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The Doors of Perception

Page history last edited by ShareRiff 14 years, 3 months ago

 

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

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"William Blake the invisible father of English visions!"

 

~Allen Ginsberg- Wichita Vortex Sutra:

 

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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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