Doors of perception

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Hi

 

Aldous Huxley has interesting views about the old problem: active or

contemplation in his book Doors of Perception. He got deeper insight during a

mescalin trip.

 

Here is an excerpt:

 

"'This is how one ought to see,' I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers,

or glanced at the jewelled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely

more than Van-Goghian chair. 'This is how one ought to See, how things really

are.' And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one

would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine

Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough. But in

that case what about other people? What about human relations? In the recording

of that morning's conversations I find the question constantly repeated 'What

about human relations?' 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? 'One ought to be able,' I said, 'to see these

trousers as infinitely important and human beings as still more infinitely

important.' One ought - but in practice it seemed to be impossible. 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

now a Notself, 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.

Compelled by the investigator to analyse and report on what I was doing (and how

I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four chair legs

and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!) I realized that I

was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room,

deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them. One was my wife, the

other a man I respected and greatly liked; but both belonged to the world from

which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me - the world of selves, of time,

of moral judgments and utilitatian considerations, the world (and it was this

aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of

self-assertion, of cocksureness, of over-valued words and idolatrously

worshipped notions.

 

[...]

 

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? 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, without which even the

prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in

nature, of Wordsworth's 'something far more deeply interfused'; as systematic

silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an 'obscure knowledge.' But now I knew

contemplation at its height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For in

its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to

speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the

door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation - but to a

contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action,

the very thought of action. In the intervals between his revelations the

mescalin taker is apt to feel that, though in one way everything is supremely as

it should be, in another there is something wrong. 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 lives. 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 prepared to implement the right kind of Weltanschaung by means

of the right kind of behaviour and the right kind of constant and unstrained

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. Over against the arhat

retreating from appearances into an entirely transcendental Nirvana, stands the

Bodhisattva, for whom Suchness and the world of contingeneies are one, and for

whose boundless compassion every one of those contingencies is an occasion not

only for transfiguring insight, but also for the most practical charity. And in

the universe of art, over against Vermeer and the other painters of human still

lives, over against the masters of Chinese and japanese landscape painting, over

against Constable and Turner, against Sisley and Seurat and Cezanne stands the

all-inclusive art of Rembrandt. These are enormous names, inaccessible

eminences. For myself, on this memorable May morning, I could only be grateful

for an experience which had shown me, more clearly than I have ever seen it

before, the true nature of the challenge and the completely liberating response.

 

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. 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. The sum of evil,

Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly

in their rooms. The contemplative whose perception has been cleansed does not

have to stay in his room. He can go about his business, so completely satisfied

to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that he will never even be

tempted to indulge in what Traherne caned 'the dirty Devices of the world.' When

we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when 'the sea flows in our

veins ... and the stars are our jewels,' when all things are perceived as

infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion,

for the pursuit of power or drearier forms of pleasure? Contemplatives are not

likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule

preach intolerance or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or

grind faces of the poor. And to them enormous negative virtues we may add

another which, though hard to define, is both positive and important. The arhat

and the quietist may not practise contemplation in its fullness - but if they

practise it at all, they may bring back enlightning reports of another, a

transcendent country of the mind, and if they practise it in the height, they

will become conduits through which some beneficent influence can flow out of

that other country into a world of darkened selves, chronically dying for lack

of it."

 

Regards

 

 

 

Lars