by Aldous Huxley

 

Non-fiction

 

This is a well-known treatise on altered perceptions and is loosely categorized as Philosophy.

 

The Doors of Perception is largely about the author's experience of mescaline and the altered mental perceptions of the world he experienced under the influence of the drug. I have to admit that I was a little disappointed with the limited viewpoint as this could have been much more interesting with input by other people, especially native American people who have traditionally used Peyote for spiritual questing in their rituals.

 

The sequel, Heaven and Hell, goes more into the philosophical musings that I was interested to find. In this follow-up, Huxley discusses correlations between hallucinogenic drug experience, especially the heightened sense of color, and religious experience as well as the natural attraction our species has to gemstones and flowers with bright colors.

 

It made for dry reading, yet had some interesting points. The rock band, The Doors, named themselves for this book so curiosity made me want to read it. I wouldn't recommend it for deep Philosophy, but it was interesting in parts and blissfully short. Reading a few pages at a time worked for me to keep from letting the boredom mask the worthwhile insights.

I don't even know why I thought this might be a good read for me. 

 

Sure, this is the book the inspired The Doors but it is infinitely more enjoyable to listen to Jim Morrison's musical expressions of his experiments with drugs than it is to read Huxley's accounts of his, and even then this is only because the songs are so much shorter.

 

Not for me.

Hello there Booklikers! I decided to start a new vlog dedicated to books. I am an eclectic reader, so I thought it would be a good idea to share a "reading list" of books that are interesting for art geeks, even if they're not necessarily about art.

 

The first book to be featured is Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" (1954). I will publish a new reading vlog every two weeks.

 

Tell me what you think! And if you have a book vlog, send me the link, I would love to see it!

 

I'm reminded by local media that Jim Morrison would be 70 today -  were he less unhappy with his life. That's really strange, the way he'd acquired the cult status here many years after his death (during his lifetime there'd been iron curtain and only a few crazy music fans would have had the information). In comparison, nobody's heard of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix except for a small niche audience.

In what now seems almost another life - my late teens and early twenties - old Jim was a major influence on my reading habits. Heck, I read "Ulysses" while still in high school though it took me the longest time ever, half a year I think. I did enjoy it, actually - probably wouldn't have if I read it now. As it is, I remember it every time I start my period :)

 

Other books from the Morrison list:

Aldous Huxley "The Doors of Perception"

William Blake "Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience"

 

and lesser known, from which the enterprising Morrison also filched titles and bits:

 

John Rechy "City of Night"

all you wanted and didn't want to know about the gay (and trans etc) underground (I would even say underbelly) of the US in the fifties - an engaging book that sometimes reads as a picaresque but ultimately depressing

 

Anais Nin "A Spy in the House of Love"

I was bored and couldn't understand why a seemingly intelligent woman always had sex on her mind when there were so many other interesting topics to think of, the meaning of life and everything the lack of it for example. I was a cerebral young thing.

 

Richard Farina "Been Down So Long"

 

This book is like a blur in my mind but I think it captures well the general feeling of sub-depression that is nothing like a clinical depression but more of a constant hum, background bleakness so aptly described by the title "been down so long it looks like up to me". All the better for fact that the hero isn't moping and languishing, he's too busy messing up his life but it doesn't give his life meaning, he's too intelligent to get really distracted.

 

And there were more of these books I probably would never go back to, but enough for my little tribute.

 

Increasingly, I'm learning that perception is far more complicated than I ever imagined. Sight, as an example, isn't simply eyes acting like cameras, sending image data to the brain for interpretation. An article in the online journal, Nature, described the mechanism by which the brain "sees" what our eyes are going to see before our eyes see it. This is why we don't view the world through what would otherwise look like a hand-held camera. Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has shown that "the human retina can transmit data at roughly 10 million bits per second."

What the brain does with this data is amazing. For one thing, it compensates for anything that prevents us from seeing things as normal. In 1896, George Stratton experimented with eyeglasses that inverted his vision. After a few days, his brain adapted and Stratton saw everything the right way up.

The brain, needing to process data rapidly, is predisposed to see a perceptual set, which means we see what we expect to see, based largely on prior experience. No wonder children look at the world with such wide eyes--they are truly looking, whereas adults are watching re-runs. All this is necessary from an evolutionary point-of-view, since survival depends on quick data interpretation and reaction--useful for escaping lions, for example.

In The Doors of Perception, (published in 1956), Huxley recounts his personal experience with mescalin and its effect on his senses and thought processes. An interesting springboard into the discussion was Huxley's admission of being quite ordinary in artistic skills, yet wanting to see the world as an artist sees it. Likewise, he wanted to see and feel about the world as would a mystic. Most of the essay described exactly that.


An interesting section, which I expect has been more thoroughly researched by now, discusses adrenochrome, a product of the decomposition of adrenalin. Huxley wrote that adrenochrome "can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia."

Mescalin, it seems, along with chemicals found naturally in the body, can shake up the way the brain normally filters and manipulates data input. Huxley thought it prevented the brain from filtering input from our senses, thereby making everything intense and amazing. The end result was to make other things less important, such as the idea of the individual and our self-importance. If we have a finite capability for 'input', then it stands to reason that turning the valve on the senses will change other aspects of our world view. Huxley coined a term, Mind at Large, which I rather liked--

“Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. 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 knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large."

In any case, I enjoyed this slim volume as it connects scientific inquiry with what seems to me to be a higher pursuit of our consciousness. The other edge of the sword is that one cannot operate or navigate in this world, outside a lock down mental facility, with other than a brain that functions within certain margins of filtration. While under the influence of mescalin, Huxley lost interest in relationships and all sorts of trivial pursuits necessary to sustain life in society. Seems we are as we need to be, and if one wants to pursue other avenues of consciousness, they'll have to do so within certain limitations.

Sidenote from internet search: "On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular". According to her account of his death, in This Timeless Moment, she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died at 5:21 pm on 22 November 1963, aged 69."

One can't help but wonder what that trip was like.