The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley and my own Experiences

[unico_love]

Huxley wrote about his experiences on mescalin, and I've never taken mescalin, so I'm not writing about that, just about how his experiences on mescalin reminded me of my own experiences in everyday life. Until very recently I thought everyone experienced life this way, I was just unusually stupid and weak-minded. I always feel like my general state of awareness, abilities, perceptions, and so on change on a kind of sliding scale. Sometimes I feel (and act) much more "normal" than at other times. Sometimes speaking is much easier or writing is much easier, I feel more "aware" of my surroundings or I simply understand my surroundings better, how heightened my perceptions are changes, etc. From a more spiritual perspective, which Huxley talks a lot about, I can go from feelings of extreme ecstasy or peace, feelings of union with everything and everyone and everything feels enchanted, to more spaced out and dulled feelings like everything is far away and I'm lost. Sometimes I feel completely outside of my body whereas at other times I feel caught in my body, but in peculiar ways, where I feel or I am aware of one part more than another and things fit oddly. I can act very strangely or very normal, be very much "in" the world of my surroundings, or very disjointed from it. In my case I think this is due to a combination of factors (autism, possible seizures, certain life circumstances, an intensely sensitive personality, etc.)

Huxley referred to a lot of these kinds of experiences as "visionary" and said that some people have these experiences very often and other people have these experiences very infrequently, which I'm sure is true. He used art for examples which I really liked and identified with, since art is so important to me. Apparently, while on mescalin, time didn't seem to matter to him anymore, or even really have much reality, and he was less aware of space. He would see objects more as brilliant compositions, and spatial relationships took on a flatter but very geometric and enchantingly beautiful appearance that deeply affected him emotionally. I tend to experience life a lot like this. I have a poor sense of time and time doesn't affect me much psychologically (I feel like everything is occurring simultaneously, and there isn't so much a differentiation of a past, often I actually feel like I'm jumping from one point in time to another, backward and forward -- sometimes notes in a song will bring this feeling out). Space relationships confuse me (kind of like the weird space in Alice in Wonderland is how I often think of it), even though I can mentally manipulate objects in my head pretty well (I'm sure painting and drawing all the time helps with this). I get confused about where my body is in space and where objects are in space, how far apart things are/how big things are, etc. Everything I see I tend to see as a composition of art, with different brilliant colors (color was enhanced for Huxley during his mescalin experiences). Orange is painful to me, but I do enjoy vivid, bright colors a lot and find color greatly affects my mood; I love to incorporate bright colors into my paintings because of the joy I associate with them.

And regardless of one's religious or spiritual beliefs, it sounds common for people who get intense sensory perceptions to find it relatively easy to find enhanced beauty in the world in very simple, everyday things (as Huxley found) and to feel a sense of union with the rest of the world, where arbitrary categories and separations fall to the wayside.

Huxley's changes in perception seemed fairly limited in some ways (such as his vision seemed enhanced and sense of time and space changed, and speech suddenly seemed much more like dead symbols unable to reveal true reality, but some things -- such as sound -- remained fairly unchanged for him). However, there were certain kinds of music (like chants) that did affect him more strongly. I have synesthesia that includes sound (seeing colors and movement, etc. with sound) and I also tend to have very sensitive hearing (though I also tend to hyperfocus so sometimes my hearing gets blocked out in favor of a different focus).

Although I often have feelings of transcendent union with the world or joy at simple things that I come across, where I get entranced, I also experience horror and terror at things others might consider simple. Where something little can seem ugly and hideous and terrifying just as easily as something small can be wonderous. My senses seem to all run together, my emotions seem to all run together, where things either become very jumbled and communication isn't likely to happen, or things just seem so pure and perfectly aligned, a perfectly solved pattern which is very strong (for good or bad). It's hard for me to explain how and why I can switch from seeming one way to a very different way. It's not that I always look more strange or uncommunicative when I'm overloaded, and sometimes I can stifle myself under very overloading circumstances. The waves of strange confusion and floating can come at any time, as can the feelings of ecstatic union. It's easiest to just describe it as a feeling like I'm constantly sliding between very different states of being with very different perceptions and orientations to the world. All of it is me, and all of the basics are always present, just some parts fade into the background for awhile while others take precedence.