Herbert L Calhoun 2008-11-07
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Like Douglas Hofstadter three generations later, Aldous Huxley is in awe of the complexities of the human mind. Just like Hofstadter, he too is a compassionate and astute observer of what the mind can accomplish when given full and free-reign. He is also a teacher like Hofstadter with the single purpose of conveying what he has learned to later generations. But unlike Hofstadter whose writings seek to soothe our fears, Huxley perhaps unwittingly, heightens them.
Huxley's writings have shocked and informed us for the better part of a century. His relaxed, clear, almost laconic style can be disarming. Yet, lurking behind this easygoing persona and writing style are always truths so devastating that we ordinary "socially adjusted" humans still have great difficulty getting our minds around their full implications. As was true in his most famous novel, "A Brave New World," here in two of his non-fiction works, Huxley continues his exploration into the implications of expanding the dimensions of the mind; or conversely, exploring why we continue to maintain a world in which the mind remains closed, shutoff, rendered static and limited. Using his own self-administered experiments with drugs, the author directs his fire at how cultural limitations and misuse of the mind have often diminished rather than enhanced the richness of man's life as well as affected his survival chances negatively.
The first book in this two-book volume is called "The doors of Perception." It is an all but clinical reporting on the effects of a self-administered experiment with the mind-expanding drug, Peyote. (I will review the second book, "Heaven and Hell," separately.)
Long before the neuro-scientists had confirmed that it was so, Huxley had reported that the brain and its nervous system are primarily a "data-reduction machine." That is to say, since in principle each person is capable of taking in vast amounts of data, including being able to remember all that has ever happened to him, and is capable of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere else in the universe, the primary function of the brain and nervous system is to "reduce" or "abstract from" this universe of infinite complexity and possible perceptions, only those data that might be useful in enhancing survival. This "reducing function," accomplishes its task by allowing us to discriminate between a mass of overwhelmingly irrelevant and useless stimuli, and those that are perceived to be useful to survival. Importantly, the residue that remains is what we have come to know as conscious awareness.
In order to communicate the content of consciousness we have invented symbol systems such as languages, which in themselves have become a mixed blessing: since, at the same time that they allow inter-subjective sharing of accumulated information (usually of survival value), they also erroneously confirm the fact that reality itself is the same as our "reduced" version of it. That is to say, languages teach us that the reality we have constructed to make the world save for our survival, is the only reality. Further, through language, we have also learned to mistake for "real data," the very "concepts" we invent as their substitutes. And likewise, we have learned to mistake "words" for the "things we have assigned them to represent." Thus the world we see is a severely "tapered-down" version of the wider universe. It is one of limited, reduced awareness: a "symbolic playground" that is a mere fragment of the larger, much richer reality: It remains one that is etched and ossified into our brains through language.
Huxley claims here that by depriving the brain of its primary fuel, sugar, drugs such as mescalin, the active ingredient in Peyote, can allow us to bypass the brain's "data reduction function," making it possible for man to see well beyond the narrowly constricted world created only for purposes of advancing survival. Bypassing the brain's data reduction function, mescalin opens up a whole new world of "cleansed or virgin perceptions." It does this by relaxing the constraints and inhibitions perceived necessary for survival: things such as our dependence on time, space and having a need for a goal or a purpose. Without the need for a survival purpose, many ordinary utilitarian concerns simply just become uninteresting.
What become infinitely more interesting are details previously left unattended to: things that artists see naturally and are conditioned to take for granted, such as intensified visual beauty and impressions, form and structure as inherent qualities, the absence of a dependence on time and space, discursive ego-free thinking, the apprehension of new orders of reality, extra-sensory perceptions, awareness at a distance, awareness of un-conceptualized and un-verbalizable events, perceptions of "being one with the universe," simultaneously perceiving everything that is happening within the body (both physically and mentally), and everywhere outside it in the universe at large; a conceptual world that is free of moral judgments, the pursuit of power and control, and all other petty utilitarian concerns that go with them; in short, being able to get beyond the ego-filter allows us to forget the need for self-esteem, ego-relevance, and self-assertion. And most of all it opens the door to transcendental experiences.
The beauty of this expanded dimension of psychic reality is that by existing above "ego-ness," it necessarily also lies beyond good and evil; indeed beyond a preoccupation with power and self-assertion. The problem with this expanded psychic worldview, however, is that it is incompatible with action-based reality. It gives us access to pure contemplation but not to action itself: It cannot bring the contemplative realm down from the clouds and into phase with the realm of action, in the present. This is so because this wider world of inner contemplation is itself acting as a "stand-in" for feelings and ideas. As a result, it reduces to a kind of intuited "proto-language of the mind" of its own: one in which the mind devises its own internal set of psychic symbols, operations and dynamics; symbols and dynamics that interplay among themselves well above our conventional paradigms of how the mind is supposed to function. Schizophrenics use the same self-constructed internal language and in a real sense represent the extreme end, or "worse-case" example of this enlightened "exterior point of view."
Yet, Huxley makes a strong case for exploring this broader "deeper internal" (and "superior external") point of view. It, for instance, allows us to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness -- arguably, the very definition of awareness. And yet it also allows us to be able to think and feel as an animal and as a human being; that is to say, it does not preclude the possibility of resorting, whenever expedient to systematic survival-based reasoning.
As but one example, Huxley compares religions that are "talk therapy based" -- that is Christianity for instance -- with those that include drugs as part of their sacramental rituals, for instance most Native American religions. Huxley argues rather convincingly that if the purpose of religion is to share a transcendental experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and is of one with nature and with the divine, then Christian bible reading, prayer, hymnal singing and sermonizing, go together to constitute a kind of "talk therapy:" a living abstraction away form both deep feelings and about as far from "true" religious needs as one can get. True religion demands a deep shared psychological experience with the universe and with the divine. All religions strive for this kind of oneness that transcends the bounds of selfness. Yet, Christianity is based on having a "personal God" as man's personal servant, constantly at the very "beck and call" of every religionist's ego.
Huxley suggest that Christians might well learn from our Native American brothers, who took the best of Christianity and married their inherent religious needs with their own self-transcendent experiences, using Peyote. Thus in one religious rite, they satisfied the two appetites of the soul: the urge to independence and self-determination, and the urge to become one with God through self-transcendence.
However, for contradictory cultural reasons, drugs, it seems have no place in the Judeao-Christian Church, even when "sacramentized use" could expand religious understanding, address psychological yearning that can only be satisfied through transcendent experiences, and vastly enrich the religious experience. In order for Christians to have a true religious experience they are required to turn to the drug of alcohol, outside of the walls of the Church, Mosque or Temple.
1000 stars