The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell

by Aldous Huxley

Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else.

homemade universe of common sense—the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions.

“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.

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 urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition.

on the verbal level,

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and

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.

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 and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact ...

Teachers in every field of psycho-physical skill, from seeing to tennis, from tightrope walking to prayer, have discovered, by trial and error, the conditions of optimum functioning within their special fields.

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.

Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versifier’s ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes—any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support.

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 worlds into which we have been born.

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, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.

months of his mortality, to turn away from merely symbolic straw and chaff to the bread of actual and substantial Fact.

But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall 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 words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

By doing so it lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing the mind on the problems of life on the surface of our planet.

lowering of what may be called the biological efficiency of the brain seems to permit the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded, because they possess no survival value.

Similar intrusions of biologically useless, but aesthetically and sometim...

material may occur as the result of illness or fatigue; or they may be induced by fasting, or a period of confinement in a plac...

A person under the influence of mescalin or lysergic acid will stop seeing visions when given a large dose of nicotinic acid. This helps to explain the effectiveness of fasting as an inducer of visionary experience. By reducing the amount of available sugar, fasting lowers the brain’s biological efficiency and so makes possible the entry into consciousness of material possessing no survival value. Moreover, by causing a vitamin deficiency, it removes from the blood that known inhibitor of visions, nicotinic acid. Another inhibitor of visionary experience is ordinary, everyday, perceptual experience. Experimental psychologists have found that, if you confine a man to a “restricted environment,” where there is no light, no sound, nothing to s...

Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind’s antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.

First and most important is the experience of light. Everything seen by those who visit the mind’s antipodes is brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within. All colors are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and at the same time the mind’s capacity for recognizing fine distinctions of tone and hue is notably heightened.

Most dreams are concerned with the dreamer’s private wishes and instinctive urges, and with the conflicts which arise when these wishes and urges are thwarted by a disapproving conscience or a fear of public opinion.

The letters in which we write about roses need not be red, and we can describe the rainbow by means of ink marks on white paper.

by the fact that our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are forever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

Consequently our perception of visionary objects possesses all the freshness, all the naked intensity, of experiences which have never been verbalized, never assimilated to lifeless abstractions.

In his Candle of Vision, the Irish poet, Æ (George Russell),

“I was sitting on the seashore, half listening to a friend arguing violently about something which merely bored me. Unconsciously to myself, I looked at a film of sand I had picked up on my hand, when I suddenly saw the exquisite beauty of every little grain of it; instead of being dull, I saw that each particle was made up on a perfect geometrical pattern, with sharp angles, from each of which a brilliant shaft of light was reflected, while each tiny crystal shone like a rainbow…. The rays crossed and recrossed, making exquisite patterns of such beauty that they left me breathless…. Then, suddenly, my consciousness was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world

appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.”

in the literature of religious mysticism.

objects do not stand for anything but themselves.

And their meaning consists precisely in this, that they are intensely themselves and, being intensely themselves, are manifestations of the essential givenness, the non-human otherness of the universe.

Light, color and significance do not exist in isolation.

They modify, or are manifested ...

The raw material for this creation is provided by the visual experiences of ordinary life; but the molding of this material into forms is the work of someone who is most certainly not the self, who originally had the experiences, or who later recalled and reflected

“the work of a highly differentiated mental compartment, without any apparent connection, emotional or volitional, with the aims, interests, or feelings of the person concerned.”

These things are self-luminous, exhibit a preternatural brilliance of color and possess a preternatural significance.

To acquire such a stone is to acquire something whose preciousness is guaranteed by the fact that it exists in the Other World.

Hence man’s otherwise inexplicable passion for gems and hence his attribution to precious stones of therapeutic and magical virtue.

In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.

“The view of that world,” says Plato, “is a vision of blessed beholders” for to see things “as they are in themselves” is bliss unalloyed and inexpressible.

Gems, for example, come from the soul’s visionary heaven; but they also lead the soul back to that heaven.

We see then that there are in nature certain scenes, certain classes of objects, certain materials, possessed of the power to transport the beholder’s mind in the direction of its antipodes, out of the everyday Here and toward the Other World of Vision.

In a word, the beauty that transports the beholder, because it reminds him, obscurely or explicitly, of the preternatural lights and colors of the Other World.

Bright, pure colors are characteristic of the Other World.

Familiarity breeds indifference.