The Doors of Perception

This book is a collection of literary essays by the British writer Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, and the Chinese translation also includes his two famous works The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. The title comes from a line by the English poet William Blake: “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.” This idea also resonates with the sense of Laozi’s “mystery of mysteries, the gate of all wonders.” The Doors of Perception records an experience Huxley had after taking mescaline extracted from a cactus native to the Americas under the care of a doctor and family members: his sense of time and the boundaries of self loosened, and everyday objects revealed unusual light and color, and he wrote of the feeling “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation.” Huxley did not treat this as a curiosity but used it to put forward an influential view: the brain is less an amplifier of perception than a “reducing valve” or sieve that filters out the vast flow of sensory information and leaves only the small portion necessary for survival; “opening the doors of perception” is the state in which this filtering mechanism is temporarily relaxed. Heaven and Hell, as a sequel, extends the discussion from drug experience to a broader range: light and color in art, religious visions, asceticism and meditation, and extreme states of memory and introspection. He tries to show how these seemingly mystical experiences find a place in the structure of human perception. The whole book is written in first-person speculative prose, combining scientific literacy with a literary touch, and is also widely known for influencing the Beat Generation, psychedelic rock, and hippie culture—the American band The Doors took its name from the book’s title.