The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell

Tags:  non-fiction,

This is the book from which Jim Morrison’s band took its name. The title comes from a line by the English visionary and poet, William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Huxley decides to test Blake’s theory by dosing himself on mescaline, the hallucinogenic ingredient in peyote. Huxley seems to have been inspired by the peyote ceremonies of Native American tribes, who consider the cactus a spiritual gift from God.

The author, around sixty years old at the time, dosed himself at home and then spent a good chunk of time staring at a chair, some flowers, and his pants while a friend interviewed him and recorded his thoughts and impressions. The author notes the profound impact of seeing and feeling the intense presence of ordinary objects in the everyday world.

The brain, Huxley says in both The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, acts to limit our perception, filtering out things that won’t have an immediate effect on our survival. This includes most things, and most of the attributes of the things we do notice. Mescaline, LSD and other drugs seem to turn that filter off, allowing us to perceive more and with greater intensity. The intensity can sometimes be overwhelmingly moving and beautiful, and sometimes terribly frightening. The four bamboo legs of the chair inside Huxley’s house are unspeakably beautiful. The shadows on the chair outside his house are horrifying.

In Heaven and Hell, the author spends some time considering which factors determine whether one’s visions are beautiful or horrifying. Often, it comes down to one’s sense of well-being and one’s physical state upon beginning the trip. Huxley cites M.A. Sechehay’s Journal d’une Schizophrene as an example of the potential horrors a tripper may encounter when things go wrong. But in Huxley’s case, except for the briefly terrifying encounter with the backyard chair, it all goes right.

Two of the primary characteristics of the mind-opening visions induced by mescaline are bright, almost overwhelmingly beautiful colors and the ability to see a transcendent inner light shining from all objects. With the inner light comes a feeling of immanence, or the presence of divinity within every object one beholds. This, Huxley believes, accounts for Native Americans’ reverence for the peyote cactus. It gives them direct access to what those in Christian churches try, often without much success, to access through ritual and weekly worship.

Regarding the flowers in a vase in his office, Huxley says that when he looked at them under the influence of mescaline, “I was not looking 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.”

This is in stark contrast to the way he is used to seeing the world. He notes:

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born–the beneficiary inasmuch 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.

Once mescaline opens the mind to see, it produces profound effects.

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room. He can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that he will never even be tempted to indulge in what Traherne called “the Dirty devices of the world.” When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when “the sea flows in our veins… and the stars are our jewels,” when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or for the drearier forms of pleasure? Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; the do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor. And to these enormous negative virtues we may add another which, though hard to define, is both positive and important. The arhat [one who has obtained enlightenment] and the quietist may not practice contemplation in its fullness; but if they practice it at all, they may bring back enlightening reports of another, a transcendent country of the mind; and if they practice it in the height, they will become conduits through which some beneficent influence can flow out of that other country into a world of darkened selves, chronically dying for lack of it.

In Heaven and Hell, Huxley discusses ways in which people manipulate the amount of carbon dioxide delivered to their brains in order to suppress ordinary cognition, thus limiting the throttling effects of the brain’s rigid thinking and opening the doors of perception. Singers, chanters and participants in religious revivals use their voices until their brains are so deprived of oxygen they begin to experience religious feeling. Buddhist monks achieve a similar physiological effect through the practice of controlled breathing. The brain subjected to elevated amounts of carbon dioxide is more open to religious experience, sometimes gaining the ability to perceive naked existence where it had previously known only secondhand words and thoughts.

The Doors of Perception focuses specifically on how mescaline induces these effects, and Huxley notes that people always have and always will turn to drugs as a means to find an awareness that escapes them in everyday life.

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and always has been one of the principal appetites of the soul… And for private, everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots–all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial.

“All our education,” Huxley writes, “is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone elses.”

Alan Watts conveyed something similar when he said, “I can no more give you knowledge through teaching than I can give you nutrition by eating your food for you. You must do it yourself.” And what you are looking for is right there in front of you, if you can just get out of your own way.

“The given reality,” Huxley says, “is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sense totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation.”

Mystics and visionaries throughout history have had direct access to this. Others seem to find their way there through psychedelics like mescaline and LSD. Huxley gives a good account of what the people taking that second route can expect to find.