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The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

by Parker · 24 things on Twos

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 suffer and enjoy in solitude
Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable
Remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves in their places
At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? How far? How situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern
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 experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in 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 concept for data, his words for actual things
What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescaline, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to mind at large oozes past the reducing value of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existence
This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the not-self of the things around me. To this new-born not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of their selves, it’s one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful, but enormously irrelevant
Both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescaline had delivered me “a world of selves, of time, of moral judgements and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksure ness, of overvalued words and idolatrously worshiped nations
Who on earth does he think he is? Who did they all think they were?
This is how one ought to see. These are the sort of things one ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the dharma-body, in luciferian defiance of the grace of god
The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms
The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room. He can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that he will never even be tempted to indulge in what Traherne called “the dirty Devices of the world.”
When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, the 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 dressier forms of pleasure? Contemplative are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor
The outer world is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is the place where, willy-nilly, we must try to make our living. In the inner world there is neither work nor monotony. We visit it only in dreams and musings, and it’s strangeness is such that we never find the same world on two successive occasions
In reality, our bodies are perfectly able to look after itself. All that the conscious who can do is 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, 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
The effects of mescaline will pass after 8 or 10 hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose
Most men and women lead lives at worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves id only for a few moments, is and has always been on of the principal appetites of the soul
We spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education
The need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain
A man under the influence of mescaline quietly minds his own business
We can never dispense with language and other 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. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world 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
To be enlightened is to be aware of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it snd 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 he. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves