7 ms·
The Doors of Perception (1954) [pdf]
- keiferski 7y ago"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” - William Blake
- 8bitsrule 7y agoTo see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour
- louwrentius 7y agoPlease watch the movie Dead Man with Jonny Depp.
- keiferski 7y agoI had never heard of this movie, but it looks great. Thanks for the suggestion!
- toxicFork 7y agoIf you're in London you can buy the book (comes with Heaven and Hell) for £4 at the Old Spitalfields Market. Tell the guy "the one in the yellow jacket sent me".
- plumednom 7y agoI will be in London next month. What exactly should I expect the sales person to say when I tell them who sent me. Sounds covert. :)
- toxicFork 7y agoHe will be prompted to say something along the lines of "sorry feller, I don't know who you mean". This will mark the completion of his assignment as it was intended. What is expected from you as the participant will be to nod along and move on, after completing the monetary transaction, of course. This way he will know that you have completed your part too. Otherwise there is a chance to set off a sequence of events that may be most full of misfortune for anyone involved.
- nabla9 7y agoNothing. You are supposed to just go home and lick the pages.
- toxicFork 7y agoA civilised person will know to lick the fingers instead as they touch to turn the pages.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zigzaggy 7y agoBrings back memories of the college days... not a single care in the world but expanding horizons.
- ronyfadel 7y agoIt's never too late to re-expand them :)
- kordlessagain 7y ago"I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world - a poor thing but my own - which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself"
- cmuldur 7y agoI couldn't comprehend the meaning of "pregnant words of poets". Can someone explain this to a non-native english speaker?
- julian37 7y agoA dictionary will help, or try googling for "pregnant definition": 2. full of meaning; significant or suggestive. "a pregnant pause" EDIT: Or you're a recursive troll?
- cmuldur 7y agoNo man i just tried to search pregnant words of poets and found lots of poems about pregnancy which i liked some of them. I don't advise you to read though.
- idclip 7y agoYour confusion is endearing it makes me smile with compassion. Bless you. The word pregnant is used symbolically - a woman carries a child with great effort (the symbology gets even more significant if we consider the act of sex before the pregnancy) - and the child Is born with great pain, but eventually happiness of the parents. So this symbol of promise-of-joy-at-end-of-suffering, when combined with the symbol of the word (as carrier of meaning) gives birth (see how im using birth here to explain something? Its a similar mechanism) to a new symbol, “pregnant words” - these words written during great emotional storms, and attempt to draw a picture of immense meaning and beauty to those who read it, if they are also in the right state of mind to understand. Even trying to truly explain what it is, is kind of difficult. We humans actually are “complex symbol creators” - rather than “language users” - its a wonder we understand each other at all sometimes, and its no wonder that we disagree so much.
- lubujackson 7y agoThe Doors (the band) got their name from this book's title.
- qqn 7y agoYes, I'd seen this claim once before. The original quote was "There are things known, and things unknown, and in between are the Doors", yet a quick search led to this explanation: "QI hypothesizes that this quotation was streamlined and then the words were reassigned to more prominent figures such as Jim Morrison, Aldous Huxley and William Blake" on https://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/the-doors https://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/the-doors.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- orasis 7y agoWhat is the copyright status of this?
- hinkley 7y agoLearned something new: > In some other countries, including Canada, copyright term is life plus 50 years, and in those countries C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Robert Frost, Jean Cocteau, and the famous poet Sylvia Path, who all died in 1963, enter the public domain in 2014. https://klminc.com/intellectual-property/peter-rabbit-loses-copyright-protection https://klminc.com/intellectual-property/peter-rabbit-loses-...
- lstodd 7y agoWas expanded to perfection by Douglas Adams with the bird.
- sideshowb 7y agoI always thought this book pretty dull. Different topic, but if you want to read Huxley, Brave new world is great. Alternatively if you want to read about the experiences of early psychedelic users, Leary's psychedelic experience is better.
- dwaltrip 7y agoRelatedly, I just finished reading How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, which does a great job of detailing the fascinating history of psychedelics and the current very promising resurgence of scientific research. It also does as good a job as one can expect at actually explaining what they are like, including descriptions of his own personal trips. After reading the book, I wouldn't be surprised to see legal clinics open to the public in the US in the next 10-15 years.
- mistermann 7y agoSam Harris does quite an impressive job articulating what a recent 5 gram mushroom trip was like, worth a listen. https://bullhorn.fm/makingsensewithsamharris-subsc/posts/177-psychedelic-science?p=6201 https://bullhorn.fm/makingsensewithsamharris-subsc/posts/177...
- dwaltrip 7y agoThanks for the recommendation! I just listened to the entire podcast, very interesting and exciting stuff.
- idclip 7y agoAmazing read so far, very gripping! (Page 5)
- duelingjello 7y agoYeap. I read it in high school many moons ago. I should probably read it again, before and after dropping acid, just to understand the context. With each year and season of our lives, we see the world through different, hopefully wiser yet still youthfully-enthusiastic, eyes.
- duelingjello 7y ago[2011] Aldous Huxley, Dying of Cancer, Left This World Tripping on LSD (1963) http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/aldous_huxleys_lsd_death_trip.html http://www.openculture.com/2011/10/aldous_huxleys_lsd_death_... As an aside: The Doors (the band), in addition to being named after the book and having a classically-trained pianist, basically delved into a different genre with each album. The Electra label also had their albums put on early CDs in 1980/1981 made in West Germany.