The Doors of Perception (1954) Aldous Huxley
This short book is probably the most famous trip report of our recent history. A fervent and crystalline little dream, it rang a bell that kept ringing throughout the sixties and is arguably still ringing now. Huxley is a true believer in the Psychedelic Mystery. Concocting an idealist and ecumenical view of the universe that turns on the axis of psychoactive consciousness, the book charts how in one afternoon mescaline trip in Los Angeles, what before had been Huxley’s mere academic understanding of mysticism—the Rig Vedas, Eckhart Tolle, Zen, William Blake—phenomenology and psychoanalysis, would now be flooded over by the mystical itself, the mysterium tremendum, the omni-potent, face-melting revelation of the “Mind at Large;” the Dharma-Body of the Buddha, which is in fact, mescaline, a psychoactive cactus.
Subsequently the book is balls-to-the-wall, unabashedly religious. Huxley is one of those persons who suffers no doubts. He has read all the books, established a perennial philosophy and has now had the samsara-shredding, galactic-vertigo of drug-addled gnosis to confirm the thesis. As a result the book was considered a “deadly heresy.” Such persons no more eminent than that of Martin Buber and Thomas Mann were incensed: for them the mystical was a higher order of objective reality that could not be accessed by ingesting base chemical substances. But Huxley, along with anyone else who had been there, did not care.
This is Huxley’s thesis: Our day-to-day perception is tuned to the world of the symbolic, the language world; we do not, as a rule, experience the real, but rather are trapped within the mundane realm of signs. As such we reside on a lower-order of existence. We do so for our biological survival; the brain and the nervous system function as a “reducing valve” filtering out the huge data of the universe and producing a “measly trickle of consciousness” that allows us to focus and survive on the planet. And yet “if the doors of perception were cleansed,” as William Blake declared for all time, “Everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Mescaline (or peyote), as Native Americans have long known, is a pretty good window cleaner for these doors. The mystical—whether induced by ascetic practice, psychosis—is a state in which the mundane has been sheered away and one encounters the “suchness” of the real, unmediated by the symbolic world (samsara). The thesis drifts up into the religious by claiming that the suchness of the real is irradiated with Mind at Large (the Dharma-Body). “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to them and of perceiving all that is happening everywhere in the universe.” Consciousness becomes One. Huxley’s psychedelia is a result, not of oceanic feeling, but of cosmic feeling.
Clearly it is the nature of the mystical drug experience to resort to large metaphors.
But in some sense this thesis is ground zero for much of psychedelic thought that would follow and we can find its traces throughout the sixties and seventies and even up to today in our so called “psychedelic renaissance.” Huxley’s book allowed the very long mystical tradition to invade the new psychedelic one. Does this mean that these mystical drug experiences produce a near universal belief in the grandest of all transcendental narratives? Do the drugs reveal the truth of a perennial philosophy?
Spacewhy, dubious of off-world transcendence, remains incredulous. The psychedelic experience is no monolith. And yet this is the question: is the psychedelic/mystical experience an empty vessel that magnifies whatever the participant brings to it, the so called “non-specific amplifier?” (Yes.) Or is there something out there in the psychedelic/mystical vortex that wishes to communicate with us? (Also yes.)
The mystic/psychonaut confronted with something that is way beyond their comprehension looks to Huxley (and the reports from mysticism) to explain it. Meanwhile psychedelia derives from something far older that predates the human by a billion years; because these drugs are mushroom/plant based, what we receive from them is not cosmic, but is rather earthbound and super-terrestrial, sent to us by the planet itself
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