The Doors of Perception QUOTES

21 " 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. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

23 " I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise. "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

25 " Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

27 " 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 analyze 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. 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 in-compatibility between man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God. Following Boehme and William Law, we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality—anything! "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

29 " Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

31 " 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. "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

33 " 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. "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

35 " 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 as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own. "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

37 " An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind. "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception

39 " En el mundo interior no hay en cambio ni trabajo ni monotonía. Lo visitamos únicamente en sueños o en la meditación, y su maravilla es tal que nunca encontramos el mismo mundo en dos sucesivas ocasiones. ¿Cómo puede extrañar entonces que los seres humanos, en su busca de lo divino, hayan preferido "

― Aldous Huxley , The Doors of Perception