Huxley’s 1954 essay ‘The Doors Of Perception explores ways of overcoming mental barriers, be they real or imaginary.
This is primarily an account of his experimentation with the drug mescalin but it also examines human drives and desires that make mind expanding experience so compelling.
Huxley’s study predates by some 10 years Timothy Leary’s celebration of LSD that had such an impact of the lifestyle and music of the sixties.
Huxley takes his title from Blake’s ‘Marriage of Heaven And Hell’ (“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is – infinite”).
His study explores not only the hallucinatory effects of the drug but what draws people to seek out what he calls “Artificial Paradises”.
There is nothing particularly mysterious about how mescalin works in the body. It is known that the drug inhibits the production of enzymes which in turn reduces the supply of glucose to brain cells so that the user experiences a heightened visual sensibility.
The subsequent fascination with this new way of seeing the world overrides the will to do anything of a practical nature. The drug, writes Huxley, delivered him from “the world of selves, of time, of moral judgements and utilitarian considerations”.
He goes on to explain how this altered state enabled him to gain a unique insight into how he imagines artists habitually perceive the world. Commonplace objects took on a new significance so that he saw cubist patterns in household furniture and marvelled at the Botticelli-like folds of ordinary items of clothing.
Huxley reported that ,by stimulating such an increased awareness, the drug effectively caused the desire for contemplation and intense reflection. In this way the prompts of visual stimuli fed the imagination to become of far greater importance than the functional use of these objects in the material world.
We may compare this almost dreamlike conditions to the kind of mind states that meditation and prayer tries to tap into. Indeed, Huxley explicitly makes a link between the drug induced state and the spiritual experiences of mankind:
“men have attached more importance to the inscape than to objective existents, have felt what they saw with their eyes shut possessed a spiritually higher significance than what they saw with their eyes open”.
As Huxley shows, we are habitually fascinated by worlds and experiences beyond what is known and familiar because of an innate desire to be free of constraints.
Our lives, for the most part, feel restricted by obligations and for too much of the time this makes it is hard to find a sense of connectedness with people or institutions.
Anything which draws us away from this concept of the ‘civilised world’ is something to aspire towards and the creative, contemplative self offers one means of escape.
“There is nothing particularly mysterious about how mescalin works in the body. It is known that the drug inhibits the production of enzymes which in turn reduces the supply of glucose to brain cells so that the user experiences a heightened visual sensibility.”
Isn’t there more to it than this? If this was all it is, then diabetics would be in an altered state, in a positive way, much of the time.
One can see why these experiences would appeal to Huxley, who could only half see the physical world to start with…….
Is that so? And have you even read Aldous Huxleys books? Are you really qualified to make a comment like that about someone of Huxley’s talent, insight and stature?
All I meant was that to see more clearly inwardly would be especially appealing to someone with such bad eyesight, who nevertheless was avid to understand the world : “For most of his life, since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, his eyesight was poor” it says here, admittedly only on Wikipedia. So I think you might hop off your high horse there for a minute, and possibly have a cup of tea and a nice lie down.
Ah, come on, get serious. I have read all Huxley’s novels along with a major portion of the essays and I love the guy. He is one of the guiding intellects of my life. Still his impaired vision must have and did influence his thinking. By the time he wrote Doors Of Perception his mind was wandering. His last efforts were much below the standards he set in the twenties and thirties.
Betty’s opinion is a valid insight that doesn’t require insults. So Huxley was a genius, almost an intellectual god to me, my life would be much different and impoverished if I had never read him.
If you want to get some idea of how his keratitis punctata affected his life try my essay on I, Dynamo entitled A Mother’s Eyes. Be a little tolerant and forgving marcys.
Oops! (wiping egg off face)
I didn’t mean to sound so pompous, marcys. Words get away from you sometimes. It’s just that Huxley is nearly an alter ego for me. Sorry.