The Doors of Perception

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION: 

A SHORT REFLECTION

Published in 1954, Aldous Huxley’s The Door of Perception is a book about the author’s first-hand psychedelic experience after taking a drug called Mescaline. The following are some insightful quotations I picked up while reading the book.

Quote 1:

“By it’s 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.” (8)

The quotation above shows the importance of individuality embedded in each experience in one’s life. No matter how ordinary or insignificant it may be, any experience one has is an experience that cannot be felt precisely the same by the other person. First-hand experience is thus irreplaceable and inexpressible in this sense. Interestingly, body language might sometimes do better in transferring energy and information to the other person than verbal communication, which relies on linguistic symbols. 

Quote 2:

“I was looking at my furniture…this purely aesthetic Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality…The leg, for example or that chair—how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes—or was it several centuries?—not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them—or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for “I” was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were “they”) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.” (15-6)

Taking mescalin allows the author to experience something new: the perception of Not-Self. For example, the author was looking at the chair’s structure and texture for a long time, and during this process, he felt as though he had become one with the chair. There is a “him” in the chair while there is the “chair” in him; he was not himself anymore and either the chair. This Not-Self experience allows him to escape from his conventional self and see the world through an alternative lens. Under this situation, the experiencer is free to be anything for a certain time: a chair, a tree, a toothbrush, a golden fish, an apple – you name it. 

Quote 3:

“In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again 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 an “obscure knowledge” that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to “perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.” (18)

It is hard to let go of our conventional selves tied to the ego in general. With Mescaline, one can enter and explore a somewhat alternative dimension of time, space, and visual world that is also the same reality we are living in. However, in this unconceptualized universe, everything becomes “naked” in the sense that the intuitive value of each thing or being is visualized and appreciated. The observer is also the observed and vice versa. This overlapping role allows the viewer to destabilize his ego and cultivates his Not-Self perception. 

Quote 4:

When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs 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? (33)

This is my favorite quote from the whole book. I like the way he describes it: we are part of the sea and stars; we are part of nature. This part inside us cannot be separated from nature even though many of us live a lifestyle that is so far from the way our ancestors used to have. We can understand much more about nature these days with the help of science and modern technologies, yet we spend less time engaging ourselves with the natural environments. We have lost a sense of touch and intimacy with many natural entities, and many of them will soon disappear from this planet due to our unreasonable and unsustainable activities.

Quote 5:

We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment id in almost everyone almost all the time. The urge to do something for the young is strong only in parents, and in them only for the few years during which their children go to school. Equally unsurprising is the current attitude towards drink and smoke. In spite of the growing army of hopeless alcoholics, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of persons annually maimed or killed by drunken drivers, popular comedians still crack jokes about alcohol and it’s addicts. And in spite of evidence linking cigarettes with lung cancer, practically everybody regards Tabacco smoking as being hardly less normal and natural than eating. From the point of view of the rationalist utilitarian this may seem odd. (50; bold mine)

Quote 6:

The problems raised by alcohol and Tabasco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones. Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological in haute, others religious or psychological, others dietetic, educational, athletic. But 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 without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it does not possess these qualities, it’s production, like that of wine, beer, spirits and tabacoo will interfere with the raising of indispensable food and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol 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. (51) 

Quote 7:

All I am suggesting 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. (58)

Drawing on quotes 5 to 7, we understand that most societies accept alcohol and tobacco consumption and yet perception-changing drugs like Mescaline are not taken into consideration although the latter might be less harmful compared to the former. This is a difficult debate since the experiments with drugs are still ongoing. However, research has shown that psychedelic drugs are beneficial for treating mental illness. We should look more into those substances then. Everything exists for a reason. There must be some ways which we can use for good.

Quote 8:

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. But we can 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 preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly 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. (58)

Quote 9:

Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education on is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what 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 world students of the Humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s. (59) 

Quote 10:

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in the age of technology the verbal Humanities are honoured. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored…when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system—when it comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish Drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. (61) 

Quote 11:

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 reception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and the outer worlds into which we have been born. Thus given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in som 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, and experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. (62) 

Quotes 8 to 11 depict the problem of higher education in our society. Words, languages, and symbols dominate the mainstream education system, while nonverbal expressions, direct lived experiences, and non-systematic arts are put aside as subordinate components. The imbalance between the verbal/outer/yang and non-verbal/inner/yin education enforced is seen as problematic by the author as it prevents an individual from looking into the world from a more direct, transparent, animal-like or primitive perspective. The keypoint here, as the author suggests, is to balance both verbal and non-verbal humanities. Young individuals should be offered more freedom and space to create art and music; Feminism and deep ecology should be one of the essential courses in higher education; Sex education and spiritual workshops should be provided at an earlier age; Psychedelic drugs may be taken into consideration for consciousness-swifting and consolation. There are so many possibilities and potentalities we could discover, examine, and develop – if we are willing to.