The Doors Of Perception
By Aldous Huxley

Hungarian Experiment Book Review/Notes

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.” (pg.12)

“I am and, for as long as I 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.” (pg.15-16)

While reading, this part really stood out to me and in my notes I wrote down that, ‘I GRATELY resonate with this.’ I too feel that I am a poor visualizer. I can’t hold images in my head and look back at them as I find others are able to do or claim they are able to do. I very rarely, if ever, can recall my dreams and in general I regularly question ‘how good my memory would be’ if I didn’t document so much of my life.

Last night while I was struggling to get to sleep after a long day and as an experiment to put my mind at ease I thought I would ‘go through my day in my head’ which is something I don’t often do but I wanted to see after reading this section of the book and Mr. Huxley’s explanation of his own view on life, if I could recall the images from the day. I spent the day shooting videos in Brantford, Ontario with Matt McKeever for his YouTube Channel and a real estate investor named Sarah who we were highlighting and featuring for his channel. As I lay there, unable to sleep, my mind racing, I tried to envision their faces, what they were wearing. I tried to see the colours of their clothes and although I could remember faintly what she was wearing, a turquoise dress shirt with a grey ‘robe’ overtop and Matt with a grey blazer and black t-shirt but I felt I could remember this but I couldn’t ‘see’ it in my head. I regularly find myself ‘remembering’ and seeing things from the perspective of the the video we shot from, more then the real aspect of life and my own perspective. I find that whatever I can ‘see’ while recollecting images in my mind are extremely weak and I seem to be pulling the images more from what I document through camera rather than my actual memory of it.

I regularly question for myself if my ‘experiences’ aren’t as great or that maybe those who are great visualizers such as artists and musicians have a greater ‘experience’ visually than I do or others similar to myself such as Aldous Huxley. I find I’m able to express my experiences in life greater through words then through ‘art’ or visualizations which I feel, according to the very minimal understanding of Mr. Huxley’s life, we have similar perspectives in this manner which from the start of this book I felt I greatly resonated with his words and him.

“According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind At Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind At Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition onto which he has been born – the beneficiary in as-much as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.” (pg.23-24)

I found this concept of the Mind At Large and how ‘making biological survival possible by it being funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system’ and how it leads to a ‘measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet’ and how this lead to us as humans inventing language which is meant to express and share and inevitably has advanced us as human beings is also the thing that holds us back.

“The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. 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.” (pg. 22-23)

“Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language.” (pg. 24)

This was another interesting aspect that stood out to me that I had not really considered in life. The concept that our brains and nervous system and sense organs are ‘eliminators’ rather than ‘producers’ and that their functions are ‘to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by…useless and irrelevant knowledge’ and that most of us only know what comes through this ‘reducing valve’ and then able to be articulated through this rather weak communication system we call language.

“The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul. 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 in the modern West, alcohol and opium in the East, hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America.” (pg. 67)

Interesting concept on how people have a natural urge to ‘transcend self-conscious selfhood’ which as Mr. Huxley states is ‘a principal appetite of the soul’ and how if we can’t find this transcendence by ‘means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises’ that we turn to ‘chemical surrogates’ or things in life that can briefly make them transcend their selfhood by means of intoxications with drugs/alcohol.

“In a world where education is predominately verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced who to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities are honored, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completed 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. But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system – when it comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that “what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply.” Besides, this matter of education is the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeon-holes. It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so the subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may safely be ignored altogether or left, with a patronizing smile, to those whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and unqualified amateurs.” (pg. 76-77)

I think this section is quite self-explanatory but I wanted to keep it documented for my sake, “when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system…no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it.”

“A person under the influence of mescaline 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 smell and, if you put him in a tepid bath, only one, almost imperceptible thing to touch the victim will very soon start “seeing things,” “hearing things” and having strange bodily sensations.”

I just wanted to save this piece for myself 😊

Well that’s just some of the main takeaways I got from Doors Of Perception by Aldous Huxley. I really enjoyed it and found it to be a nice quick read but I thought I gained a lot from it. I’ve heard of this book in the past but what turned me on to reading it was while reading ‘How To Change Your Mind’ by Michael Pollen where he regularly referenced key points from Mr. Huxley’s book which intrigued me to pick it up.

Thank you to both Aldous Huxley for sharing his experience with us and Michael Pollen for turning me on to reading it! I will definitely be diving into more of both their books!