Leaving the Doors of Perception open

Aldous Huxley, in line with his being a visionary author and philosopher, played a significant role in the popularisation of psychedelics in the West. In early 1953, Huxley took mescaline in the presence of an investigator, and later recalled his experience in a wonderful little book called The Doors of Perception. Later, Huxley was involved in advising Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, and remains a key influence in the schools examining the perceptual and even mystical implications of psychedelic use.

The first time I really learned that Huxley had had such a prominent role in the field of psychedelics was at a discussion panel about whether psychedelics can enable mystical experiences, and what psychedelic use can teach us about the divine. I picked up his book more than a year later, after it had floated on my "to-read" list long enough for me to ask a friend to borrow it when I saw it at her house

For reference, I have never taken mescaline. Not that this should matter much at all. Not that it should invalidate my opinion on the topic either. Only sometimes there is a tendency to erode the value of someone's judgment who hasn't experienced something at first hand, who has approached a topic analytically (and even verbosely). This seems especially relevant for the kind of experiences that can only be lived without description, without comment. Yet, there is something precisely about what Huxley writes, and my situation relative to it, that is deeply familiar.

I believe it relates to the degree to which one can feel familiarity, even deep personal involvement, in a way only informed by verbal recounts of others. Huxley precisely stresses how language is a strangling channel that compresses impressions through symbols, and how psychedelics instead temporarily allow perception of the world with a pristine vision, unconcerned with symbols. Yet I have grown up learning about the flavour of feelings by reading novels. I absorbed them in words, and slowly they became mine as well. I learned to feel and reason by reading about situations I never have, and never will, experience.

And so it is especially salient to me how I am still sitting on the exterior of the topic of psychedelics, sitting on chairs I have built with words and concepts and looking inside as if it was a show I had seen many times before. Although I have not taken psychedelics, so many topics and thoughts covered by Huxley tie threads between common kernels of my own pre-occupations and readings. The limits of language. The untarnished experience of simple existence. Madness as aberrant salience. Oneness.

I have approached these ideas through readings about Buddhism, literature, neuroscience. Maybe I have access to them on a lower order of magnitude, one that is learned and not fully lived. But all these ideas seem so very familiar. Despite some familiarity, this book also changed my mind on these topics, or at least provided some angles I had never thought about before. So, I will share some passages briefly, hope that you will find value in them as well

Huxley discusses these main ideas:

• How mescaline allowed him to experience the simple "suchness" of things

• How mescaline gives access to Oneness in a way that is too overwhelming for daily life

• How some form of bending of perception is a primary appetite of the human soul

The mescaline experience unlocking "suchness"

"Is it agreeable? somebody asked

Neither agreeable nor disagreeable I answered. It just is"

...

"More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my grey flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness".

...

To me, this resonated with the concepts of suchness and beautiful emptiness from Zen practice. Zen is no mind (wu-hsin) and no-thought (wu-nien). Yet thinking about Zen is even the wrong thing to do. Zen is not something to be thought about. In Zen, reality is the suchness (tathata) of the natural, non-verbal world.

Mescaline connecting us to Oneness (unsustainably)

"The suggestion (of Broad) is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. 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 knowledge. Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. To make biological survival possible, Mind at large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system"

(What I have come to call Oneness over the years is what Huxley calls Mind at Large I believe)

He makes the classical argument that mescaline leads to a state that is so unpreoccupied with action that it could interfere with our daily lives. This is quite a common debate I gloss over here, that relates to contemplation vs action, but Huxley highlighted something really brilliant that responds to people saying contemplation is just worthless because of inaction.

"Let me add before we leave the subject that there is no form of contemplation, even the most quietistic, which is without its ethical values. Half at least of all of morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischiefs. The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do, but to make up for it he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do. The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms".

Huxley outlines how this connection to Mind at Large can be maddening.

"The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into intrepreting its unremitting strageness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence calling for the most desperate counter-measures."

The throttle of language and communication

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand onto the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. 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. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes"

***

"Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born-the beneficiary inasmuch as languages 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 yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the world. We talk, he wrote in his middle life, far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window still quietly awaiting its future-all these are momentous signatures... The more I think of it, the more there is something futile, mediocre even, I am tempted to say foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills."

"We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems.... 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 the world directly and not through half-opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction"

> This is probably one of the intuitions in this book I found most well put

Humanity's need for Artificial Paradises

"That humanity will ever be able to dispense with artificial paradises seems very unlikely. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory-all these have served, in H.G Well's phrase, as Doors in the Wall"

***

"The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendances is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors....The need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain"

***

"What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species. Such a drug must be potent and synthesizable. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcholol or the barbiturates, less inimical to heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence, or release from inhibition."

***

"I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or any other drug with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life, Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggeting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic Theologians call a "gratuitous" grace, not necessary 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 inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notion, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large, thus an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

Conclusion

"Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every Angel would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience"