A Door in the compartmentalizing Wall

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." - William Blake

Most 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.

Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

The genius carries the spirit of the child into old age - never lose your enthusiasm.

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education 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 about truth.
By simply not mentioning certain subjects totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a category of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their freedom taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.(see social control through drugs)

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 in the pharmacologist's repertory.

A philosopher would take mescalin for the light it might throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.

There is a similarity, in chemical composition, between mescalin and adrenalin. Further research revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness.

Thus it came about that, 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. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffered 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 the experiences themselves.

The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

The change which actually took place in reality was in no way revolutionary. Half an hour after swallowing the 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 other reality to which mescalin admitted me was not the reality of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open.

I took the mescalin at eleven. An hour and a half 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 little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now 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."

A transience that is eternal life, a perpetual perishing that is at the same time pure being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, is to be seen the divine source of all existence. The really important fact was that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving reality in terms of 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 had been, was still, 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 the sacramental vision of reality.

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and 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 or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."

What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the 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, however, seem to be 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 drugs. Through these permanent or temporary bypasses there flows awareness which is more than, and above all some different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture 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 of mescalin, I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times.)

(2) Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero.

(3) Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing any thing 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 that 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. All manner of wealth, a gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very nature of things, together with a more 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 which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

For the moment, mescalin had delivered me "the world of selves, of time, of moral judgments and utilitarian considerations, the world of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words and idolatrously worshiped notions. Successfully or unsuccessfully, we 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 that transfigured outer world which I had seen with my eyes open.

Most visualizers are transformed by mescalin into visionaries. Some of them, and they are perhaps more numerous than is generally supposed, require no transformation; they are visionaries 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 the outward reality into the personal subconscious, into a mental reality more squalid and more tightly closed than even the reality of conscious personality.

The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work.

I was willing; and though my body seemed to have dissociated itself almost completely from my mind - or, to be more accurate, though my awareness of the transfigured outer world was no longer accompanied by an awareness of my physical organism -I found myself able to get up, open the French window and walk out with only a minimum of hesitation.

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 well 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 any thing more - when it tries too hard, for example, 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, awareness was not referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own. This meant that 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 an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of any thing but blue fire. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of any thing else. Garden furniture, laths, 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, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying.

Suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be insane.

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. But the reasonably healthy individual knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, 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 fear, in other words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than normal human experience into some thing appalling, some thing actually diabolical.

I found myself all at once on the brink of panic.

This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some 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 moment later 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. The effects of the mescalin were already on the decline: but 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.

And then, abruptly, we were at an intersection, waiting to cross Sunset Boulevard. Before us 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. The 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. All the other chemical Doors in the Wall are labeled dope, and their 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. Moreover, the business he is about is an experience of the most enlightening category, which does not have to be paid for by a compensatory hangover. Of the long-range consequences of regular mescalin taking we know very little. The Indians who consume peyote buttons do not seem to be physically or morally degraded by the habit.

The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, 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 religion's chemical surrogates - alcohol and "goof pills" in the 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 and with a wealth of documentation on the immemorial connection between religion and the taking of drugs. Here, in summary or in direct quotation, are his conclusions. The employment for religious purposes of toxic substances is "extraordinarily widespread. The practices studied in this volume can be observed in every region of the Earth, among primitives no less than among those who have reached a high pitch of civilization. We are therefore dealing not with exceptional facts, which might justifiably be overlooked, but with a general and, in the widest sense of the word, a human phenomenon, the category of phenomenon which cannot be disregarded by anyone who is trying to discover what religion is, and what are the deep needs which it must satisfy."

Christianity and mescalin are compatible.

This has been demonstrated by many tribes of Native American, from Texas to as far north as Wisconsin. 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 agape, or love 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 the divine Spirit.

Professor J. S. Slotkin, one of the very few white men ever to have participated in the rites of a peyotist congregation, says of his fellow worshipers that they are "certainly not stupefied or drunk.... They never get out of rhythm or fumble their words, as a drunken or stupefied man would do.... They are all quiet, courteous and considerate of one another. I have never been in any white man's house of worship where there is either so much religious feeling or decorum."

For these Native Americans, religious experience is some thing more direct and illuminating, more spontaneous, less the homemade 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. At times they become aware of the presence of God and of those personal shortcomings which must be corrected if they are to do God's Will. The practical consequences of these chemical openings of doors into reality seem to be wholly good. Dr. Slotkin reports that habitual peyotists are on the whole more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether from alcohol), more peaceable than non-peyotists. A tree with such satisfactory fruits cannot be condemned out of hand as evil.

In sacramentalizing the use of peyote, the Indians of the Native American Church have done some thing which is at once psychologically sound and historically respectable. Here 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.

I am suggesting that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary a path 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 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 apprehended, directly and unconditionally.

This is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual. We can never dispense with language and the other symbol system; 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 system. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, 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.

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. 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 fact of experience, it inflicts upon the Earth students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's. The non-verbal humanities, the art of being directly aware of the given reality of our existence, is almost completely ignored.

Systematic reasoning is some thing 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 apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness, to be aware of and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.

Near the end of his life Thomas Aquinas experienced Infused Contemplation. Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his unfinished book.

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall 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 words to things and to apply systematic reasoning to mystery in an attempt to comprehend.

- from The Doors of Perception

Aldous Leonard Huxley, British author

Through his novels and essays Aldous Leonard Huxley examined and critiqued of social morés, societal norms and ideals, and possible misapplications of science in human life. Aldous Huxley wrote great novels on dehumanising aspects of scientific progress including Brave New World. Aldous Huxley main message examined the tragedy that frequently follows from egocentrism: self-centeredness and selfishness.

While Aldous Huxley was noted for his compassion, only considerably later, some say under the influence of such friends as D.H. 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.