The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell

published	2004 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics
binding	Paperback
isbn	0060595183 (isbn13: 9780060595180)
url	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
pages	192
description	Sometimes a writer has to revisit the classics. Here we find that "gonzo journalism"--gutsy first-person accounts wherein the author is par...more [close] Sometimes a writer has to revisit the classics. Here we find that "gonzo journalism"--gutsy first-person accounts wherein the author is part of the story--didn't originate with Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe. Aldous Huxley took some mescaline and wrote about it some 10 or 12 years earlier than those others. The book he came up with is part bemused essay & part mystical treatise--"suchness" is everywhere to be found while under the influence. This is a good example of essay writing, journal keeping & the value of controversy--always--in one's work.
date added	12-07-06 edit book

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John rated it:

12/21/07

Read in December, 2007

i give doors of perception 3 stars, and heaven and hell 1. overall, there was just not much interesting material in these books. i found two ideas in "the doors" that were interesting to me.

first, the idea that the primary function of the brain is as a filter, to reduce the massive amount of incoming information that comes into a smaller set that is useful for survival and propagation. in itself, this is not much, but the implications as to what that unfiltered set looks like, is. ...more i give doors of perception 3 stars, and heaven and hell 1. overall, there was just not much interesting material in these books. i found two ideas in "the doors" that were interesting to me.

first, the idea that the primary function of the brain is as a filter, to reduce the massive amount of incoming information that comes into a smaller set that is useful for survival and propagation. in itself, this is not much, but the implications as to what that unfiltered set looks like, is. this does not mean that the data coming in from the five senses is filtered down. it means that the five senses also serve as part of the filtering mechanism, and the original source is the universe itself. this is quite agreeable to me - the bottom-up approach to consciousness taken by most western scientists is full of holes. (in western metaphysics, there seem to be two major categories of theories on this - the first agrees with that of western scientists, and the second posits a dualism, where the soul is somehow more-or-less completely separate from the physical body, but still informs conscious process. this position is, in my opinion, even more untenable than the materialist one - it is directly evident from our experience of the universe that everything is connected, and the idea of two separate but somehow-interacting universes is silly.)

the second thing that turned me on in "the doors" was his description of tripping not as a vivid hallucinogenic experience, but as an exposure the the raw, true, nature of reality - that essentially, our survival filters fail to function. this is the most sympathetic description of tripping that i have ever heard - it matches my experience to a tee. most people who describe tripping either talk about wild hallucinogenic, or imagined, experiences, which never really happened to me at all, or they talk about the experience of one-ness with the universe in terms that are more or less opaque and seemingly ingenuine. bill hicks is a prime exception here, but his trippping story basically boils down to a single run-on sentence that he used to close his shows.

both of these texts extremely annoyingly lacking in any visible structure - just one paragraph after the other, with no exposition of a thesis or anything like that. as if the thoughts that were running through this guys mind were enough, as is, to spark great insight into his readers. sorry aldous, just not there. "the doors" goes on for 70 pages without section or subsection, without a single "***" or "*****" between two paragraphs, and exactly one instance of a single blank line between two paragraphs. just awful! heaven and hell is more or less the same.

maybe i should be more interested in art, but both these texts read more as poor art criticism than anything else.

the idea that psychedelics function by cutting off oxygen to the brain seems incredibly silly and quaint here in 2007. the psychedelic experience is *not* on the order of sniffing glue or hyperventilating until we pass out. there is obviously something more going on here.

anything else? i flipped through most of the pages in heaven and hell. actually reading it would have been a big waste of my time....less

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Jenny rated it:

(review of isbn 0099458209)

12/17/07

Read in October, 2007

Read online here. A friend told me to read this, I think in my rant against drug use, lol. This book was popular in the 1970s, and argues that we need to find a safe drug that will allow everyone to escape reality without damaging our bodies. Some fun quotations here.

"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 into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to f...more Read online here. A friend told me to read this, I think in my rant against drug use, lol. This book was popular in the 1970s, and argues that we need to find a safe drug that will allow everyone to escape reality without damaging our bodies. Some fun quotations here.

"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 into 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."

"The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling."

"Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten."

"To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift."

""This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers...."

"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."

"The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. "

"We see, then, that Christianity and alcohol do not and cannot mix. Christianity and mescalin seem to be much more compatible."

"Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be."...less

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