The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell Books
Product Description
As only he can, Aldous Huxley explores the mind’s remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. These two astonishing essays are among the most profound studies of the effects of mind-expanding drugs written in this century.
Amazon.com Review
Sometimes a novelist has to revisit the classics, and here we find that “gonzo journalism”–gutsy first-person accounts wherein the author is part of the tale–didn’t originate with Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe. Aldous Huxley took some mescaline and wrote about it some 10 or 12 years earlier than those others. The book he came up with is part bemused essay and part mystical treatise–”suchness” is the world over to be found even as below the influence. This is a excellent example of essay writing, journal maintenance, and the value of controversy–everlastingly–in one’s work.
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Huxley is a very erudite individual, and hallucinogenics were novel for the time (1950’s). What we can say now is that even well educated and intelligent individuals are not very far from psychotic thought.
Rating: 3 / 5
I was disappointed with “Doors of Perception.” I was expecting something insightful. Instead, this book was all theoretical with comparisons to art. I had no thought what Huxley’s top was.
Rating: 1 / 5
These are two essays from Huxley (the brilliant mind that brought us Courageous New World) about the psychadelic experience. BUt I found them to be ponderous and outdated. Vital books in the sixties, manuals to counter culture even, but nothing more than a mere curiousity nowadays.
Rating: 1 / 5
From /Wikipedia
“Following his education at Balliol, Huxley was financially obliged to his father and had to earn a living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later known by the pen name George Orwell) and Stephen Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered by another as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words.”
Although “By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a chief of modern plotting and an intellectual of the highest rank,” after taking a quick overall look at his life, I feel he was a limp sort of intellectual full of himself, his words, and his thoughts. I perceived this in the off topic ramblings and flowery prose that is interspersed between a few valid insights in “The Doors of Perception”.
“Heaven and Hell” has even fewer and weaker insights. (I swear if he referred to the “antipodes of the mind” or “preternatural light” one more time I would’ve screamed.)
He was report has it that born into a rich, privileged family and in fact he doesn’t seem much different than the current generation of bored, aimless, youth that have everything handed to them and so turn to drugs as an antidote to their meaningless, apathetic existences.
I also don’t reckon he lived long enough to gain perspective on the pros vs. cons of using “mind altering” drugs. And as with other drug deluded personalities clung to his artificially induced enlightenment above all else.
A much more modern look at psychedelic drugs and their overall effects on the body, mind, and spirit is documented in Jost Sauer’s “Higher and Higher”. A fascinating and compelling drug use odyssey.
One of the main problems with using drugs is that the user looses his ability to glean pleasure and joy from the mundane because he has tasted an artificial pleasure and so everlastingly yearns for that level of pleasure. I presume it is hard to find that level of pleasure without the substance. Better to never have tasted it and to learn to find comparable levels of joy, peace and contentment in the world as it is.
Drugs are so like a mirage. The pleasure they result in is artificial and drains away as soon as the effects wear off. Wereas if a person learns to find joy and the profound in simple, absolutely simple, everyday things there is no need for drugs. THIS IS A LEARNED THING, you learn it as you go through life and once you do drugs you stop learning this and go honest for the drug instead.
Rating: 1 / 5
I reckon it is on of the best books I have ever read, I would recomend it to everyone.
Rating: 5 / 5