Island - Aldous Huxley [160]
From the books the investigator directed my attention to the furniture. A small typing table stood in the center of the room; beyond it, from my point of view, was a wicker chair and beyond that a desk. The three pieces formed an intricate pattern of horizontals, uprights and diagonals—a pattern all the more interesting for not being interpreted in terms of spatial relationships. Table, chair and desk came together in a composition that was like something by Braque or Juan Gris, a still life recognizably related to the objective world, but rendered without depth, without any attempt at photographic realism. I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist’s-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers—back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, of that chair—how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes—or was it several centuries?—not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them—or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for “I” was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were “they”) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.
“Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.”
Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. 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.” According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. 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.
Excerpted from The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley. Reprinted with permission.
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The Complete Aldous Huxley Bibliography
Dates are the year of first publication.
The Burning Wheel 1916
Jonah 1917
The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems 1918
Leda 1920
Limbo: Notes and Essays 1920
Crome Yellow 1921
Mortal Coils: Five Stories 1922
On the Margin 1923
Antic Hay 1923
Little Mexican 1924
Those Barren Leaves 1925
Along the Road: Notes and Essays 1925
Two or Three Graces: Four Stories 1926
Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday (The Diary of a Journey) 1926
Essays Old and New 1926
Proper Studies 1927
Point Counter Point 1928
Do What You Will: Essays 1929
Brief Candles 1930
Vulgarity in Literature and Other Essays: Digressions from a Theme 1930
The World of Light 1931
The Cicadas and Other Poems 1931
Music at Night and Other Essays 1931
Brave New World 1932
Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology of Commentaries 1932
Beyond the Mexique Bay 1934
Eyeless