It is a remarkable fact that before the 20th Century there were no allusive titles. Titles were simpler then, like “Daniel Defoe” or “David Copperfield.” St. Bernard did not call his commentary on the Song of Songs “The Kiss of His Mouth” and Shakespeare did not call Julius Caesar “Scatter the Proud.” Crime and Punishment sounds like an allusion but is actually a description; so is Pride and Prejudice. But then came the 20th Century, and The Grapes of Wrath, All the King’s Men, Brave New World, and a host of others. I do not know who came up with this idea, but it certainly caught on. We are not out of this forest yet either.
There is a strange magical power in titles, especially in a society too preoccupied to look behind them. I once heard an author of twenty-odd books musing on why one book of his, called Everything Belongs, had sold so many more copies than all his other books. His interlocutor said, with the simple air of absolute certainty, “the title.”
So it is with Aldous Huxley’s marvellously titled essay “The Doors of Perception.” It is usually packaged – thankfully – with a much better essay by the same author on the same topic called “Heaven and Hell.” If you mentioned Huxley’s essay “Heaven and Hell” at a cocktail party no one would know what you are talking about. But all you need to do is note that it is the fuller and more thoughtful version of his essay “The Doors of Perception” and everyone will be back on track. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is not accepted wisdom in the publishing trade.
The topic of the two essays is the use of drugs which alter perception, particularly mescaline (LSD is mentioned, but there is no direct narration of LSD experiences). “The Doors of Perception” is about a single eight-hour mescaline trip. Mescaline is the active ingredient in peyote, and Huxley offers the following analysis:
A young English psychiatrist, at present working in Canada, was struck by the close similarity, in chemical composition, between mescalin and adrenalin. Further research revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness. (11)
It is not too much to say that this kind of information, which Huxley was breathlessly excited about in 1956, has been so thoroughly digested by our society that it is unlikely to raise an eyebrow. We are well aware that the brain is a stew of organic chemicals.
The effects of mescaline on Huxley are not such as to produce much excitement either. He was fascinated by a bouquet of flowers on the table. He could stare in rapture at his flannel pants. His desire to do things flagged. He did not find people interesting. He was not impressed by art or music. Things became rapturously resplendent. Then they became too resplendent. He went outside and saw a garden chair onto which beams of light had fallen, creating a striped pattern of light and darkness:
Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement – or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgement which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair – I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. (55)
If you haven’t experienced this yourself, you’ve probably heard about it from your friends: about four hours into the trip, starting to cry because of the way the light hits a tree or some such thing.
It’s not clear that this is an experience anyone really wants to have in itself, though of course curiosity and peer pressure will lead a person to it readily enough. People usually do this kind of thing to “expand their mind,” and while the results are usually fairly deplorable – minds usually stay very much the same size after drug use, and sometimes they contract – the results were very good in Huxley’s case.
One of the reasons why the results are so good in Huxley’s case is that he does not subscribe to the “nothing but” theory, which he names and attacks: the theory that a religious vision is “nothing but” the presence of decomposed adrenalin in the blood, or an excess of carbon dioxide. He contends that the alteration of the brain chemistry allows us to perceive things differently, but he does not question that the things perceived exist. In fact he may be excessive on this point, but there is some reason to it.
There are three visual phenomena he records in his drug-induced state. One is translucent colored geometrical shapes. He likens them to gems. He then goes on to give one of the most convincing explanations for man’s esteem for shiny rocks, one which can virtually float the entire export economy of South Africa:
Hence man’s otherwise inexplicable passion for gems and hence his attribution to precious stones of therapeutic and magical virtue…. In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary. (103-4)
He notes the ubiquity of gemstones in descriptions of heaven (across cultural boundaries), and also the Western link between stained glass – a variant on the gem theme – and spiritual transports:
Thanks to glass, a whole building – the Sainte Chapelle, for example, the cathedrals of Chartres and Sens – could be turned into something magical and transporting. Thanks to glass, Paolo Uccello could design a circular jewel thirteen feet in diameter – his great window of the Resurrection, perhaps the most extraordinary single work of vision-inducing art ever produced. (108)
This is typical Huxley, by the way. He laces these essays with art-criticism, and while many of his declarations are inarguable (everyone likes Sainte-Chapelle), some have a merely personal significance. The window of Uccello he refers to is not to the taste of all. And throughout these essays are declarations about Rembrandt, Matisse, Van Gogh, and Vermeer. They are not objectionable and are at times insightful, but they are not always relevant.
Another major visual phenomenon he records is the intensification of the experience of color. He found this salutary and even says, “This is how one ought to see” (34). The overall effect for him was the conclusion that everything is a miracle, which is a primary religious experience which many people who call themselves religious have not yet had. People are often curiously dead to the things around them, and cannot be made to stop and look at anything beyond the human tragedy/comedy of self-advancement. But the contemplative eye sees marvels in the tiniest flowers and the daily aspect of the sky.
The third phenomenon Huxley records is a kind of shimmering breathing of inanimate matter. Insofar as a philosopher can see that this indicates that the distinction between animate and inanimate may be less significant than we imagine, I see no trouble in this, but insofar as it indicates something false – those walls aren’t really breathing – it opens up the potential for escapism. Huxley took his drugs to go deeper into reality, but not everyone does. And perhaps many of the perceptions of the drug-induced state are really just misperceptions. This is more likely to enslave people than to liberate them.
One of Huxley’s primary concerns is the social and religious utility of drugs, as in his Brave New World where “soma” is an indispensable aid to sex, enjoyment, and religion. It doesn’t seem like we are moving very quickly towards this perfect pleasure drug; in fact most of the drugs being produced today offer not happiness but success, such as steroids, diet pills, acne medication, cognitive enhancers, beta blockers – even Viagra offers not so much pleasure as avoidance of failure.
But his conviction of the value of drugs to enhance perception leads to a most interesting theoretical investigation of various religious disciplines. Most fruitful is his assertion that increased carbon dioxide in the blood can produce visions; he associates the breathing exercises of yoga with the attainment of this reduced-carbon state, as well as the chanting of the Jesus-prayer and the singing of psalms. Even extended choral singing can produce a “buzz”, as any singer knows. Since he believes that good cerebral function is mostly a question of eliminating useless impressions, he believes that reducing cerebral efficiency – via carbon dioxide poisoning, or long fasts – permits an “expanded” outlook. This is a theoretical explanation, and I cannot vouch for it. Tolstoy recommended an ascetic diet, but for a different reason – he felt that a protein- and vitamin-rich diet overstimulated the bodily urges at the expense of the spiritual. Both theories commend simplicity to those who seek religious experience; Huxley’s theory leads us a little closer to self-mortification.
Since he thinks these drugs are the stuff of mystical experiences, he recommends that mystics give up their old methods and use the chemicals:
For an aspiring mystic to revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self-flagellation would be as senseless as it would be for an aspiring cook to behave like Charles Lamb’s Chinaman, who burned down the house in order to roast a pig. Knowing as he does (or at least as he can know, if he so desires) what are the chemical conditions of transcendental experience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help to the specialists – in pharmacology, in biochemistry, in physiology and neurology, in psychology and psychiatry, and parapsychology. (156)
But this presumes that Huxley really knows the depths of the mystical experience, and hence knows that the traditional one and the chemical one are interchangeable, and I am not at all sure that this is so. He describes the sense of miraculousness in the world; the vividness of all things; the forms floating past his eyes. These are lovely experiences and have something to teach. But to me these all sound like Huxley looking at reality; and, to me at least, the mystical experience is when you know you are not looking at reality but from it. To have the world “apparelled in celestial light” is not enough if you are on the outside of it peering in. It sets up experiences like his terror at the sight of a chair. You have increased the stimulus-power of externalities, but not the power of the mind to identify with them. The enlightened Buddha not only sees the horror of the “Face of Glory,” but also sees it as glory and knows he is part of it and so is not afraid.
Another reason why Huxley’s descriptions do not draw me away from my own spiritual exercises – such as sitting on a chair watching the sun rise over a mountain, or staying for hours on a rock in the middle of a forest – is that his drug-induced experiences seem to diminish many religiously important aspects of the universe: it “left no room,” as he says, “for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons” (35). The contemplative life draws men into solitude and away from activity, it is true; a great contemplative can never be president, and if the life of Celestine V is any guide, he cannot even be pope; but the traditional contemplative disciplines are not opposed to the “concerns involving persons.” In fact, the knowledge of one’s own compulsions, of one’s own habitual distortions of reality, which you can see in extended solitude – the absence of varied stimuli allows you to see your brain operating nearly on its own momentum – may often help the contemplative particularly in his interactions with other people. The conquering of his own fears regarding his own dissolution and his own smallness may lead to true liberation and greatness.
A friend, when told of my project of reading these essays of Huxley, said to me, “I think you may have missed the window in life when those essays seem really important. I read it when I was sixteen and thought it was great then, but I feel no need to revisit it.” The essays are good, but there is something about them that seems dated and superfluous; the wise today are far more cautious about artificially induced shortcuts than perhaps they were in the middle of the last century. And we can see the minds of our parents’ generations, which went through all the “expansions” that were available for purchase at the time; the results were more like solipsism and materialistic paranoia than mystical awareness. One way or another, Huxley himself does not act as a convincing siren to steer us onto these rocks. Hearing people talk about the mystical experience of having children or listening to music is far more intense. Much of Huxley’s “drug culture” seems like a dead end rather than a gateway to transcendence, or like a title-page without the actual contents.
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