The Doors of Perception
Aldous Huxley
Quotations reprinted without permission from the Granada edition
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in
all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the
arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to
fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain.
By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in
solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies -- all these are private
and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool
information about experiences, but never experiences themselves. From
family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and half later I was sitting in my study,
looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three
flowers -- a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at
every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and
cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk,
the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the
little nosefay broke all the rules of traditional good tsaste. At breakfast
that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But
that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower
arrangment. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation
-- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Istigkeit -- wasn't that the word Meister Eckhardt like to use?
'Is-ness.'
To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled
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 to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To
formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has
invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit
philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the
beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she
has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he
accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as
it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness
and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take
his concepts for data, his words for actual things.