The doors of perception / Heaven and hell - Aldous Huxley

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION

‘I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.’ This fascinating essay describes how Mr Huxley submitted himself as ‘a guinea-pig’ to mescalin, the active principle of a drug, peyotl, long known to the Mexican Indians. He expected it to produce a different mode of consciousness: but he found that it resulted in an extraordinarily heightened visual awareness, which gave him ‘a sacramental vision of reality’. Everyday objects took on a great significance and intensity: in Blake’s phrase, ‘the doors of perception were cleansed’.

HEAVEN AND HELL

In this companion volume to The Doors of Perception, Mr Huxley is concerned with ‘the supreme truth that perception … can be the same as Revelation’. Visionary power, attained once by fasting and mortification, can be achieved today through certain drugs, through hypnosis, or the stroboscopic lamp. The experimenter finds himself in an unexplored New World of the mind, the Antipodes of his normal conscious living, whose properties have a heightened significance, a pure intrinsic value. This world can have the characteristics of the Paradise or the Fairyland of religion and folk-lore; but negative emotions – fear, hatred, anger, or malice – will turn this heaven into a hell.