Artists view is open to behold things invisible  visionary  but the visualizer is able to share this in something that is common

Tonight I sat down and read The Doors of Perception and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Huxley is insightful, honest, and humble as he spends the 80 pages of the book describing his trip on mescalin and the revelations he had in his reflections upon it.

He touches on the true meaning of art, the nature of artistry, the vicious reality of sin as addiction, the solitary reality of the human experience, the role of memory in shaping our vision, and of course our ego.  

I have wrestled myself with the spiritual morality of taking psychedelic drugs, especially naturally occurring ones.  Only God can truly create, and they are creation, but so too were the fruit of the forbidden tree which also promised knowledge….

Huxley is by no means a Christian but is honest and reverent to it here and has helped me clarify incoherent thoughts I have been unable to articulate previously. 

----This book is absolutely worth the evening it takes to read even if (maybe especially if) you have no history or intention of psychedelic use. 

5/5

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Below I will explain, analyze and detail some of my favorite quotes and passages from the book: 

Huxley begins his thoughts with the acute and often dismissed fact that no two people live the same lives, see the same world, or can understand the universe in the same way.  

“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” P.12

“Every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude” P.12

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Then he begins to think about our inability to think and communicate without words, symbols and systems.  It is these creations which allow us to become more than savages, but they are also our mental cage.  {The greeks for instance didn't have a word for blue, and so they called the sea grey and for lack of words to describe it, never developed the ability to appreciate the color of the glistening sea from that of a stormcloud} Our structure of thinking becomes our only way of being

“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born” P.23

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And so this castle of knowledge becomes an obstruction to our view…

“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for” P.29

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Someone on drugs may look at a curtain, a blanket, or their pair of pants with absolute wonder and appreciation.  These things have become mundane to us but it is actually we sober men who are blind and the drugged who can see, their existence, their act of being is good, so good in fact it is near overwhelming.  The artist is the man blessed enough to see this perfection always and he is doomed to try and share it. 

“For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being” P.33

“For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the power of even the highest art to express” P.34

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Upon looking at a flower he is unsurprised to be awestruck by a thing so beautiful it pierces even the mundane.  It is the “more subtle miracle of the leaves which surprised me” and so he remembers the HAIKU

“The flowers are easy to paint

The leaves are difficult

-Shiki” P.59

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Humans are of course greater and more fantastic than any chair, curtain or pair of pants, but we have the vice of trying to be more than the good we already are.  The beauty of humans is what they are, not what they pretend to be.  

“We all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction” P.37

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When asked what fantastic wonder he can discover within his own mind, Huxley claims to be disappointed by the disorder and the weakness.  The things he finds “revealed” to himself are quite unimpressive, in fact he realizes that the beauty of art comes in the understanding of the being of the other

“These contraptions of tin and highly colored plastic—where had i seen them before? In every picture gallery that exhibits the latest in nonrepresentational art” P.49

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Huxley argues that much of human substance abuse is a result of inability to find a truly spiritual experience in their religion whether it is their fault or not. I’m not sure what I make of this, although as anyone who’s been to AA knows the only way out of addiction is inherently spiritual.  Something about that urge is truly spiritual…

“When for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates—alcohol and “goof pills” P.67

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The true climax of his realization is functional, it is that we do not actually see the world.  So too we cannot think of all that we know, or acknowledge all that we might sense.  And so, for survival we limit our minds to what is functional.  Huxley says that ‘we slow the valve of what is available to our Mind at Large to only the trickle, to only what is necessary for survival’  In so doing this we do not really see, or experience and so we are not struck with wonder at existence and creation.  We are saved the “wonder” by seeing only memories, things categorized into shapes made vague enough to be used without overwhelming.  

“We must learn to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction”P.74

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And so, imperfectly, he claims that his psycho active dose of mescaline reverted him back to seeing for the first time; to wonder to goodness, to the being itself of each thing.  

Anyways, read the book, its fun!!

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I will write again of this problem of the cloud of our memory; poetry, fantasy and all true art may be some remedy.