Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Doors of Perception
    The Doors of Perception
    The Doors of Perception
    Ebook57 pages1 hour

    The Doors of Perception

    By Aldous Huxley

    4.5/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Doors of Perception is a book by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it details his taking mescaline in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion. (Wikipedia)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOtbebookpublishing
    Release dateMar 20, 2020
    ISBN9783965370098
    Author

    Aldous Huxley

    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.

    Read more from Aldous Huxley

    Related to The Doors of Perception

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How to Take Shrooms

      Jan 21, 2021

      How to Take Shrooms
      6 min read

    • Article

      ‘Microdosing’ Is Touted By ’shroomers And Reddit Users. Science Is Starting To Test Their Claims — And Finding Some Truth

      Aug 23, 2018

      As microdosing psychedelics such as the active ingredient of "magic mushrooms" became the latest Silicon Valley “productivity hack,” all the evidence about its effects has been anecdotal. Until now.

      5 min read

    • Article

      I Am a Heroin User. I Do Not Have a Drug Problem

      Feb 17, 2021

      Carl Hart is a neuroscientist and Ziff Professor of Psychology at Columbia University—he was the first tenured African-American professor of sciences at Columbia. His research focuses on the “behavioral and neuropharmacological effects of psychoactiv

      9 min read

    • Article

      Michael Pollan

      Jun 4, 2018

      For his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, the author researched—and experimented with—psychedelic drugs. What do scientists believe psychedelics can offer people, especially those with certain types of mental illness? These chemicals allow us to

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Spiritual Materialist

      Mar 30, 2023

      The Spiritual Materialist
      11 min read

    • Article

      Holding Hands With A Chimp

      Dec 13, 2018

      Revelation comes in different forms for different people. A biblical verse. A flash of recognition in a lover’s eyes. A Nietzschean proverb. A classical sonata. A child’s embrace. Any moment of profundity, really, where time stops and the divine reve

      4 min read

    • Article

      What My Stroke Taught Me

      Apr 6, 2017

      In my memories of the Scottish hospital, the sky is always blue, though I know that can’t be completely accurate. Summer was waning, and as my friends and I had already experienced, Edinburgh was prone to unpredictable storms. Yet, I can’t think of a

      16 min read

    • Article

      Our Library

      Oct 28, 2019

      For choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and in

      2 min read

    • Article

      When Neurology Becomes Theology

      Jun 15, 2017

      Early in my neurology residency, a 50-year-old woman insisted on being hospitalized for protection from the FBI spying on her via the TV set in her bedroom. The woman’s physical examination, lab tests, EEGs, scans, and formal neuropsychological testi

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Power Of AWE

      Feb 14, 2023

      The Power Of AWE
      6 min read

    • Article

      Consciousness Is Just a Feeling

      Mar 3, 2021

      When he was a boy, Mark Solms obsessed over big existential questions. What happens when I die? What makes me who I am? He went on to study neuroscience but soon discovered that neuropsychology had no patience for such open-ended questions about the

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Dreams of the Man Who Discovered Neurons

      Oct 24, 2019

      Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish histologist and anatomist known today as the father of modern neuroscience, was also a committed psychologist who believed psychoanalysis and Freudian dream theory were “collective lies.” When Freud published The Int

      11 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Doors of Perception

    4.5/5

    10 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley

      THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION

      It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.

      Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True, they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a position among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist's repertory.

      Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis. Chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no longer depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed themselves with mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand, understanding of their patients' mental processes. Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of the drug's more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists have found out something about the mechanism of its action upon the central nervous system. And at least one professional philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness¹.

      There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and perhaps highly significant fact was observed². Actually, the fact had been staring everyone in the face for several decades; but nobody, as it happened, had noticed it until 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. Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is the mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the adrenals? It would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that some kind of a prima facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being systematically followed, the sleuths -biochemists, psychiatrists, psychologists - are on the trail.

      By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953, squarely athwart that trail. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy years of mescalin research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus, it came about that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.

      We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its 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. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or feeling into. Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1