Read my first post here.
Before Aldous Huxley
had his first experience with mescaline, he thought that the drug would turn
off filters in his brain, revealing an expanded view of the universe. Building
on work done by Dr. C.D. Broad and Humphry Osmond,
Huxley developed a concept he called Mind at Large.
The concept of Mind at Large is fairly simple: Huxley
thought that the brain was a reducing valve, or a series of filters, that
filtered out most of the stimuli of the world, leaving us with only the
information that we need to survive. In The Doors of Perception Huxley said,
“To
make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the
reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end
is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay
alive on the surface of this Particular planet.”
This
echoes the conclusions of Dr. C.D. Broad. Huxley references Broad’s work in Doors. The passage as follows:
“The suggestion is that the
function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main
eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of
remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that
is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous
system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of
largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we
should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very
small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."
Huxley was interested in using mescaline to unlock the
secrets of the geniuses, the savants, and the mystics. He claimed that these
people experienced life differently that the average person, so there was no
way for the normal person to understand the minds of the extraordinarily
gifted. He wanted to use mescaline to, “…change my ordinary mode of
consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the
medium, even the mystic were talking about.”
The Peyote Cactus that Mescaline is extracted from
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