The Doors of Perception- Aldous Huxley
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."
~William Blake
A scene of the real William Blake
A Poet and a Gunslinger
Posted by Kori Ramos
"William Blake the invisible father of English visions!"
~Allen Ginsberg- Wichita Vortex Sutra:
from The Doors of Perception
by
Aldous Huxley
Reflecting on my experince, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philospher,
Dr. C.D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have
hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection
with memory and perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and
nervous system and sense organs in in the main eliminative and not productive.
Each person is at each moment capbale of remembering all that has ever
happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening 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 usesless 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
pracitcally useful."
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 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. That which, in the language
of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, and, as it were, petrified by language. The
various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality
of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through
the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however,
seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-
passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises,"
or through hypnosis, or by menas of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes
there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the
universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the
total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something
material which our narrrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least
sufficient, picture of reality. ~The Doors of Perception- Aldous Huxley
Heaven and Hell
Comments (2)
jn said
at 10:13 pm on Oct 1, 2009
wonderful, thank you.
ShareRiff said
at 5:33 pm on Oct 6, 2009
bowin', thankin'.......loving the "bottleneck"/filter design!!
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