The Doors of Perception & |
 Zur Startseite: Religion und Physik
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Das folgende Buch wird vorgestellt: Titel: „The Doors of
Perception“ and „Heaven and Hell“ |
 Aldous
Huxley, englischer Autor, 1894 bis 1963, lebte
seit 1937 in Kalifornien. Anderes bekanntes Werk: "Brave
New World" |
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| Der englische Autor Aldous Huxley ist heute vor allem für seine Zukunftsvision "Brave New World" (Schöne Neue Welt) bekannt. Weniger bekannt ist, dass er sich seit seinem Umzug nach Kalifornien im Jahre 1937 intensiv mit mystischen Erfahrungen auseinandersetzte. Im Frühjahr 1953 nahm Huxley dann in Anwesenheit mehrerer Personen und eines sachkundigen Wissenschaftlers die Droge Mescalin zu sich. Diese Droge ähnelt in manchen Effekten dem synthetischen LSD oder den natürlich wachsenden Psilocybine Pilzen. |  Suchtipp Internet:
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| Huxley hat seine Erfahrungen in zwei Büchern literarisch verarbeitet: "The Doors of Perception" und "Heaven and Hell". Kernaussage in den beiden Werken ist, dass Mescalin einen grundlegend andersartigen Erlebensmodus hervorrief, als er den meisten Menschen im Alltag geläufig sein dürfte. Huxley beschrieb, wie die "Bedeutung" des bloßen Seins die überragende Wahrnehmungskategorie wurde und dabei alltägliche Belange und Interessen gänzlich in den Hintergrund traten. | Namen im Zusammenhang mit "Neurotheologie" |
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| Huxley glaubt, dass viele Maler versucht hatten, in ihren Bilder dieses Seins-Erleben darzustellen. Er beschäftigt sich unter anderem mit Van Gogh, Vermeer, Blake, Constable und Cezanne. Huxley benutzt dabei gerne Worte aus der deutschen Philosophy wie etwa "Istigkeit", "Weltanschauung", "Ding an Sich" etc. Eine enge Erfahrungsverwandschaft scheint ihn mit dem mittelalterlichen Mystiker Eckehart zu verbinden, auf den er sich oft bezieht. |  Zitate von Meister Eckehart
(1260 bis 1329) über mystische Erfahrungen. Huxley bezog
sich oft auf diesen deutschen Gelehrten. |
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| Merkwürdigerweise spricht Huxley an keiner einzigen Stelle seines Buches von einem personalen Gott. Er benutzt zwar Adjektive für das Göttliche, er vermeidet es aber über die Existenz eines Gottes zu spekulieren oder diese auch nur zu erwähnen. Er nennt dafür auch keinen Grund in seinem Buch. | ||||||
| Die folgenden Zitate sollen einen Eindruck von dem vermitteln, was Huxley beschreiben hat: | ||||||
| "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. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable." | Seite 13 | <= loneliness of human experience | ||||
| "The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience." | page 14 | <= dualism? | ||||
| "I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact." | page 16 | <= no visions induced by mescalin | ||||
| "I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence." | page 17 | <= miracle of existence | ||||
| "'Is it agreeable?'
somebody asked ... 'Neither agreeable nor
disagreeable," I anwered. "It just is.' Istigkeit - wasn`t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? 'Is-ness.'" |
page 17 | <= Istigkeit allows no feelings | ||||
| "... a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged." | page 17 | <= innate significance | ||||
| "... eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence." | page 17 | <= evidence of divine truths?
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| Huxley about a piece of far-eastern Zen-philosophy: "It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden." | page 18 | <= Eastern mysticism | ||||
| "The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern ... The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning." | page 19 | <= significance as perceptive category | ||||
| "'There seems to be plenty of it,' was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time." | page 20 | <= perception of time | ||||
| Huxley zitiert den Philosophen Dr. C. D. Broad aus Cambridge: "'... the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.' According to such a theory, each one of us is potentiall Mind at Large." | page 21 | <= brain as reducing valve & Mind at Large
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| "Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change for the worse. The mescalin take sees no reason for doing anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting." | page 23 | <= will diminished | ||||
| "To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of ego-lessness there is an 'obscure knowledge' that All is in all - that All is acutally each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to 'perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe'." | page 24 | <= All is in all & aboliton of the ego
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| Huxley on looking at painting by van Gogh: "The Chair- that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror..." | page 25 | <= chair by van Gogh and apsect of terror | ||||
| Huxley about pictures a symbols: "However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for." | page 26 | <= limitation of symbols | ||||
| "It would be interesting, in this context, to make a study of the works of art available to the great knowers of Suchness. What sort of pictures did Eckhart look at? What sculptures and paintings played a part in the religious experience of St John of the Cross, of Hakuin, Of Hui-neng, of William Law?" | page 26 | <= Knowers of Suchness | ||||
| "Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner." | page 26 | <= art as a poor "ersatz" of Suchness | ||||
| "For the artist as for the mescalin taker, draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some pecluiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being ... the folds of my grey flannel trousers were charged with 'is-ness'." | page 29 | <= drapery charged with is-ness | ||||
| "They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone." | page 30 | <= Istigkeit of drapery | ||||
| "And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else ... How could one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought to see with the temporal duties of doing what one ought to do and feeling as one ought to feel?" | page 30 | <= contemplation or action: a dilemma | ||||
| "This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was not a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behaviour, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant." | page 31 | <= dilemma unsolved, disregard for human affairs | ||||
| "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? The age-old debate between the actives and the contemplatives was being renewed - renewed, so far as I was concerned, with an unprecedented poignancy." | page 35 | <= contemplation or action: a dilemma | ||||
| "His problem is essentially the same as that which confronts the quietist, the arhat and, on another level, the landscape painter and the painter of human still lifes. Mescalin can never solve that problem: it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to whom it had never before presented itself. The full and final solution can be found only by those who are prepraed to implement the right kind of Weltanschauung by means of the right kind of behaviour and the right kind of constant and unrestrained alertness. Over against the quietist stands the active-contemplative, the saint, the man who, in Eckhart's phrase, is ready to come down from the seventh heaven in order to bring a cup of water to his sick brother." | page 35 | <= contemplation or action: right Weltanschauung
as a solution? definiton of quietism: the practice of resigning oneself to mental inactivity to bring the soul into direct union with God |
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| "... the Taoists and the Zen Buddhists looked beyond visions to the Void, and through the Void at 'the ten thousand things' of objective reality." | page 40 |  The irrationality of Plato's ideas (German) |
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| "All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all. When it does anything more - when it tries too hard, for example, when it worries, when it becomes apprehensive about the future - it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and may even cause the devitalized body to fall ill. In my present state, awareness was not referred to an ego; it was, so to speak, on its own. This meant that the physiological intelligence controlling the body was also on its own." | page 41 | <= mystery of ego
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| "Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement - or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgement which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair - I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols could possibly bear." | page 46 | <= panic creeping into the experience | ||||
| "The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man`s egotism and the divine purity, between man`s self-aggravated seperateness and the infinity of God." | page 46 | <= mysterium tremendum
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| "The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the home-made universe of common sense - the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols, and socially acceptable conventions. The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence." | page 47 | <= schizophrenia | ||||
| "The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul." | page 55 | <= appetite of soul | ||||
| "In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when?" | page 62 | <= limits of verbal education | ||||
| Das "The Doors of Perception" schließt mit der Nachhaltigkeit der Drogenerfahrung: "But 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." | page 65 | <= after-effects of mescalin-experience | ||||
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