The Doors of Perception

Written by Aldous Huxley

Narrated by Rudolph Schirmer

The critically acclaimed novelist and social critic Aldous Huxley, describes his personal experimentation with the drug mescaline and explores the nature of visionary experience. The title of this classic comes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstone Audio
• Release date: Jun 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781602836532

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews for The Doors of Perception

[uh8myzen_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Aldous Huxley will always be one of my favourite writers as he has a way of capturing my imagination in a unique way. I read Brave New World when I was about fourteen years old and was blown away. I have since reread it a few times, and each time I am equally amazed.I found this book in my dad's library when I was eighteen, and took to it immediately. I could not help but be swept up by Huxley's writing style, his intellectual examination of the drugs effects and the theories he applies to his observations. There is no doubt that his experiences had a profound effect on him as it did many other intellectuals and doctors of the time, and his arguments are profoundly compelling.As an aside, when I discussed the book with my father, I learned that he had worked with the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond at the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan during early experimentation with LSD. At the time, Dr. Osmond believed that the mescaline "trip" was similar to the early stages of schizophrenia and so was given research grants by the Saskatchewan government to conduct trials (not to be confused with the CIA funded experimentation of the same time that were conducted in Montreal). My father was a Doctor and he assisted in the research.Here's the interesting part and why my dad had a copy of the book. Dr. Osmond administered the mescaline to Aldous Huxley at the Weyburn Mental Hospital that he writes about in the book... my dad actually met one of my literary heros and had an incidental role in the writing of one of the most important books of the 20th century.Cool huh?

[tony_landis_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Some very deep and though provoking ideas and observations.

[janepriceestrada · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This small book is extraordinary. It made me see the world in a new way. Although the main plot is about drug use the idea that artists see the world in a different way and are able to express that through their medium is beautiful and true.

[Renato Marin Bautista · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

just talk about drugs and more drug, very dissappointed

[Stalinova Storojvaia · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting writing of Huxleys encounter with psychoactive drugs combined with a brief, albeit fascinating take on the history and relevance of them as compared with more traditional narcotics. Narrators voice is in tone and rather pleasant to hear.

[smichaelwilson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail.”To put it bluntly, The Doors of Perception is a first-hand account of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley's documented experience of tripping balls on mescaline. I've always found it telling how high schools (at least in the eighties and nineties when I attended) would eagerly lead students through an anti-drug perspective of Brave New world without bothering to mention Huxley's later experimentation and promotion of hallucinogenics as positive tool towards psychological and philosophical growth. The Doors of Perception is probably one of the most scholarly and grounded first-hand accounts of a hallucinogenic journey you'll ever read, as Huxley takes periodic breaks to expound upon drugs (not all, mind you) as a tool to aid in understanding the perceptions of those suffering from metal illnesses and seeing how the "genius" sees the world, as well as the religious connotations in and human necessity towards chemically aided transcendence. Huxley would later experiment with LSD and continue to support the clinical and societal benefits of hallucinogenics, and would receive injections of LSD on his deathbed at his request. This book is an a must read for anyone interested in the scholarly pursuit of better living through chemistry, or the history of the modern approach and examination of such drugs.

[jimocracy · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

And... I'm done with this author. His non-fiction is less interesting than is fiction. Who would have thought that a book about one's personal experience with drug use could be so boring? I can't believe that members of The Doors found this drivel so intriguing that they would use part of the book title for the name of the band. What a serious time waster!

[brleach · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely profound. The most intellectual and yet simultaneously immanent account of altered perception I've ever read. The first piece of gonzo journalism. He captures the way empathy and love are the means through which we conduct our doomed quest to assuage the inescapable solitude of life. The revival of Bergson that forms the backbone of this piece insists on an understanding of the mind that, if accepted, is transformative, bursting with the potential for new ways of life, and disturbing. I find his meditations on art reassuring; perhaps my philistine disinclination towards art and preference for the art of being itself is not so philistine after all.

[evolvingthread · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the account, in a form that seems to blend both an essay and a journal entry, of Aldous Huxley’s experience on mescaline.Although I have never taken mescaline, I have had many spiritual experiences of higher consciousness, and of what he describes as the “Mind at Large”, and I have to say that this was a wonderful account of “suchness”, of “being”, of “awareness”, of spiritual reality, enlightenment, of “naked existence”. It was reassuring, and empowering, inspiring and vivid. What he was able to describe, and with such accuracy, was profound.✦ “Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. 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. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves.”✦ “However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”✦ “He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers, shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were-a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.”✦ “We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through the half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.”✦ “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 the drearier forms of pleasure?”✦ “But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”✦ “‘A gratuitous grace,’not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large-this is an experience of inestimable value.”I will be reading this book again.

[janemarieprice · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This small book is extraordinary. It made me see the world in a new way. Although the main plot is about drug use the idea that artists see the world in a different way and are able to express that through their medium is beautiful and true.