Shortly after Huxley detailed his mescaline experience in "The Doors of Perception", he published another book - "Heaven and Hell", in which he invites us to look at our own minds in the same way that zoologists have looked at a new continent during the Age of Exploration. Instead of thinking of the mind as a static entity that is completely known to us, Huxley presents us with a picture of the mind as a space filled with profoundly alien creatures:
If you go to New South Wales you will see marsupials hopping about the countryside. And if you go to the antipodes of the self-conscious mind, you will encounter all sorts of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos. You do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials. They live their own lives in complete independence. A man cannot control them
This reminds me of the Buddhist idea that the mind and the thoughts are not something we control but something which we simply perceive - a sixth sense of sorts, trained on the contents of our inner world. We can't control these strange inhabitants of our minds but we can study and catalogue them in the way an explorer studies and catalogues the creatures found in nature. However, just like the animals observed by the scientist don't tell us anything about the scientist's character, so do the thoughts not reveal any information about the entity who perceives them:
A garden in July is perceived as brightly coloured. The perception tells us something about sunshine, flowers and butterflies, but little or nothing about our own selves. In the same way, the fact that we see brilliant colours in our visions and in some of our dreams tells us something about the fauna of the mind's antipodes, but nothing whatever about the personality who inhabits what I have called the Old World of the mind
For such a "zoologist of mind", one thing is of utmost importance - a means to access the mind field which is ordinarily buried away and to do it reliably. For Huxley, the answer to this need came in two forms - drugs and hypnosis.
In the first case, the soul is transported" to its far-off destination by the aid of a chemical - either mescaline or lysergic acid. In the second case, the vehicle is [..] hypnosis
Huxley believed that one of the mechanisms through which mescaline worked its magic was by depriving the brain of sugar and making it less efficient at "filtering reality", allowing for more of our subconscious experience to come forward. He believed it was for that same reason that some ascetics would get visions of God:
Asceticism, it is evident, has double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.
In my previous essay on Huxley, I wrote about the idea that there is meaning to life, that life itself might mean something, that there is something greater, something more real behind the spectacle of existence. Here Huxley goes on a similar exploration, this time in connection with the mind objects seen at the peak of the visionary experience. At this new visionary frontier, the mind objects we see are not mere symbols pointing to something else, as is the case with so many other thoughts.
The self-luminous objects which we see in the mind's antipodes posses a meaning... Significance here is identical with being; for, at the mind's antipodes, objects do not stand for anything but themselves
Unlike mere everyday thoughts which always exist in relation to other aspects of our daily lives, these more exotic corners of the mind contain entities which stand by themselves, as "manifestations of the essential givenness, the non-human otherness of the universe". Some of the things we encounter in our minds feel alien, but according to Huxley, there is nothing surprising in this alienness. There is no reason to expect that the Universe we inhabit is readily understandable by our human brains - some of it might be profoundly weird and unintuitive. By this same logic, we should not be surprised if parts of our minds feel just as strange and incomprehensible to us.
Here I am unavoidably reminded of the mechanical elves - one of Terence McKenna's favourite aspects of the DMT trip. Their utter otherness, their ability to create matter via means of a song, and their popping in and out of existence, all sound alien. Not just alien in the Hollywood sense of little grey men, but alien in a deeper sense, in the sense of something that inhabits not another planet but another reality altogether.
Some people interpret those as literal aliens - entities which exist independently of us. The DMT trip is to them like a gate, allowing us to enter another world and communicate with its inhabitants. Others claim that the mechanical elves, and whatever other entities we might encounter are simply figments of our imagination, nothing more than the fantastic beasts we sometimes see in dreams. I see Huxley as proposing a third path, a compromise of sorts. Just because an entity is created by our mind, that doesn't mean it is not independent of us. His analogy with a zoologist studying exotic creatures points to just that - whatever creatures we encounter are both part of our minds and independent of the "Old World Self" as he might call it. Even inside our own heads, we are still mere observers.
Very interesting. Does Huxley ever experience or talk about non duality ? What you outline here seems only to cover the dual consciousness of observer and observed. Definitely gonna read the rest of his works. At this point, I can’t go by the zen saying “not one, not two, but one and two”. I’m interested to see if he reaches this conclusion from his exploration.