Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception #074

How our brains construct reality

Exploring Perception with Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was an author in the middle of the 20th century who, in the 50s, wrote famous books where he explored, among other things, the influence of our minds on our perception of the world. He was trying drugs at this time, and what he learned from this is interesting—not because I believe that we should be taking drugs, but because it gives us an opportunity to look into how our brain constructs reality. And this exploration was done by someone who really could write, and he could then express what he experienced in the most interesting way.

A Journey into Perception

He writes about one of his trips the following: "I took my pill at 11: an hour and a half later I was sitting in my study looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers. (I shorten it a little bit — he now describes the flowers). And at breakfast this morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But this was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. This was something I had seen before, seen this very morning between the flowers and the furniture when I looked down by chance and went on passionately staring by choice at my own crossed legs, those folds in the trousers. What a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel—how rich, how deeply and mysteriously sumptuous. This is how one ought to see, I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers or glanced at the jewel-like books at the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair."

The Power of Observation

So I think what this gives us is the idea to just look more because what he can do under the influence of this drug, we can in principle do without the drug. We can just teach ourselves, we can just practice to look more, to experience the world in a more deep, more direct way, and to try to recover this liveliness that the images of the world have for a child.

Thank you and see you tomorrow!