hey, I like your proverb, ‘Arry Aardvark! As Huxley believes that contemplation should also include action and charity, he concludes that the experience represents contemplation at its height, but not its fullness. [31] The Doors of Perception was the first book Huxley dedicated to his wife Maria. Christianity and mescaline seem well-suited for each other; the Native American Church for instance uses the drug as a sacrament, where its use combines religious feeling with decorum.[49]. Reading the papers today I’d have to agree with you! [80] For Philip Thody, a professor of French literature, Huxley's revelations made him conscious of the objections that had been put forward to his theory of mysticism set out in Eyeless in Gaza and Grey Eminence, and consequently Island reveals a more humane philosophy. 2. Finally, they returned home and to ordinary consciousness. [25], The experience started in Huxley's study before the party made a seven block trip to The Owl Drug (Rexall) store, known as World's Biggest Drugstore, at the corner of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards. [22], Osmond arrived at Huxley's house in West Hollywood on Sunday, 3 May 1953, and recorded his impressions of the famous author as a tolerant and kind man, although he had expected otherwise. ‘Arry is that short for Larry and so on with Aardvark? Perhaps one of the reasons that he continued into adulthood with a more intuitive, imaginative ‘right brain’ way of looking at reality, was that he did not receive any formal education. In this state, Huxley explains he didn't have an "I", but instead a "not-I". There are still people who do not feel this desire to escape themselves,[68] and religion itself need not mean escaping from the ego. ‘William Blake’ collage by Chekoullage, by kind permission of the artist. The Doors of Perception provoked strong reactions for its evaluation of psychedelic drugs as facilitators of mystical insight with great potential benefits for science, art, and religion. Blake’s thinking predicts all sorts of things, from the structure of matter (his views on the inter-involved, infinite nature of energy anticipate Niels Bohr and David Bohm) to the structure of the mind, where his theories prefigure Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi. [75], Huxley continued to take these substances several times a year until his death,[76] but with a serious and temperate frame of mind. This belief allowed him to penetrate deeply into the human mind, and to bring back remarkable, and remarkably prophetic, visions of man’s internal world. The Doors of Perception is a book by Aldous Huxley. These included mescaline, which he showed through a combination of animal and self-experiments was the compound responsible for the psychoactive properties of the plant. – William Blake. The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. [21] He also wrote that he looked forward to the mescaline experience and reassured Osmond that his doctor did not object to his taking it. Huxley was "shrewd, matter-of-fact and to the point" and his wife Maria "eminently sensible". [53], For Huxley's biographer and friend, the author Sybille Bedford, the book combined sincerity with simplicity, passion with detachment. He assembled a number of these aphoristic observations and published them as the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ which appear at the start of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley cited his fascination with Blake as a primary factor in his decision to take mescaline, which he hoped would help him transcend the self and see the world without the usual filters on reality: “the drug would admit me at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake.” After returning to Los Angeles, he took a month to write the book. The Doors is a quiet book. Correct behaviour and alertness are needed. We didn’t have to look far, for there on the magazine’s back cover was a quote from William Blake, the mystical British poet and artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. [7] Mescaline also played a paramount part in influencing the beat generation of poets and writers of the later 1940s to the early 1960s. What’s happening here? "Entheogens in the Study of Religious Experiences: Current Status", Huxley, Aldous, Eds. Huxley's 'aesthetic self-indulgence' and indifference to humanity would lead to suffering or stupidity; Mann concluded the book was irresponsible, if not quite immoral, to encourage young people to try the drug. 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