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When Aldous Huxley opened the doors of perception
- mapcars 5y agoImportant thing to understand is that psychedelics can be used at most as an easy incentive for people to see if they interested in this direction of experience. There are reasons why most profound mystics don't value substances much and rather focus on developing people's own perception. Yes it takes time but results come above all expectations. From my experience it's much healthier to realize I can go into states of bliss and ecstasy completely by myself without any external help.
- whalesalad 5y agoIf you can reach enlightened states on your own - more power to you. I don’t think it’s fair to put down psychedelic drugs though. They rapidly accelerate the journey if used with the right amount of respect and intention. Your experience is yours. Don’t invalidate the experiences of others.
- 8bitsrule 5y agoI found the book (and many more) following the experience, and so Huxley's pitch was welcomed but 'not needed'. Agreed:respect and intention may indeed lead to very helpful insights. That said: as always in life, if you can't trust the source, you may find yourself misled.
- mylons 5y agoMaynard Keenan from Tool had a good line about this he’d use in interviews. Something like, “you get a shortcut to transcendence that you spend the rest of your life developing the ability to get their naturally“
- b3morales 5y agoPrecisely this. This is something that Huxley himself emphasized in his writing. The substance is, like any medicine, an aid to the natural process, not a substitute for it.
- GameOfFrowns 5y agoI think Alan Watts stated something similar in one of his famous speeches. The question is if the value of that experience is the same if it's "unearned" by taking the easy path or if it's better to experience profoundness earlier in life through consuming DMT, LSD or Magic mushrooms than having to meditate for decades first.
- pcarolan 5y agoRay Manzarek from The Doors (named after this book) used to say something like "I don't need drugs any more because the doors are open". Here's a similar quote: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ray_manzarek_307478 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ray_manzarek_307478
- ArtWomb 5y ago>>> atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection The idea is: what happens with psychedelic experimentation at mass scale? Do we morph into an empathic nation of Deanna Troi's overnite ;)
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoMassive chaos. All traffic stops. All services are disrupted and finally nothing works anymore. You cannot even count on water and electricity being available. The fact that some people have bad trips and become paranoid becomes the least of your problems. It would be very, very different from limited, occasional, "recreational" use.
- mc32 5y agoSo, like massive tent encampments but without the social services?
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoIn areas with moderate climate (no cold winters and hot summers) and with access to potable water, I guess it could go on for some time until they run out of food.
- GameOfFrowns 5y ago
- b3morales 5y agoOne of Huxley's fiction books, Island, is a thought experiment about the choices a very explicitly spiritual (Buddhist in origin) society would take. Among other things the coming of age ceremony involves taking a small dose of psilocybin.
- carapace 5y agoHave you ever heard of "Rainbow Gatherings"?
- scarecrowbob 5y agoI see this idea a lot, and in the main, I wholly agree with the understanding that it's personal work and not drugs which help people develop their understanding of the world. At the same time, this mode of saying "at most" undercuts the actual value of a psychedelic experience: that kind of experience is so profound that I often liken it to discovering sex for the first time. Knowing how to bring yourself and/ or a partner into some state or other isn't in itself useful, it's awkward and confusing to become initiated into that practice, and there are a myriad of ways where becoming sexually activated is violent and traumatic. But done well a) these experiences can be fun/useful as ends in themselves and b) these experiences are often the ones which open up entire realms of possibility for our minds and bodies. For instance, without a psychedelic context I certainly would not have had a way of parsing the effects of kundalini yoga, and I might not have even been inclined to work in that direction if I didn't have a first hand understanding of how dramatically our physiology can so directly impact our perceptions. And I find the people who discount the profound impact of initiation into that realm of experience almost tautologically fall into two camps: people who have moved past psychedelics as a mode (which is a legitimate and good mode, in my epereince) and people who have never had psychedelic experiences (which is also a wholly legitimate way to be in the world). The thing is, the first camp often seems (at least to me) to understate the actual impact of psychedelia in their development and the second camp doesn't have the personal experience to make those claims at all. While I am happy at your personal development and ability to enter states of bliss or ecstasy without psychedelic drugs, you may consider that this general bend of argumentation (that the drugs aren't valuable and may be unhealthy in general in this movement) is just as much of a shortcut as thinking that the psychedelics in themselves can lead to some sort of enlightenment.
- aksss 5y agoI think this is a very appropriate comparison. At risk of forcing the analogy, there's some balance between (dis)trusting society at large with the liberation of attitudes towards psychedelics while maintaining some guardrails against the objectification, or cheapening, or hyping (miracle cure-all style) or even institutionalization of the experience/tooling. Society seems to be very tolerant of the risks/consequences of liberalized sexual morality. I'm not in any way interested in judging that as a positive or negative right now, just the observation that a) there are consequences; b) Western society has given priority to the benefits over the consequences; c) the boundaries and dimensions of the issue, benefits, consequences are still being explored; d) that exploration has largely been hands-off and organic, addressing problems in an arguably reactive posture. With psychedelics I think the risks/consequences are potentially greater and so would say simply as a comparison, societies need to be a little more careful, a little less reckless with this one. I instinctively project my own positive experiences with psychedelics onto others and so imagine positive outcomes to be more accessible or certain for society at large. This instinct - I know from observation as I've grown older and have seen more of the world and its inhabitants - needs to be checked. There are a lot of broken people out there, a lot of vulnerable people, a lot of self-interested influences that are either uncaring or malign. I have trouble articulating my full thoughts on this, but I don't think Western and particularly US culture has done a good job managing mental health and particularly in fostering positive mental health during formative years of human development. Not specifically talking about acute diagnosable disorders, but even the level of chronic anxiety, depression, and hopelessness that is experienced and amplified when passed cyclically over generations. The causes are interesting but beyond the scope of my comment, though it does influence my skepticism about throwing a grenade of recreational psychedelics into the gen-pop and letting it work itself out. I know someone is bound to say that nobody is talking about recreational psychedelics in a conversation about therapeutical use, but I would say that's precisely my starting point - a) it's hard to avoid more recreational use of psychedelics when normalizing it socially even in a clinical setting; b) figuring out how and where to set up appropriate guardrails should be deliberate; c) the experience with sexual liberation can probably inform the conversation in valuable ways, particularly in a critical approach. This is not an easy problem to solve in a secular, diverse, free-market democracy since the levers of influence are less centralized and arguably incentivized towards disruption, live experimentation, and deconstruction.
- mekoka 5y agoThe typical gatekeeping through Appeal-To-Nature fallacy. I've heard some mystics speak about psychedelics. It sounds like what some gurus use to say about people like Krishnamurti who were profoundly influenced by their deep study of philosophy. Their arguments are moot because, although they have indeed invested a lot of time in their own practice to reach alternate states of consciousness, they often have very little experience with psychedelics. Actually, scratch that. We all have so little experience and so much to learn still about them. I'd agree that to reap the most benefits from a transcendental experience, whether through psychedelics, meditation, breathwork or other, you should also invest in nurturing yourself spiritually and philosophically. However, when I pin your argument downplaying the importance of psychedelics, against the results obtained in psychiatry, in end-of-life care, and even in spiritual awakening for the layperson, I don't think it holds. But that's my opinion.
- netcan 5y agoI think it's hard to understand a public discourse from that long ago. From here, most of it seems like cliche contest, but that's because the debates became cliched in the proceeding decades. In many sense, Huxley pioneered it. In any case, I think it is unquestionable that the mid century psychedelic renaissance was impactful. It's not possible to prove that ideas in music, art, philosophy and such could not have come into existence without lsd, mescaline or whatnot. But, enough people like Huxley credit psychedelics that I'm strongly prone to agree. The world would have been different without psychedelics, perhaps even without Doors of Perception.
- jancsika 5y ago> But, enough people like Huxley credit psychedelics that I'm strongly prone to agree. I think it's more likely that artists like Kubrick and Ligeti did not use psychedelics to create works that were greatly enjoyed by people who use psychedelics.
- yung_steezy 5y agoCompletely agree with this. I think the notion that "drugs make you more creative" is a common misconception/fallacy. Creativity is hard to quanitfy. However drugs certainly make you more receptive to certain stimuli.
- mwattsun 5y agoIf you're interested in the confluence of psychedelics and the digital age, I can't say enough good things about "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" by John Markoff. For further exploration, Markoff's book prompted me to recently purchase "Seattle Mystic Alfred M. Hubbard: Inventor, Bootlegger and Psychedelic Pioneer" by Brad Holden [2]. I haven't read it yet, but apparently Hubbard was the pre-60's Johnny Appleseed of LSD in Silicon Valley. [1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/What_the_Dormouse_Said/cTyfxP-g2IIC?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/What_the_Dormouse_Said/... [2] https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467148061 https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467148061
- SilasX 5y agoYou also might like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive fiction involving the intersection of early computer programming, insanity, and psychedelics. ‘A bit of madness is what you need, and that works best when it’s one mind.’ “Alright, Timothy Leary, we’ll debate The Doors of Perception later.” ‘That was Huxley, not Leary.’
- photochemsyn 5y agoThis is a rather utopian take: > Mescaline was “not yet the ideal drug.” Huxley noted that “along with the happily transfigured majority of mescaline takers there is a minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory.” However, he was confident that modern chemistry and physiology were capable of achieving practically anything “if the psychologists and sociologists will define the idea.” A strictly utilitarian view of psychedelics outside the currently popular area of 'treating depression and other psychological disorders' is that they are useful for helping people who struggle with geometry enhance their 3D visualization skills, and for teaching classically trained musicians how to improvise over a chord progression, and so on. As far as the 60s 'psychedelic revolution' it's rather overblown in my opinion. The acid-dropping hippies of the late 1960s seem to have become the coke-snorting yuppies of the 1980s, and in general the societal structures that existed before the 1960s still exist today, the only major noticeable change being the relatively increased participation of women and minorities in leadership positions at universities and corporations, which probably isn't attributable to psychedelic use. Other societal norms in the USA - advertising and consumerism, internal political divisions and external military aggression and widespread wealth inequality, remain basically the same as before if not actually more extreme. There's no 'ideal drug' that would solve these problems. It might be fair to say that certain scientific and technological and artistic developments since the late 1960s psychedelic era began were spurred on by the use of psychedelics in many cases, however.
- ericmcer 5y agoHuxley was definitely a modernist, his views on psychedelics track with that. Across every aspect of technology, medicine, society, etc. we have had to temper our optimism in the last 70 years. That said if psychedelic drug use was as pervasive as alcohol it would definitely have an effect on the values of our society. I don't know if war and inequality would end overnight, but it would start to dig at the basic human desires that keep us all working and consuming and trying to get more.
- infp_arborist 5y agoAre you saying that our culture hasn't really gone anywhere with psychedelic drugs, i.e., that so far there has only been a (if at all) small net benefit?
- pkdpic 5y ago> “I am profoundly mistrustful of the ‘pure gifts of the Gods.’ You pay very dearly for them,” Jung warned [...] As for Huxley, he was described by Jung as a “Zauberlehrling,” a sorcerer’s apprentice who has learned how to call on ghosts but does not possess the knowledge needed to control them. This is a thought provoking section. On the one hand I have the utmost respect for psychedelics and their liberating potential against repressive socio-economic psychological mechanisms etc. On the other hand, being in my mid-thirties I'm starting to realize that a lot of the destructive behavior of my closest friends and family might ultimately trace back to prolonged use of psychoactive substances including psychedelics like mescaline and psilocybin. I grew up seeing these drugs as non addictive harmless and spiritually enlightening. But there is no doubt in my mind based on my observations that they weaken the perceptual connection with the every day world and ones relationships with other people, at least when done for prolonged periods. My friends and family who have been the most active users of psychedelics have had their post-adolescent lives plagued by divorce, alienation from friends, misguided career decisions and have made them easily distracted and often hurtful insensitive people who seem to have a perennial inability to empathize with others or feel emotional remorse. Ultimately the heavy users of psychedelics I am closest with seem like they have become docile bodies with a diminished capacity for critical thought that fit very neatly into an abusive capitalist society that wants them to endlessly chase fame and fortune while remaining addicted to over-stimulating digital media. And its hard to believe thats what Huxley and the intellectuals of his generation would have wanted. Im not sure how I feel about psychedelics anymore, I just know that they've trapped a lot of people I love more than they've liberated them. At least in their later years.
- realce 5y ago“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.” - HST 1971 I feel you.
- heurisko 5y ago> If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. - William Blake I don't know of any evidence he experimented with drugs, however he was influenced by the Swedenborgian and Moravian sects of London who espoused a spiritual sexuality, which Blake called "Beulah" in his mythology. The "doors of perception" for Blake were rather his idea that the world exists as human imagination "Jerusalem", and for him the Fall was the fall from this state through the creation of the physical world, as referenced in the next part of the quote > For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern. As now in our fallen state we can only perceive parts of the infinite through our senses.