[HN Gopher] When Aldous Huxley opened the doors of perception
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When Aldous Huxley opened the doors of perception
Author : benbreen
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-12-20 23:18 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| netcan wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| mwattsun wrote:
| If 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/...
|
| [2] https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467148061
| SilasX wrote:
| You 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.'
| mwattsun wrote:
| Thanks! That looks really interesting. It's in my queue (Next
| up is Ready Player One)
| dv35z wrote:
| (passerby guy shouting offscreen) Watch Bandersnatch first!
| heurisko wrote:
| > 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This 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.
| webdoodle wrote:
| The hippies also allowed our governments to continue to erode
| our freedoms, either being too high to understand how they were
| being duped, or being so high as to actually believe the news
| media. Either way, they were too busy in communes getting high
| to continue any meaningfully constructive protests. Thanks CIA!
| ericmcer wrote:
| Huxley 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 wrote:
| Are 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 wrote:
| > "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.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It's possible that you have the cause and effect reversed. Self
| medicating is rampant in our society, whether that medication
| is caffeine, alcohol, other stimulants, sleep aids, or
| psychedelics.
|
| Basically, we are all just trying to get by, dealing with our
| various traumas the best we can.
| DarylZero wrote:
| > 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.
|
| These sound like personality problems that cause drug use.
|
| It's very hard for me to imagine drug use causing personality
| problems. Unless they were using them in childhood.
|
| > 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.
|
| That's what our society does to everyone, not just drug users.
|
| Maybe the drug users have a harder time "growing up" because of
| the personality problems that caused them to use the drugs.
| realce wrote:
| "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.
| robocat wrote:
| A Scanner Darkly ends with the most gutting personal note:
|
| """
|
| This has been a novel about some people who were punished
| entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a
| good time, but they were like children playing in the street;
| they could see one after another of them being killed -- run
| over, maimed, destroyed -- but they continued to play anyhow.
| We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not
| toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for
| such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was
| beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not
| believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned
| that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based
| killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie
| Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself
| was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like
| the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up,
| and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list
| of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of
| each.
|
| Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the
| decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call
| that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of
| people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In
| this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because
| tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once,
| and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding
| up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is
| not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all
| takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years.
| "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in
| 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the
| credit a whole lifetime.
|
| There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does
| not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;
| it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they
| were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which
| means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not
| fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing
| in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my
| life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on
| playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am
| the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time.
| This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some
| we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting
| around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape
| recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both
| in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on
| us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.
|
| If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to
| keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for
| that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was
| far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or
| morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic
| impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the
| list, to whom I dedicate my love:
|
| To Gaylene... deceased
|
| To Ray... deceased
|
| To Francy... permanent psychosis
|
| To Kathy... permanent brain damage
|
| To Jim... deceased
|
| To Val... massive permanent brain damage
|
| To Nancy... permanent psychosis
|
| To Joanne... permanent brain damage
|
| To Maren... deceased
|
| To Nick... deceased
|
| To Terry... deceased
|
| To Dennis... deceased
|
| To Phil... permanent pancreatic damage
|
| To Sue... permanent vascular damage
|
| To Jerri... permanent psychosis and vascular damage
|
| . . . and so forth.
|
| In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no
| better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be
| forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them
| all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.
|
| -- Philip K. Dick, 1977
|
| """
| mapcars wrote:
| Important 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.
| mekoka wrote:
| The 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.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| mylons wrote:
| Maynard 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"
| pcarolan wrote:
| Ray 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
| b3morales wrote:
| Precisely 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| >>> 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 ;)
| b3morales wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| Have you ever heard of "Rainbow Gatherings"?
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Massive 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 wrote:
| So, like massive tent encampments but without the social
| services?
| GameOfFrowns wrote:
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