The Brain's Three Milliards

"Thought is the brain's three milliards
Of cells from the inside out.
Billions of games of billiards

Marked up as Faith and Doubt.

My Faith, but their collisions;

My logic, but their enzymes;

Their pink epinephrin, my visions;

Their white epinephrin, my crimes.

Since I am the felt arrangement

Of ten to the ninth times three,

Each atom in its estrangement
Must yet be prophetic of me."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
Island

Living Geometry

"We apprehend Him in the alternate voids and fullness of a cathedral; in the space that separates the salient features of a painting; in the living geometry of a flower, a seashell, an animal; in the pauses and intervals between the notes of music, in their differences of tone and sonority; and finally on the planes of conduct, in love and gentleness, the confidence and humility, which give beauty to the relationships between human beings."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

The One "Before Whom Words Recoil"

"The purpose of all words is to illustrate the meaning of an object. When they are heard, they should enable the hearer to understand this meaning, and this according to the four categories of substance, of activity, of quality and of relationship. For example cow and horse belong to the category of substance. He cooks or he prays belongs to the category of activity. White and black belong to the category of quality. Having money or possessing cows belongs to the category of relationship. Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like 'being' in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity because it is without activity—'at rest, without parts or activity,' according to the Scriptures. Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is 'without a second' and is not the object of anything but its own self. Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One 'before whom words recoil.'"

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)
The Perennial Philosophy

Place of Purification

"Solitude is the place of purification."

- Martin Buber (1878 - 1965)

"In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

"The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born. That is why many of the earthly miracles have had their genesis in humble surroundings."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

Being, Meaning, and Another Order

"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.

...

The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.

...

"Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Postscript. My apologies for the poor quality of this image, but it was captured with a shivering cold hand tapping on an even colder iPhone while out on my morning walk with my wife (these now routine walks have been a very generous "gift" of our pandemic-ridden times). I had a thought to run back into the house to get one of my "real" cameras, but my brain and legs were colder still and simply refused to budge. Searching for otherworldly vistas in ice forms is one of my favorite pastimes in the winter, but I've had precious few days in which to do so (as yet, in northern VA). While work week constraints prevent me from truly indulging myself, the promise of some continued cold weather has me eagerly looking forward to continuing my search for "otherworldly vistas" this weekend!

Mind at Large

"To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled 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. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Things Unknown

"There are things known

and there are things unknown,

and in between are

the doors of perception" 

- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Unfathomable Mystery

"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

The Doors of Perception

Door in the Wall

"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

The Doors of Perception

Synesthetic Noetics: Cognition vs. Intuition

Intuition                                  Cognition

“The Noetic Quality, as named by William James, is a feeling of insight or illumination that, on an intuitive, nonrational level and with a tremendous force of certainty, subjectively has the status of Ultimate Reality. This knowledge is not an increase of facts but is a gain in psychological, philosophical, or theological insight.” - Walter Pahnke, The Psychedelic Mystical Experience in the Human Encounter With Death

“Although contemporary neuroscientists study “synesthesia”—the overlap and blending of the senses—as though it were a rare or pathological experience to which only certain persons are prone (those who report “seeing sounds,” “hearing colors,” and the like), our primordial, preconceptual experience, as Merleau-Ponty makes evident, is inherently synesthetic. The intertwining of sensory modalities seems unusual to us only to the extent that we have become estranged from our direct experience (and hence from our primordial contact with the entities and elements that surround us.):

'…Synesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the center of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking, feel, in order to deduce, from our bodily organization and the world as the physicist conceives it, what we are to see, hear, and feel.' (Merleau-Ponty)" - David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

"Hallucinogenic discourse, both of scientific and “recreational” nature, faces a similar rhetorical dilemma as the rest of the ecstatic traditions it responds to: It must report on an event which is in principle impossible to communicate. Writers of mystic experience from St Teresa to William James have treated the unrepresentable character of mystic events to be the very hallmark of ecstasies. Hallucinogenic discourse faced a similar struggle in the effort to report on the knowledge beyond what Aldous Huxley (and Jim Morrison…) described as the “doors of perception.” - Richard Doyle, "Consciousness Expansion and the Emergence of Biotechnology" in In Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body

Note: Volume II of my "Synesthetic Landscape" series is now available for purchase (softcover, hardbound with wrap-around cover, and pdf versions).

Doors of Perception

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception" - Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).

A camera is a portal to both ordinary worlds and otherwordly mysterious realms. Sometimes the two coalesce, but only for an instant, and hint at other unfathomable and inaccessible universes; all teasingly poised just beyond the impenetrable boundary between what we see and ... ?

What lies beyond the door of perception? What meets our silent inquisitive gaze as we gently push it open?

Would what we newly see change everything we've ever known? Would the world we leave behind seem as incomprehensible to us as the one we enter? Are all but Shamans truly blind?

How shall we describe what lies beyond? Will our old words and concepts be enough? Or will they merely be useless relics of the past; meaningless symbols of a misaligned reality?

What happens when we discover a new language to express our strange perceptions (assuming that such a language even exists, or that we are clever enough to find it)? Will new categories emerge, subjectively partitioning our world into newly objectified parts?

Or will the new, still unrecognizable abstract forms suddenly revert back to old meanings (or appear to), subtly revealing even deeper recessed mysteries to be explored...?

What was the world like, I wonder, before I stepped into this one? Is there anyone left to understand my answer?

"As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious." - Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965).