doors into inner reality
seem to be wholly good.
Slotkin reports that peyotists are on the whole
more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether from
alcohol), more peaceable.
A tree
with satisfactory fruit cannot be condemned as evil.
In sacramentalizing the use
of peyote Native American Church Indians have done something which is
psychologically sound and historically respectable.
Here the
the soul knows itself
as unconditioned and of like nature with the divine, hence the Native
American Church.
In it two great
appetites of the soul -
the urge to
independence and self-determination and
the urge to
self-transcendence are fused with, and
interpreted in the light
of, a third, the urge to
worship, to justify the ways of God to man,
to explain the universe by
means of a coherent theology.
Literary or scientific, liberal or
specialist,
education is
predominantly symbol manipulation and therefore fails to enlighten us.
Instead of transforming children into fully
developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are
completely unaware of nature as the primary facet of experience, it inflicts
upon the Earth students of the humanities who know nothing of
humanity.
The art of being directly aware of the
given reality of existence is ignored.
Systematic reasoning is
something we could not, as a
species or as individuals,
possibly do without.
But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we
possibly do without direct
perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer
realities into which we have been born.
This given reality is an
infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in
some sort totally apperceived.
To be enlightened is to be aware of
total reality in its immanent otherness.
Near the end of his life
Thomas Aquinas experienced Infused
Contemplation.
Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his
unfinished book.
(Note: Most likely he was unable after experincing a
stroke while at the same recognized
the futility of attempting
to define God.)
The man
who comes back through the Doors of Perception will
never be quite the same as
the man who went out.
He will be wiser
but less cocksure, happier but less
self-satisfied,
humbler in acknowledging his
ignorance yet better equipped to
understand the relationship of things and to apply
systematic reasoning
to mystery in an attempt to
comprehend.
-
adapted from The Doors of Perception, Aldous Leonard
Huxley
Aldous
Huxley examined and critiqued social morés,
societal norms and ideals, as well
as the possible misapplications of science in
human life.
Aldous Huxley wrote on the
dehumanising aspects of
scientific progress.
Aldous Huxley
examined the tragedy that
frequently follows from
egocentrism:
self-centeredness and
selfishness.
While Aldous Huxley was noted for
compassion, only
considerably later, some say under the influence of such friends as
DH Lawrence, did he heartily embrace
feelings as matters of importance in his evolving personal philosophy and
literary expression.
Aldous Huxley, immigrated to America, but was denied citizenship as he
refused to ascribe his pacifism
to religious
beliefs.
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