I began reading this attractively thin battered old book in the last week of my month long travels through France, Spain and Portugal. A personal trip post Graduation and pre what the majority of over 40s tell me is life in the ‘real world’. I carried it with me trying not to destroy its bright blue cover any more than it already looks like a crisp packet buried in a river bed for 12 years; tickled by worms and flattened by rocks and it was only until I had enough of writing down my own thoughts that I sought to read someone else’s.

I haven’t actually finished the book yet; the physical book is split into two parts both written by Aldous Huxley: ‘The Doors of Perception’ and ‘Heaven and Hell’. I haven’t found the second part as juicy as the first however, I am only half way through Heaven and Hell so there’s potential for a change in heart for sure. Anyway, I want to type up some of the paragraphs on here that caught by eye before I forget to do so or loose interest for it. So here are a load of zesty chunks from ‘The doors of Perception’ not analysed or explained just observed and appreciated.

Page 3

“Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. by it’s very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes”

Page 7

“‘Is-ness.’ The Being of Platonic philosophy” (`Plato)

“a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose or iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more , and nothing less, than what they were – a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.”

Page 9

“the really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories”

“In the Mescalin experience the implied question to which the eye responds are of another order… the mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within pattern.”

books glowed with a “living light”

“The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”

Time: “Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant.”

Page 11

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled 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.” – He is saying that as we are animals and our primary need is to survive, although we are capable of experiencing the world in such a way that values being and meaning over measures and productive structures and functions, we do not do this because at survival’s face value it does not benefit or enhance our ability to survive. This page really struck me, even just with the simple notion that our instincts are still so much at the forefront of existence, and control the finest and some of the most interesting of layers of the consciousness (that we know about) is grounding. Here we are thinking we have a grip on consciousness and think we are being all powerful and in touch with the interior but actually within that naive belief that we may have the slightest pinch on the true reality where as actually we are only existing in one physical way of even seeing the world which is the sense and ability we feel most confidently present in.

Page 20

“the world of selves, of time, of moral judgements and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of over-valued words and idolatrously worshipped notions” – I’m guessing because really all these approaches and notions and ways of being are foolish when one encounters a realm of experience so spare of illusion and functions that these emotions and approaches seem like a waste of time and irrelevant to the wider picture.

Page 28
This page was just an interesting informative page about the nature and subject matter of paintings the landscape.

Page 34

“The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense – the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions. The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to wive with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which because it never permits him to look at the world through merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate counter-measures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other.”

– this is a pretty mental paragraph but I think I can gage the point about the excruciatingly mind-boggling disorder of experiencing the world with such intensity and vulnerability to its extreme presence and how this may cause uncontrollable power and how misaligned this is with the rest of society and there for cause chaotic actions and result in a complete lack of connection to others and people who cannot empathise or comprehend such an experience of the world.

Page 47

“Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education 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 or experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the Humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.”

Page 59

“our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are for ever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention, But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.”

“It is entirely natural – entirely natural in the sense of being entirely unsophisticated by language or the scientific, philosophical and utilitarian notions, by means of which we ordinarily re-create the given world in our own drearily human image.”

Page 69

“sacred jewellery has always been associated with the light of lamps and candles. For Ezekiel, a gem was a stone of fire. Conversely, a flame is a living gem, endowed with all the transporting power that belongs to the precious stone and, to a lesser degree, to polished metal. This transporting power of flame increases in proportion to the depth and extent of the surrounding darkness. The most impressively numinous temples are caverns of twilight, in which a few tapers give life to the transporting, other-worldly treasures on the alter.”