In “The Doors Of Perception,” Aldous Huxley’s 1954 short work, he opens with a quote from William Blake, the poet, painter and one of the great Christian mystics of his era in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
The brief venture is about many topics, the human mind, individuality, hallucinogenic drugs and Huxley’s own trespassing into peyote, a substance common in cactus grown in the deserts of the American Southwest and Mexico, used by native Indians for centuries.
As Huxley noted early Spanish visitors pointed out, “they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.”
“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 are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of isolated universes.”
“That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worse s painful, at the best, s monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H.G. Well’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, everyday use, there have always been chemical intoxicants.