When Aldous Huxley opened the doors of perception
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
In any case, I think it is unquestionable that the mid century psychedelic renaissance was impactful. It's not possible to prove that ideas in music, art, philosophy and such could not have come into existence without lsd, mescaline or whatnot. But, enough people like Huxley credit psychedelics that I'm strongly prone to agree.
The world would have been different without psychedelics, perhaps even without Doors of Perception.
I think it's more likely that artists like Kubrick and Ligeti did not use psychedelics to create works that were greatly enjoyed by people who use psychedelics.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/What_the_Dormouse_Said/...
[2] https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467148061
‘A bit of madness is what you need, and that works best when it’s one mind.’
“Alright, Timothy Leary, we’ll debate The Doors of Perception later.”
‘That was Huxley, not Leary.’
From my experience it's much healthier to realize I can go into states of bliss and ecstasy completely by myself without any external help.
The idea is: what happens with psychedelic experimentation at mass scale? Do we morph into an empathic nation of Deanna Troi's overnite ;)
It would be very, very different from limited, occasional, "recreational" use.
At the same time, this mode of saying "at most" undercuts the actual value of a psychedelic experience: that kind of experience is so profound that I often liken it to discovering sex for the first time. Knowing how to bring yourself and/ or a partner into some state or other isn't in itself useful, it's awkward and confusing to become initiated into that practice, and there are a myriad of ways where becoming sexually activated is violent and traumatic.
But done well a) these experiences can be fun/useful as ends in themselves and b) these experiences are often the ones which open up entire realms of possibility for our minds and bodies.
For instance, without a psychedelic context I certainly would not have had a way of parsing the effects of kundalini yoga, and I might not have even been inclined to work in that direction if I didn't have a first hand understanding of how dramatically our physiology can so directly impact our perceptions.
And I find the people who discount the profound impact of initiation into that realm of experience almost tautologically fall into two camps: people who have moved past psychedelics as a mode (which is a legitimate and good mode, in my epereince) and people who have never had psychedelic experiences (which is also a wholly legitimate way to be in the world).
The thing is, the first camp often seems (at least to me) to understate the actual impact of psychedelia in their development and the second camp doesn't have the personal experience to make those claims at all.
While I am happy at your personal development and ability to enter states of bliss or ecstasy without psychedelic drugs, you may consider that this general bend of argumentation (that the drugs aren't valuable and may be unhealthy in general in this movement) is just as much of a shortcut as thinking that the psychedelics in themselves can lead to some sort of enlightenment.
With psychedelics I think the risks/consequences are potentially greater and so would say simply as a comparison, societies need to be a little more careful, a little less reckless with this one. I instinctively project my own positive experiences with psychedelics onto others and so imagine positive outcomes to be more accessible or certain for society at large. This instinct - I know from observation as I've grown older and have seen more of the world and its inhabitants - needs to be checked. There are a lot of broken people out there, a lot of vulnerable people, a lot of self-interested influences that are either uncaring or malign.
I have trouble articulating my full thoughts on this, but I don't think Western and particularly US culture has done a good job managing mental health and particularly in fostering positive mental health during formative years of human development. Not specifically talking about acute diagnosable disorders, but even the level of chronic anxiety, depression, and hopelessness that is experienced and amplified when passed cyclically over generations. The causes are interesting but beyond the scope of my comment, though it does influence my skepticism about throwing a grenade of recreational psychedelics into the gen-pop and letting it work itself out.
I know someone is bound to say that nobody is talking about recreational psychedelics in a conversation about therapeutical use, but I would say that's precisely my starting point - a) it's hard to avoid more recreational use of psychedelics when normalizing it socially even in a clinical setting; b) figuring out how and where to set up appropriate guardrails should be deliberate; c) the experience with sexual liberation can probably inform the conversation in valuable ways, particularly in a critical approach.
This is not an easy problem to solve in a secular, diverse, free-market democracy since the levers of influence are less centralized and arguably incentivized towards disruption, live experimentation, and deconstruction.
I've heard some mystics speak about psychedelics. It sounds like what some gurus use to say about people like Krishnamurti who were profoundly influenced by their deep study of philosophy. Their arguments are moot because, although they have indeed invested a lot of time in their own practice to reach alternate states of consciousness, they often have very little experience with psychedelics. Actually, scratch that. We all have so little experience and so much to learn still about them.
I'd agree that to reap the most benefits from a transcendental experience, whether through psychedelics, meditation, breathwork or other, you should also invest in nurturing yourself spiritually and philosophically. However, when I pin your argument downplaying the importance of psychedelics, against the results obtained in psychiatry, in end-of-life care, and even in spiritual awakening for the layperson, I don't think it holds. But that's my opinion.
Your experience is yours. Don’t invalidate the experiences of others.
That said: as always in life, if you can't trust the source, you may find yourself misled.
> Mescaline was “not yet the ideal drug.” Huxley noted that “along with the happily transfigured majority of mescaline takers there is a minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory.” However, he was confident that modern chemistry and physiology were capable of achieving practically anything “if the psychologists and sociologists will define the idea.”
A strictly utilitarian view of psychedelics outside the currently popular area of 'treating depression and other psychological disorders' is that they are useful for helping people who struggle with geometry enhance their 3D visualization skills, and for teaching classically trained musicians how to improvise over a chord progression, and so on.
As far as the 60s 'psychedelic revolution' it's rather overblown in my opinion. The acid-dropping hippies of the late 1960s seem to have become the coke-snorting yuppies of the 1980s, and in general the societal structures that existed before the 1960s still exist today, the only major noticeable change being the relatively increased participation of women and minorities in leadership positions at universities and corporations, which probably isn't attributable to psychedelic use. Other societal norms in the USA - advertising and consumerism, internal political divisions and external military aggression and widespread wealth inequality, remain basically the same as before if not actually more extreme. There's no 'ideal drug' that would solve these problems.
It might be fair to say that certain scientific and technological and artistic developments since the late 1960s psychedelic era began were spurred on by the use of psychedelics in many cases, however.
That said if psychedelic drug use was as pervasive as alcohol it would definitely have an effect on the values of our society. I don't know if war and inequality would end overnight, but it would start to dig at the basic human desires that keep us all working and consuming and trying to get more.
This is a thought provoking section. On the one hand I have the utmost respect for psychedelics and their liberating potential against repressive socio-economic psychological mechanisms etc.
On the other hand, being in my mid-thirties I'm starting to realize that a lot of the destructive behavior of my closest friends and family might ultimately trace back to prolonged use of psychoactive substances including psychedelics like mescaline and psilocybin.
I grew up seeing these drugs as non addictive harmless and spiritually enlightening. But there is no doubt in my mind based on my observations that they weaken the perceptual connection with the every day world and ones relationships with other people, at least when done for prolonged periods.
My friends and family who have been the most active users of psychedelics have had their post-adolescent lives plagued by divorce, alienation from friends, misguided career decisions and have made them easily distracted and often hurtful insensitive people who seem to have a perennial inability to empathize with others or feel emotional remorse.
Ultimately the heavy users of psychedelics I am closest with seem like they have become docile bodies with a diminished capacity for critical thought that fit very neatly into an abusive capitalist society that wants them to endlessly chase fame and fortune while remaining addicted to over-stimulating digital media. And its hard to believe thats what Huxley and the intellectuals of his generation would have wanted.
Im not sure how I feel about psychedelics anymore, I just know that they've trapped a lot of people I love more than they've liberated them. At least in their later years.
- HST 1971
I feel you.
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This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed -- run over, maimed, destroyed -– but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. “Take the cash and let the credit go,” as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.
There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.
If there was any “sin,” it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:
To Gaylene… deceased
To Ray… deceased
To Francy… permanent psychosis
To Kathy… permanent brain damage
To Jim… deceased
To Val… massive permanent brain damage
To Nancy… permanent psychosis
To Joanne… permanent brain damage
To Maren… deceased
To Nick… deceased
To Terry… deceased
To Dennis… deceased
To Phil… permanent pancreatic damage
To Sue… permanent vascular damage
To Jerri… permanent psychosis and vascular damage
. . . and so forth.
In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The “enemy” was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.
— Philip K. Dick, 1977
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"He did take mescaline an unspecified number of times, and other drugs, including antipsychotics, antidepressants, sedatives, hypnotics, muscle relaxants, and stimulants." [1]
I mean, as always, do it, but don't overdo it.
Basically, we are all just trying to get by, dealing with our various traumas the best we can.
All I know is that they were kinder and more critically minded before. But perhaps there was no alternative path. Impossible to say.
These sound like personality problems that cause drug use.
It's very hard for me to imagine drug use causing personality problems. Unless they were using them in childhood.
> Ultimately the heavy users of psychedelics I am closest with seem like they have become docile bodies with a diminished capacity for critical thought that fit very neatly into an abusive capitalist society that wants them to endlessly chase fame and fortune while remaining addicted to over-stimulating digital media. And its hard to believe thats what Huxley and the intellectuals of his generation would have wanted.
That's what our society does to everyone, not just drug users.
Maybe the drug users have a harder time "growing up" because of the personality problems that caused them to use the drugs.
Maybe its just normal aging. Maybe alcohol plays a role in tandem. Maybe its just the mental trauma of chronic stress from trying to survive in a system you feel at odds with. Maybe its all of it.
But its a noticeable difference between my equally tormented friends who stayed away from drug use. They have a lot of problems but not the same marked decline in empathy and decision making.
Anyway that PKD quote someone posted says it all...
We all were...
- William Blake
I don't know of any evidence he experimented with drugs, however he was influenced by the Swedenborgian and Moravian sects of London who espoused a spiritual sexuality, which Blake called "Beulah" in his mythology.
The "doors of perception" for Blake were rather his idea that the world exists as human imagination "Jerusalem", and for him the Fall was the fall from this state through the creation of the physical world, as referenced in the next part of the quote
> For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
As now in our fallen state we can only perceive parts of the infinite through our senses.