Doors of Perception, The

Smith H. Cleansing the Doors of Perception The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals. New York Penguin Putnam, 2000. 

To Albert Hofmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who opened the doors of perception. 

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. New York Harper Brothers, 1954. 

In the early 1950s, Osmond introduced British writer Aldous Huxley to mescaline, an experience Huxley described in his book The Doors of Perception. Osmond first used the word psychedelic in a letter to Huxley... 

In my case, none of these uninvited image people promised salvation. They didn t even reveal scientific secrets. But they did, by their presence, make one thing clear that sleep deprivation alone can open wide the Doors of Perception that Huxley celebrated. Had I prepared my mind for specific communications from the beyond, I have no doubt that my visionary visitors would have articulated whatever words I wanted to hear. The point is that you don t need a drug, you don t need a medium, and you certainly don t need a spirit world to have them. Those exotic ginger flowers and that tumultuous ski run spoke so clearly to the shade of Aldous Huxley You are wrong about dreams. They can be both pre-ternaturally colorful and ecstatically animated. Even without mescaline or LSD, and certainly without cocaine, a drug that will almost certainly counteract psychedelic dreaming. 

In the middle 1950s Aldous Huxley published his influential The Doors of Perception, describing an experience with mescaline and advocating it as a means of vitalizing the... 

All six subjects responded to this condition with an expanded awareness of the world similar to the experiences described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception (1954). With the exception of the fifth hypnotic subject, all became and remained exuberantly happy. All but the simulator seemed to have experiences similar to what has been described under the rubric of "psychedelic experience." All the hypnotic subjects reported sensory enhancement, most marked in the visual area, but cutting across all sense modalities. The hypnotic subjects were also, as a group, impressed with the order inherent in the world about them, which three of them imbued with religious significance. 

Much has happened since that smogless May morning in Hollywood. Neither Aldous Huxley nor he would have predieted that The Doors of Perception (1954) was going to... 

English novelist Aldous Huxley (1894—1963) publishes The Doors of Perception, a book in which he recounts his experiences with peyote. 

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hallucinogenic substances were viewed as possible tools for understanding and treating psychiatric and other mental disorders. Tribal medicine men, or shamans, have always maintained it was an effective medicine to treat a number of ailments including alcoholism. However, peyote did not really catch on as a drug to be explored in the recreational arena until 1953 when the English novelist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) wrote The Doors of Perception where he recounted his experiences with the peyote. 

In the literature then available about what we now call psychedelic drugs, the term most commonly used to describe the effects was psychotomimetic (meaning psychosis-mimicking). Yet it is evident from Huxley s description in The Doors of Perception that when he tried mescaline sulfate he was not going through some kind of "imitation psychosis. Huxley believed he had experienced something akin to mystical experience. He was considered an authority on the subject, being the author of one of the classics in this field, The Perennial Philosophy. 

To use Aldous Huxley s expression, "the doors of perception were opened, and they saw inside the house—this house of many mansions which is also... 

Being the center of controversy was nothing new to Huxley, a renowned author whose ideas expressed in thirty-nine previous books had been discussed at practically all levels in Western society. He had been honored for decades by the literary world after a series of novels whose "cynical and "immoral characters had shocked the sensibilities of many people. Still, he must have been surprised by the intensity of the enthusiasm and the antagonism with which his The Doors of Perception (1954) was received. 

Aldous Huxley surveying Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills on that May morning in 1933 when his "doors of perception" were cleansed with 400 mg. of mescaline sulfate. His experience became a turning point in the history of psychedelics. 

Aldous Huxley s writings on mescaline and other psychedelics are collected in Moksha Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1931-1963, . edited by Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (New York Stonchill, 1977). This book includes excerpts from Huxley s most famous work on the subject, his 1954 essay The Doors of Perception New York Harper Row, 19701. 

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. 

---