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Aldous Huxley
The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell
Category: Miscellaneous | Published: 1954 | Review Added: 12-03-2007
Aldous Huxley was a participant in research into the effects of the hallucinogen mescalin in the 1950s, and in The Doors of Perception he offers a memorable account of the eye-opening, mind-warping afternoon he spent following his first dose. The world around him seemed to become saturated with meaning, objects appearing to glow with an almost conscious sense of their identity. Huxley's essential hypothesis, distilled from Bergson's philosophy, is that the brain is not a creator of meaning but a reducer of it to those facets which are useful for its owner's survival - and that mescalin temporatily opens the "reducing valve". It's a vertigo-inducing idea, but anyone who's done their own open-minded research into head-stuff will find it worth taking seriously.
Of almost infinitely less interest is Huxley's "sequel" to his trippy classic, called Heaven and Hell. It's included in the Vintage edition, and is a meandering, lazy and pretentious rumination on mysticism as expressed through the ages and across the globe in art, literature and architecture. Huxley's aim here is to be a kind of Ruskin of the technological age, and he thinks being longwinded, unfocussed and "intense" will do the trick. Unfortunately, he's missing the vital ingredient of genius. No amount of repetition of the phrase "the mind's antipodes" can compensate for that.