The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell

by Aldous Huxley

The fine point of seldom pleasure has been blunted. What was once a needle of visionary delight has now become a piece of disregarded linoleum.

there are a dozen magical paintings by Georges de Latour;* there are all those visionary Rembrandts where the lights have the intensity and significance of light at the mind’s antipodes, where the darks are full of rich potentialities waiting their turn to become actual, to make themselves glowingly present to our consciousness.

The transporting power of many works of art is attributable to the fact that their creators have painted scenes, persons and objects which remind the beholder of what, consciously or unconsciously, he knows about the Other World at the back of his mind.

a profound stillness.

And it is precisely this which gives them their numinous quality, their power to transport the beholder out of the old world of his everyday experience, far away, toward the visionary antipodes of the human psyche.

Why should landscapes have found their way into the visionary literature of a given epoch and a given culture, but not into the painting? Posed in this way, the question provides its own best answer. People may be content with the merely verbal expression of this aspect of their visionary experience and feel no need for its translation into pictorial terms.

What is true of an individual artist may be true of a whole school. There are plenty of things which men experience, but do not choose to express; or they may try to express what they have experienced, but in only one of their arts. In yet other cases they will express themselves in ways having no immediately recognizable affinity to the original experience.

“denotation and connotation cannot be divided”

“no distinction is felt between what a thing ‘is’ and what it ‘signifies.’”

Distance lends enchantment to the view; but so does propinquity.

and something in me is reminded of those living patterns, so characteristic of the visionary world, of those endless births and proliferations of geometrical forms that turn into objects, of things that are forever being transmuted into other things. This

This revelation of the wilderness, living its own life according to the laws of its own being, transports the mind toward its antipodes; for primeval Nature bears a strange resemblance to that inner world where no account is taken of our personal wishes or even of the enduring concerns of man in general.

In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely.

isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves.

Nothing can exceed in beauty and in vision-inducing power the mosaics of gardens and buildings in the great Omayyad mosque at Damascus.

“Hunt in a Wood,” now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.

their own way they are as heavenly, as powerfully reminiscent of what goes on at the mind’s antipodes, as are the great masterpieces of landscape painting at the farthest point—Sung mountains in their enormous

Alpine world of Titian’s distances, the England of Constable; the Italies of Turner and Corot; the Provences of Cézanne and Van Gogh; the Île de France of Sisley and the Île de France of Vuillard. Vuillard, incidentally,

art. But visionary experience is not always blissful. It is sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.

Blissful visions are generally associated with a sense of separation from the body, a feeling of deindividualization.

They know that works alone are powerless and that it is faith, or loving confidence, which guarantees that visionary experience shall be blissful.

Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm.

If consciousness survives bodily death, it survives, presumably, on every mental level—on the level of mystical experience, on the level of blissful visionary experience, on the level of infernal visionary experience, and on the

level of everyday individual existence.

In life, as we know by experience and observation, even the blissful visionary experience tends to change its sign if it persists too long.

Blissful visionary experience tends to change its sign if it persists too long?

and after having shuttled back and forth between heaven and hell, most souls find it possible to retreat into that more reassuring region of the mind, where they can use their own and other people’s wishes, memories and fancies to construct a world very like that in which they lived on earth.

To increase the concentration of CO2 in the lungs and blood and so to lower the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve, until it will admit biologically useless material from Mind-at-Large—

Still more cogent and much harder to unravel are the reasons of the lungs, the blood and the enzymes, of neurons and synapses.

The way to the superconscious is through the subconscious, and the way, or at least one of

the ways, to the subconscious is through the chemistry of...

from chemistry to the still more elementary r...

To sit, with eyes closed, in front of a stroboscopic lamp is a very curious and fascinating experience.

more comprehensive mystery—the nature of the relations between visionary experience and events on the cellular, chemical and electrical levels.

Penfield has been able to induce the recall of a long chain of memories relating to some past experience.

Why do all visionaries insist on the impossibility of recalling, in anything even faintly resembling its original form and intensity, their transfiguring experiences? How many questions—and, as yet, how few answers!

In the currently fashionable picture of the universe there is no place for valid transcendental experience. Consequently those who have had what they regard as valid transcendental experiences are looked upon with suspicion as being either lunatics or swindlers.

But it is not only our mental climate that is unfavorable to the visionary and the mystic; it is also our chemical environment—an environment profoundly different from that in which our forefathers passed their lives.

reconciled. For a glimpse of beatitude, for a foretaste of unitive knowledge, no price seemed too high.

Fasting was not the only form of physical mortification resorted to by the earlier aspirants to spirituality.

But histamine produces shock, and shock affects the mind no less profoundly than the body. Moreover, large quantities of adrenalin may cause hallucinations, and some of the products of its decomposition are known to induce symptoms resembling those of schizophrenia.

As for toxins from wounds—these upset the enzyme systems regulating the brain, and lower its efficiency as an instrument for getting on in a world where the biologically fittest survive.

release decomposed protein into the blood, the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve is lowered and unfamiliar aspects of Mind-at-Large (including psi phenomena, visions and, if he is philosophically and ethically prepared for it, mystical experiences) will flow into the ascetic’s consciousness.

But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely “spiritual,” purely “intellectual,” purely “aesthetic,” it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.

systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a view to creating the internal conditions favorable to spiritual insight.

An interesting feature of these popular visionary arts is their close dependence upon contemporary technology. Fireworks, for example, were once no more than bonfires. (And to this day, I may add, a good bonfire on a dark night remains one of the most magical and transporting of spectacles. Looking

True pyrotechny began (in Europe at least, if not in China) with the use of combustibles in sieges and naval battles.

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

The gorgeous fancy dress worn by kings, popes and their respective retainers, military and ecclesiastical, has a very practical purpose—to impress the lower classes with a lively sense of their masters’ superhuman greatness.

In the course of the last two hundred years the technology of artificial lighting has made enormous progress, and this progress has contributed very greatly to the effectiveness of pageantry and the closely related art of theatrical spectacle. The first notable advance was made in the eighteenth century, with the introduction of molded spermaceti candles in place of the older tallow dip and poured wax taper. Next came the invention of Argand’s tubular wick, with an air supply on the inner as well as the outer surface of the flame. Glass chimneys speedily followed, and it became possible, for the first time in history, to burn oil with a bright and completely smokeless light. Coal gas was first employed as an illuminant in the early years of the nineteenth century, and in 1825 Thomas Drummond found a practical way of heating lime to incandescence by means of an oxygen-hydrogen or oxygen-coal gas flame. Meanwhile parabolic reflectors for concentrating light into a narrow beam had come into use. (The first English lighthouse equipped with such a reflector was built in 1790.)

Two distinct and separate arts are practiced in the theater—the human art of the drama and the visionary, other-world art of spectacle.