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....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 the experiences themselves.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION





...there stood in the darkness an old stone wall which I always noticed with pleasure....the wall was peaceful and serene and yet something was altered in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my mind whether this doorway had always been there or whether it had just been made....From the sidewalk where I stood and looked across, it seemed to me in the dim light that a garland, or something gaily colored, was festooned round the doorway, and now that I looked more closely I saw over the portal a bright shield, on which, it seemed to me, there was something written....bright letters dancing and then disappearing...at last I succeeded in catching several words on end. They were:

MAGIC THEATER
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY

HERMAN HESSE
STEPPENWOLF





That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and always has been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory---all of these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as the Doors in the Wall. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots---all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial....For unrestricted use the West has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All the other chemical Doors in the Wall are labeled Dope, and their unauthorized takers are Fiends.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION




...there are in nature certain scenes, certain classes of objects, certain materials, possessed of the power to transport the beholder's mind in the direction of its antipodes, out of the everyday Here and toward the Other World of Vision.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful ones.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION







The most impressively numinous temples are caverns of twilight, in which a few tapers give life to the transporting, other-worldly treasures on the altar.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





Between the eyes and ears there lie,
The sounds of colour,
And the light of a sigh.

With thoughts of within
To exclude without
The ghost of a chord
Will expel all doubt

And to name this chord
Is important to some
So they give it a word
And the word is OM

THE MOODY BLUES
IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORD




Men have spent enormous amounts of time, energy and money on the finding, mining and cutting of colored pebbles. Why? The utilitarian can offer no explanation for such fantastic behavior. But as soon as we take into account the facts of visionary experience, everything becomes clear. In vision, men perceive a profusion of what Ezekiel calls "stones of fire," of what Weir Mitchell describes as "transparent fruit."...To acquire such a stone is to acquire something whose preciousness is guaranteed by the fact that it exists in the Other World.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





...the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION




...this is no search for earthly things but a seeking out of the mysteries and hidden sweets of Our Lord, and the divine secrets which the most high Master will disclose to that blessed knight whom He has chosen for His servant from among the ranks of chivalry: he to whom He will show the marvels of the Holy Grail, and reveal that which the heart of man could not conceive nor tongue relate.

THE QUEST OF THE HOLY GRAIL





And the moral of all this is---what? Exponents of a Nothing-But philosophy will answer that, since changes in body chemistry can create the conditions favorable to visionary and mystical experiences, visionary and mystical experiences cannot be what they claim to be, what, for those who have had them, they self-evidently are....A similar conclusion will be reached by those whose philosophy is unduly "spiritual." God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshiped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, ALL our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely "spiritual," purely "intellectual," purely "aesthetic," it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence....it is a matter of historical record that most contemplatives worked systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a view to creating the internal conditions favorable to spiritual insight.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





For the aspiring mystic to revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self-flagellation would be as senseless as it would be for an aspiring cook to behave like Charles Lamb's Chinaman, who burned down the house in order to roast a pig.

ALDOUS HUXLEY
HEAVEN AND HELL





No matter where you go, there you are...

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