Here is the first part, or phase, to a series of cut-ups taken from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception. Enjoy.

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The First Phase: Conspiracy and Misconception

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories.

The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain’s normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows.

It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary. From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the miraculous facts.

Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness.

“What about spatial relationships?” the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books.

The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris.

“Is it agreeable?” somebody asked.

“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “it just is.”

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction. The age-old debate between the actives and the contemplatives was being renewed – renewed, so far as I was concerned, with an unprecedented poignancy. For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms – as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations…

But meanwhile my question remained unanswered. How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations, with the necessary chores and duties, to say nothing of charity and practical compassion?

Let me add, before we leave this subject, that there is no form of contemplation, even the most quietistic, which is without its ethical values. Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The Lord’s Prayer is less than fifty words long, and six of those words are devoted to asking God not to lead us into temptation.

“Cheap,” I commented. “Trivial. Like things in a five-and-ten.” And all this shoddiness existed in a closed, cramped universe. “It’s as though one were below decks in a ship,” I said. “A five-and-ten-cent ship.” And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human pretensions, with the portrait of Cezanne, with A.B. among the Dolomites overacting his favorite character in fiction. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self…

The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but to make up for it, he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do. And now someone produced a phonograph and put a record on the turntable.

“These voices,” I said appreciatively, “these voices – they’re a kind of bridge back to the human world.” And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince’s compositions. “And yet,” I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-Reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, “and yet it does not matter that he’s all in bits.

But, as it turned out, I was wrong. Actually the music sounded rather funny. Dredged up from the personal subconscious, agony succeeded twelve-tone agony… When it was over, the investigator suggested a walk in the garden. I was willing; and though my body seemed to have dissociated itself almost completely from my mind – or, to be more accurate, though my awareness of the transfigured outer world was no longer accompanied by an awareness of my physical organism -I found myself able to get up, open the French window and walk out with only a minimum of hesitation. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories. The drug brings hell and purgatory…

Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia …only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain.

“If you started in the wrong way,” I said in answer to the investigator’s questions, “everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating, You couldn’t draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot.”

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Source(s): Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception