Mr. Aldous Huxley

Huxley's essays were full of valuable insights. In fact, there were several parts of the Doors of Perception that I found fairly fascinating. Huxley the "sleuth", disclosed his own personal experiences with inebriation. In the beginning of Doors of Perception, Huxley mentions his decision to swallow four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in a glass of water. It was in this part of the essay, that Huxley made note of the problem with our experiences. He writes, "Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies— all these are private and except through symbols and at a second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves." Yes.

Talking about experiences... In the last class, a female student said that she and her father came to the conclusion that life is about experiences. I believe this.

I remember years ago thinking about the purpose of life. Sure, life might have NO PURPOSE at all, BUT I find this hard to believe.

I believe life is to be lived to experience. To experience is so much different from a lot of other beliefs. Even if a moment is bad, disastrous, it is another experience to be absorbed.

In the next sentence, Huxley writes, "From family to nation, every human group of society is a society of island universes." This is a powerful statement. It makes a lot of sense. At times I think I about my friends. We are so much different from most people. As the years have passed, we seem to have become one person... a lot like a family unit. My family isn't much different.

I know this was just a small part of a larger idea, but it's just some things I have been thinking about recently.

Later in the essay, Huxley writes about the condition of the human being. He says that the mind and nervous system literally filter out anything that is not useful for survival. I raised this point a couple of blogs ago. I first read of this philosophy in a Kabbalist text. Huxley writes, "To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."

In Heaven and Hell, Huxley writes that not just spiritual, but religious insight can be gained through drugs. Surely this section will offend some, but after doing my own research for the Analysis Paper I can see where he is coming from. One of the topics that I proposed in my analysis paper was the story of the Moses on Mount Sinai. There is lots of compelling evidence to suggest that Moses was a shaman, disseminating messages from the divine with the aid of mushrooms. Really at this point, anything is possible.