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"If the
Doors of
Perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is,
infinite."
William Blake
"Whenever the Secrets of Perception are taught to
anyone
his lips are sewn against speaking of the
Consciousness." -
Rumi
Human beings have an
almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are
ignored.
Words form
the thread on which we string our experiences.
The most valuable
result of conditioning is the ability to make yourself do
the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or
not.
Great is truth, but still greater,
from a practical point of view, is
silence.
By
simply not mentioning
certain subjects propagandists
influence opinion more
effectively than they could have by
eloquent
denunciations.
In
the next generation or so, a
pharmacological
method of making people adore their servitude,
producing dictatorship without
tears, producing a category of painless concentration camp for entire
societies so that people will have their freedom taken away from them but
will rather enjoy it.
Aldous
Leonard Huxley, Prophecies
1897
Mescaline alkaloid extracted by
Arthur Heffter.
1918 Mescaline first
synthesized in by Ernst Späth.
Mescalin has a position among
drugs of unique distinction.
Administered in suitable doses it
changes the quality
of consciousness more profoundly and yet is
less toxic than any
other substance.
A
philosopher would take
mescalin for the light it throws on such ancient, unsolved riddles such as
the place of mind in
nature and the relationship between
brain and consciousness.
The
chemical composition of mescalin
and adrenalin is
similar.
Further
research reveals lysergic
acid, an extremely potent
hallucinogen derived
from ergot, has a structural biochemical
relationship to the others.
Then came
the discovery that adrenochrome, a
product of
decomposition of adrenalin, can
produce the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication.
Adrenochrome
occurs spontaneously in the human body.
Each one of us is capable of
manufacturing this chemical, minute doses of which are
known to cause profound
changes in consciousness.
One bright May morning, I
swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water
and sat down to wait for the results.
We
live together, we act on, and
react to, one another; but always and
in all circumstances we
are by ourselves.
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 experience itself.
The
mental places
inhabited by the insane and
the exceptionally gifted
are different from the
places where ordinary men and women live.
There is no
common ground of
memory to serve as a
basis for connection.
Words are uttered, but
fail to enlighten.
The symbols refer to
mutually exclusive realms of
experience.
The change which actually took place was in no way
revolutionary.
After swallowing mescalin I became
aware of a slow dance of golden lights.
A little later there were
sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that
vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life.
There is an
inside to experience as well as an outside, closing of my eyes revealed a
complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into
intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of
sight.
The
reality to which mescalin admitted me was not the reality of visions.
Reality existed out there, in
what I could see with my eyes open.
I took the mescalin at eleven.
A little later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small
glass vase.
The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of
Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter,
flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at
the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris.
Fortuitous and provisional, the nosegay broke rules of
traditional good taste.
At
breakfast I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors.
But
that was now no longer the point.
I was not looking at an unusual
flower arrangement.
I was seeing what Adam had
seen on the morning of his creation, the
miracle, moment by moment, of
naked existence.
Istigkeit - wasn't
that the word Meister Eckhart liked
to use? "Is-ness."
Eternal life is transience,
simultaneous perishing and
recreation .
Unique
particulars in which, by some
unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, is to be seen the divine source
of all existence.
The important fact
was that spatial relationships
ceased to matter.
My mind was perceiving
reality in other than spatial categories.
The mind perceives in
terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships
within a pattern, being and meaning.
My actual experience was of
an indefinite duration or
alternatively of a perpetual
present made up of one continually
changing apocalypse.
I was looking at my furniture, not as the
utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as
the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as
the pure aesthete whose
concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision.
But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's
eye view gave place to what I can only describe as
a sacramental vision of reality.
The suggestion is that
the function of the
brain, nervous
system and sense organs is in the
main eliminative and not productive.
Each individual is at each
moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him.
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
information, by shutting out most of what we sense at any moment, leaving
only that very small and special selection which is likely to be useful.
What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of
a category of
consciousness which will
help us to stay alive
on the surface of the
Earth.
To formulate and express the
contents of this reduced awareness, man
has invented and endlessly elaborated symbol systems and
implicit philosophies which we call
languages.
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 experiences.
The victim in so
far as it confirms in him 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
concepts for data, his words for actual
things in reality.
That which, in the language of religion, is
called "this reality" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as
it were, petrified by language.
Most humans, most of the time,
know only what comes through
reduced awareness consecrated as genuinely reality by the local culture.
Certain
individuals have been born with a bypass that circumvents the reduction of
awareness.
In others temporary bypasses may be acquired
spontaneously, as the result
of deliberate "spiritual exercises" or by means of entheogens.
Through these temporary bypasses there flows awareness which is more
than, and above all, different from, the
carefully selected
utilitarian material individual minds regard as a sufficient image of
reality.
What happens to those who have taken mescalin can
be summarized as follows:
(1) The ability to remember and to "think straight" is little
if at all reduced.
Listening to the recordings of my conversation under
the influence I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at
ordinary times.
(3) Though
the intellect remains
unimpaired and though perceptual coherence is
enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change.
The mescalin
taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular for the good reason that
he has better things to think about.
(4) These better things may be experienced (as I
experienced them) "out there," or "in here," or in both worlds, the inner and
the outer, simultaneously or successively.
That they are better seems
to be self-evident to all
mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound liver and
an untroubled
mind.
Some people discover a reality of
visionary beauty.
To others is revealed the glory,
the infinite value and
meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given,
unconceptualized event,
of simply being.
In
the final stage of
egolessness there is knowledge
all is one and one is
all.
This is as
near as a finite mind can ever come to perceiving the
universe.
Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the
percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at
ordinary times, he is completely
blind.
A priceless
gift of a new direct insight into the very nature of things, together with
the modest treasure of understanding reality.
Such emblems are sources
of true knowledge about the
nature of things, and this true knowledge may serve to
prepare the mind to accept immediate insights on its own account.
However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand
for.
For the moment, mescalin had delivered me from "the world of selves, of
time, of
moral judgements and
utilitarian
considerations, the world of self-assertion, of
cocksureness, of
overvalued words and
idolatrously worshiped notions.
Nearly all overact the
part of our favorite character in fiction.
Mescalin can present the
reality, apocalyptically, for those to whom it had never before presented
itself through mystical
dissociation in any other way.
When we feel ourselves to be a part
of the universe, when " thee 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 drearier forms of
pleasure?
As a rule the mescalin taker discovers
an inner world as manifest
as reality, as self-evidently "infinite and holy," as the
transfigured outer world.
Most visualizers
are transformed by mescalin into visionaires.
Some of them, and they
are perhaps more numerous than is generally supposed, require no
transformation; they
are visionaires all the time.
They belong to that archetypal
reality, where men have always found the raw materials of myth and religion.
They have engaged in a retreat from
rational
consciousness into mythical
consciousness.
Mythical consciousness balances
worldview by obscuring rational fragments that don't comfortably fit in.
More clearly present, perhaps, than in
a rationally coherent work.
My body seemed to
have dissociated itself almost completely from my mind.
Even though
I no longer had an awareness of my physical organism with
only a minimum of hesitation I
found myself able to get up,
open the French
window and walk through.
It was odd, of course,
to feel that "I" was not the same
as these arms and legs "out there," as this
wholly objective trunk and
neck and even head.
It was odd; but one soon got used to
it.
And anyhow the body seemed perfectly able to look after
itself.
In reality, of course, it always does look after itself.
All that the conscious ego
can do is to 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, 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.
In my present state,
ego did not focus awareness;
it was on its own.
The physiological intelligence controlling the body
was also on its own.
For the moment
that interfering neurotic
who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.
Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery,
stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes
of intensely bright incandescence so that it was hard to believe that they
could be made of anything but blue fire.
I was so completely absorbed
in looking, so thunderstruck by
what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else.
Garden
furniture, lath, sunlight, shadow - these were no more than names and notions,
mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event.
The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs
of unfathomable gentian.
It was inexpressibly wonderful, to the point,
almost, of being terrifying.
Most takers
of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia.
Mescalin
brings hell only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer
from periodical
depressions or a chronic
anxiety.
If, like the other drug of remotely comparable power,
mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself,
to cause anxiety.
The reasonably healthy individual knows in advance
that mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass off after
eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a
renewal of the dose.
Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the
experiment without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and
other than normal human experience into something appalling, something actually
diabolical.
This, I
suddenly felt, was going too far.
Too far, even though going into
intenser beauty, deeper significance.
The fear, analyzed in retrospect,
was of being overwhelmed, of
disintegrating
under the pressure of a greater reality than I was accustomed to,
a cosy world of
symbols.
The literature of religious
experience abounds in references to
the pains and terrors
overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with a
manifestation of the mysterium
tremendum.
In theological language, this fear is due to the
incompatibility
between man's egotism and the
divine purity, between
man's self-aggravated
separateness and the Eternity of God.
The
Tibetan Book of the Dead I opened at random.
"O nobly born,
let not thy mind be
distracted."
That was the problem - to remain
undistracted.
Undistracted by the
memory of past sins, by imagined pleasure, by
the bitter aftertaste of
old wrongs and
humiliations, by all the
fears and hates and
cravings that
ordinarily eclipse the light.
Ultimate reality remains
unshakably itself and is of the
same substance as the
inner light.
A clump of Red Hot Pokers, in
full bloom, exploded into my field of vision.
So passionately alive,
they seemed to be standing on
the very brink of
utterance, the flowers
strained upwards into the blue.
I looked down at the leaves and
discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows,
pulsing with indecipherable mystery.
Roses. The
flowers are easy to paint.
The leaves difficult.
Shiki's haiku expresses, by indirection, exactly
what I then felt-the excessive, the too
obvious glory of the flowers, as contrasted with the subtler miracle of
their foliage.
Effects of the mescalin were on the decline: the flowers
in the gardens still trembled on the brink of being supernatural, the pepper
trees and carobs along the side streets still manifestly belonged to some
sacred grove.
Abruptly, we were at an
intersection, waiting to cross Sunset Boulevard.
The cars were rolling
by in a steady stream - thousands of them, all bright and shiny like
an advertiser's dream and each
more ludicrous than the last.
And all at once I saw what Guardi had
seen and had so often rendered in his paintings - a stucco wall with a shadow
slanting across it, blank but unforgettably beautiful, empty but charged with
all the meaning and the mystery of existence.
Revelation dawned and was
gone again within a fraction of a second.
An hour later, I had returned
to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right
mind."
That humanity at large will ever be
able to dispense with artificial paradises seems
very unlikely.
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful,
at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the
longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always
been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
All the vegetable
sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the
hallucinogens that
ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots-all, without exception, have
been known and systematically used by human beings from time
immemorial.
Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken
except under doctor's orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk.
For unrestricted use America has permitted only
alcohol and
tobacco.
Doors of Perception
are labeled dope, unauthorized takers are
"fiends".
To most people,
mescalin is almost completely innocuous.
Unlike alcohol, it does not
drive the taker into the
category of uninhibited action which results in brawls, crimes of violence and
traffic accidents.
A man under the influence of
mescalin quietly goes about his own business.
Indians who consume
peyote buttons are not physically or morally degraded.
The urge to transcend
self-consciousness is a principal appetite of the soul.
When, for
whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by
means of worship, good
works and spiritual
exercises, they are apt to resort to surrogates -
alcohol and "goof pills" in modern North
America, alcohol and
opium in the East,
hashish in the
Mohammedan world,
alcohol and
marijuana in Central
America, alcohol and
coca in the Andes,
alcohol and the
barbiturates in
the more up-to-date regions of South America.
In Poisons
Sacrés, Ivresses Divines Philippe de Felice has written at length,
with a wealth of documentation, on the connection between religion and
entheogens.
Ritual use of entheogens can be observed in every culture on
Earth.
I am suggesting that the mescalin experience is what some
Catholic theologians call
"a gratuitous grace," to
be accepted thankfully.
To be shaken out of
the ruts of ordinary
perception, to be
shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner reality, not as they
appear to an animal
obsessed with survival or to
a human being obsessed with
words and notions, but as they are apperceived, directly and
unconditionally.
This is
an experience of inestimable value especially to the intellectual.
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.
Unfortunately we can as
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
intensify our
ability to look at reality 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.
This has been demonstrated by many tribes of Native
Americans.
Among these Native American tribes are to be found groups
affiliated with the Native American church, a sect whose principal rite is a
category of early Christian
Agápe, or compassion feast, where slices of peyote take the place of
the sacramental bread and
wine.
These Native Americans regard the cactus as God's special
gift to the Native Americans, and equate its effects with the workings of
Divine Spirit.
JS Slotkin, one of
the very few white men ever to have participated in the rites of a peyotist
congregation, says of his fellow worshipers:
are not stupefied or
drunk;
never get out of rhythm or fumble words;
all are quiet,
courteous and considerate of one another.
For these
Native
Americans, sychronized
religious experience is more direct and illuminating, more
spontaneous,
less the product of the
superficial, self-conscious mind.
Sometimes they see visions, which
may be of Jesus Himself.
Sometimes they hear the
voice of the Great Spirit.
They become aware of the
Presence of God and of
those personal shortcomings which must be corrected to stay within the
Will of God.
The
practical consequences of these entheogen openings of doors into inner reality
seem to be wholly good.
Slotkin reports that peyotists are on the whole
more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether from
alcohol), more peaceable.
A tree
with satisfactory fruit cannot be condemned as evil.
In
sacramentalizing the use of peyote Native American Church Indians have done
something which is psychologically sound and historically respectable.
Here the the soul
knows itself as unconditioned and of like nature with the divine, hence the
Native American Church.
In it two great appetites of the soul -
the urge to
independence and self-determination and
the urge to
self-transcendence are fused with, and
interpreted in the light
of, a third, the urge to
worship, to justify the ways of God to man,
to explain the universe by means of
a coherent theology.
Literary or scientific, liberal or
specialist,
education is
predominantly symbol manipulation and therefore fails to enlighten us.
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 facet of experience, it inflicts upon the Earth students of the
humanities who know nothing of humanity.
The art of being directly
aware of the given reality of existence is ignored.
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
perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer
realities into which we have been born.
This given reality is an
infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in
some sort totally apperceived.
To be enlightened is to be aware of
total reality in its immanent otherness.
Near the end of his life
Thomas Aquinas experienced Infused
Contemplation.
Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his
unfinished book.
(Note: Most likely he was unable after experincing a
stroke while at the same
recognized the futility of
attempting to define God.)
The man who comes back through the
Doors of Perception will
never be quite the same as
the man who went out.
He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier
but less self-satisfied,
humbler in acknowledging his ignorance
yet better equipped to
understand the relationship of things and to apply
systematic reasoning to
mystery in an attempt to
comprehend.
-
adapted from The Doors of Perception, Aldous Leonard
Huxley
Aldous Huxley examined
and critiqued social morés, societal norms and ideals, as well as the
possible misapplications
of science in human life.
Aldous Huxley wrote on the
dehumanising
aspects of scientific progress.
Aldous Huxley examined the
tragedy that
frequently follows from
egocentrism:
self-centeredness
and selfishness.
While Aldous Huxley was noted for
compassion, only
considerably later, some say under the influence of such friends as DH
Lawrence, did he heartily embrace feelings as matters of importance in his
evolving personal philosophy and
literary expression.
Aldous Huxley, immigrated to America, but was denied citizenship as he
refused to ascribe his pacifism to
religious
beliefs. |
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author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has
forged a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has
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leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is
encouraged to develop a personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer
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American social mores and values have declined
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populace in general through corporate media by pressing emotional buttons which
have been preprogrammed into the population through prior corporate media
psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family
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