Doors

[TheAtomicCloud]

How does one know which door to pick when the teacher opens every door for you? Instinct maybe? What does insight have to offer? Perhaps your intuition tells you somethings different? Or maybe... just maybe Hind-sight kicks in and something rattles inside your brain going wait a minute. Why do we need to go through a door and what happens when we realize it's only a door? My imagination goes straight to forgetting that doors exist. If it's a door how did it get there and who put it there? Mind you I still want to understand just how I know what a door is. How does someone who has never even experienced something such as a 'door', walk through one that has yet to come into existence through the knowledge that person has. Now this is the nautical talking. If you come up to a double door or better yet a revolving door, now what? Do I pick the left door, or the right door and perhaps maybe get lost in revolving around the blue or red pill conception a majority of consciousnesses live in. That may be the might, when you become the center of the revolving door looking at everything and everyone around you passing through this vortex wondering or pondering about the concern of 'what is really going on?'

[Redbeck]

Ah the subject of doors of the mind and opening of corridors of consciousness! - excellent choice of topic for the Oracle forum, therefore a belated thank you and welcome again TheAtomicCloud.

As in all promising posts you have undoubtedly triggered a flurry of thoughts, certainly on the subject of doors that take us ‘Through the Looking Glass’.

One such example is that intriguing peyote inspired tome, more a philosophical essay perhaps, which recalls a mescaline trip experienced by Aldous Leonard Huxley, English writer and philosopher of Brave New World acclaim, on an afternoon in May 1953. The Doors of Perception was published in 1954; the book borrows its title from a phrase in a William Blake poem written in 1783, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley recalls a palette of insights gained over several hours which ranged from the purely ‘purely aesthetic’ to ‘sacramental vision’, he also captured an aftermath of thoughts within the work on the experience as he perceived its general influence on and meaning within art and religion.

'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 thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.' William Blake

The use of plant drugs has been widespread in opening spiritual, religious and artistic experience doors since time immemorial, while animals discovered the euphoric qualities of certain plants almost as dinosaurs walked the earth.

Mescaline is the principal narcotic agent contained in the psychedelic cactus Peyote and San Pedro cactus, which has been employed in Native American religious ceremonies for thousands of years. The unravelling of the mysteries of Mescaline has a distinct Teutonic theme. Arthur Heffter, a German pharmacologist isolated the alkaloids in the peyote cactus in 1891. These included mescaline, which he demonstrated via a combination of animal testing and self experimentation as the compound underpinning the psychoactive properties of the plant. Again In 1919, another German chemist Ernst Spath synthesised the drug, however it was German-American Heinrich Kluver who was the first to systematically study the true psychological effect in a small volume, published in 1928, Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations. He concluded in the book that the drug could be used in effective research into the unconscious mind.

A 1930s American anthropologist Weston La Barre, published The Peyote Cult, the first study of the ritual use of peyote as an entheogen drug amongst the Huichol people natives of western Mexico. La Barre observed and recorded that the Indian users of the cactus used the plant to gain visions for prophecy, healing and inner strength. An entheogen is described as ‘generating the divine within’ and a chemical substance used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context that may be synthesised or obtained from natural species. At the time when Huxley wrote his book, mescaline was still regarded as a research chemical as opposed to a hallucinogenic drug and in fact was listed in the Parke, Davis & Company catalogue, manufacturing chemists of Detroit, Michigan, USA, as not being subject to any formal controls.

At the time of The Doors of Perception Huxley had already been interested in spiritual matters and using alternative therapies for a lengthy period. In 1936 he told TS Elliot that he had begun to meditate and that he had also used other therapies including the Alexander Technique and the Bates Method of subconscious vision saying they had been of particular importance in helping him to navigate personal crises. Also In the late 1930s he developed an interest in the spiritual teaching of Vedanta, and in 1945 set out a philosophy which he believed to be a common denominator amongst mystics of all religions in a publication named The Perennial Philosophy, aware for some time that drug induced visionary experiences were part and parcel of the practices followed by certain non-Christian religions.

[Khayaam Ravenhurst]

Interesting note: William Blake's The Lambeth Books (his long prophetic works) are heavily influenced by "Hindoo" Mythology. Blake was among the first Western poets and philosophers to incorporate Eastern myth into his work. The Proverbs of Hell, The Book of Thel, The of Urizen, Los, etc... all borrow extensively from the Hindu pantheon. His grafting of Eastern myth onto Western (English) History/Setting (Albion) is what makes Blake's work wholly unique among the Romantics. No doubt when he wrote The Proverbs of Hell he had the Hindu (Buddhist) worldview close in mind.

[TheAtomicCloud]

Thank you for the response, RedBeck. My apologies for taking almost a month to reply, I've been mulling over and reading more in-depth some of the works you spoke of. Might I begin by saying I've also read much of your work, as you've had many insightful, eloquent and outright brilliant posts. It's an honor to be able to interact with you, after the many hours perusing through things you and others have written here. Thank you.

You referenced many books. Well, books and various drugs associated with spiritual or otherwise philosophical experiences. Reading is relaxing as well as informative, in many cases. Writing, however, is a different experience but still still uses the same imaginative process. The term 'imagination' is often attributed to kids as they're more in tune with that creative ability. Pure imagination itself, using that 'minds eye', is crucial to fiction writing but it is still used in non-fiction writing as well. Writing anything words still 'pop' into being in whatever order chosen to convey a concept and it is a beautiful form of art, inducing that minds eye to create a picture for you or understand something new.

"Reason is intelligence taking exercise. Imagination is intelligence with an erection." Victor Hugo

I read elsewhere today is your birthday as well! I hope you have a fantastic one, for what it's worth.

[Redbeck]

TheAtomicCloud welcome back and huge thanks for your kind wishes on my birthday, they roll on at such an alarming rate, like a trawler in a gale with so much work still to do. Again I would thank you for the complimentary nature of your comments on material submitted on the Oracle. However as I often say to my peers, there are many occasions where I feel as if I am but a conduit scribe to other guiding hands of thought. Therefore these are perhaps words, albeit expressed in the modern idiom, derived from an endless sequence of historic memories stretching way back over many life spans, not all three score and ten I hasten to add, which I see as my own ever swinging doors of perceptive hindsight.

So TAC It is also good to see further incisive observations from your goodself on what is a most compelling topic which you were instrumental in spreading before our community.

I would also like thank the intellectuality of Khayaam Ravehurst for pointing us through the highly relevant doors into the mind and work of William Blake, into whose phenomenol output I would heartily recommend the uninitiated to delve. The term visionary is probably no more appropriate than it used to refer to Blake, whom, I would hasten to add, most definitely had a darker more disturbing side to his creativity. Nevertheless, he appeared to have travelled a great distance and through several doors of the mind in the process via his subconscious. Yet Blake appeared to have retained and regurgitated the imagery from these visionary journeys to the higher planes of alter-dimension, with flawless recall resulting in a remarkable presentation of a bizarre yet highly believable images of secondary and tertiary reality.

Yet moving on to the creativity stemming from children, which I believe to be absolutely crucial to the future of human kind and the planet we inhabit, imagination is worth a thousand words. Imagination is of course the creative staging post for very young enquiring minds at their most receptive point in the life cycle. Yet that imagination is built around real life observations with collectable nuances, all lessons learned and information acquired from the sensual maze that surrounds us all, but is perhaps more notable to the very young as fresh untried experience. Adult dreams are perhaps fatigued versions of childlike imagination, but distinctly more difficult to remember and therefore record, these too can be induced by standard prescription medications, for example they are a melancholy side effect of cholestrol reducing drugs like Statins.

From a personal perspective I have written both under the influence of drugs ranging from alcohol to harder class substances and without. Probably more credibly without I would say, although one trick was to try and record as much during the hallucinatory stages as possible. For even though the scribblings appeared awkward, sometimes cumbersome and disjointed in the cold light of sober day there was generally sufficient flash card shorthand to reignite the memory of the doors opened, and the spectrum from nirvana through dilemma to revelation within, to be eventually written up in a cogent fashion.

You are correct comrade TheAtomicCloud, the collection point for the feederstock of imagination is a most special place and essence of great fiction as well as the stuff of philosophical non-fiction.

I would conclude in appreciation, that I see every topic posted as the source of an ongoing communal blog, so fingers don't fail us now and I look forward to an even more magnificent influx of words on every topic beneath the sun ,as we head through the summer. That is if you don't live in Mordor, not say that all citizens of Mordor are not welcome to wield the pen at will.

Hectate or The Night of Enitharmon's Joy by William Blake