Huxley, Aldous - The Doors Of Perception

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ALDOUS HUXLEY

THE DOORS

PERCEPTION

It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of

the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science.

To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of

immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early

Spanish visitors to the New World, "they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as

though it were a deity."

Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as

Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of

peyote. True, they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to

mescalin 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 in the

pharmacologist's repertory.

Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis.

Chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply

no longer depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed

themselves with mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand, understanding of their

patients' mental processes. Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of

circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of the drug's more striking effects.

Neurologists and physiologists have found out something about the mechanism of its action upon the

central nervous system. And at least one Professional philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may

throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain

and consciousness1.

There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and perhaps highly significant fact was

observed2. Actually the fact had been staring everyone in the face for several decades; but nobody, as it

happened, had noticed it until a Young English psychiatrist, at present working in Canada, was struck

by the close similarity, in chemical composition, between mescalin and adrenalin. Further research

1 See the following papers: "Schizophrenia. A New Approach." By Humphry Osmond and John Smythies. Journal of

Mental Science. Vol. XCVIII. April, 1952.

"On Being Mad." By Humphry Osmond. Saskarchewan Psychiatric Services Journal. Vol. I. No. 2. September.

1952. "The Mescalin Phenomena." By John Smythies. The British Journal of the Philosophy of Science. Vol. III.

February, 1953. "Schizophrenia: A New Approach." By Abeam Hoffer, Humphry Osmond and John Smythies. journal

of Mental Science. Vol. C. No. 418. January, 1954.

Numerous other papers on the biochemistry, pharmacology, psychology and neurophysiology of schizophrenia sad

the mescalin phenomena are in preparation

2 In his monograph, Menomini Peyolism, published (December 1952) in the Transactions of the American

Philosophical Society, Professor J. S. Slotkin has written that "the habitual use of Peyote does not seem to produce

any increased tolerance or dependence. I know many people who have been Peyotists for forty to fifty years. The

amount of Peyote they use depends upon the solemnity of the occasion; in general they do not take any more Peyote

now than they did years ago. Also, there is sometimes an interval of a month or more between rites, and they go

without Peyote during this period without feeling any craving for it. Personally, even after a series of rites occurring

on four successive weekends. I neither increased the amount of Peyote consumed nor felt any continued need for it."

It is evidently with good reason that "Peyote has never been legally declared a narcotic, or its use prohibited by the

federal government." However, "during the long history of Indian-white contact, white officials have usually tried to

suppress the use of Peyote, because it has been conceived to violate their own mores. But these at- tempts have

always failed." In a footnote Dr. Slotkin adds that "it is amazing to hear the fantastic stories about the effects of

Peyote and the nature of the ritual, which are told by the white and Catholic Indian officials in the Menomini

Reservation. None of them have had the slightest first-hand experience with the plant or with the religion, yet some

fancy themselves to be authorities and write official reports on the subject."

revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural

biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product

of the decomposition of adrenalin, 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. Is the mental disorder due to a

chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the

adrenals? It would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that some kind of a prima

facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being systematically followed, the sleuths -

biochemists , psychiatrists, psychologists - are on the trail.

By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953,

squarely athwart that trail. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy

years of mescalin research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and

he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came

about that, 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. 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. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another

to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our

own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put

ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases

communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. 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. The things and events to which

the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see

others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a

radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be

mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit

the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a

man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the

limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings

of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such

questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they

know to be true - namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside - the problems

posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in

exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that

I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had

always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or autohypnosis, by means of

systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of

consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic

were talking about.

From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was convinced in advance that the drug would

admit me, at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake and AE. But what I

had expected did not happen. I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of many-

colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with

heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I

had not reckoned, it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental make-up, the facts of my

temperament, training and habits.

I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the

pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the

verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen

event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday

afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater

Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an

hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand

to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood,

who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come

to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem

curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world - a poor thing but my own - which I

expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself.

The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. Half an hour after

swallowing the drug 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. At another time the 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. But at no time were there faces or forms of men or

animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings,

nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the

world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in

the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half 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 little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I

had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not

looking now 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.

"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were

recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was

said.)

"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is."

Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic

philosophy - except that Plate seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating

Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never,

poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under

the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what

rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they

were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being,

a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was

to be seen the divine source of all existence.

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative

equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but

only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words

like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things,

they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to

the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-

Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a

distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I

remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the

Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the

Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with

the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of

the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is

he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion."

It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as

day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of

the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or

rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace - cared to look at. The

books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I

looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books;

books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose

color was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the

shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention.

"What about spatial relationships?" the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books.

It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no

longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important

facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving

the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such

problems as Where? - How far? How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the

implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of

much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance,

relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in

space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with

living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the

three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished.

When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of

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摘要：

ALDOUSHUXLEYTHEDOORSOFPERCEPTION2Itwasin1886thattheGermanpharmacologist,LouisLewin,publishedthefirstsystematicstudyofthecactus,towhichhisownnamewassubsequentlygiven.Anhaloniumlewiniiwasnewtoscience.ToprimitivereligionandtheIndiansofMexicoandtheAmericanSouthwestitwasafriendofimmemoriallylongstanding....

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