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Effing the Ineffable: Reconciling Nonduality in The Doors of Perception and The Joyous Cosmology – Part 1

Dec 6, 2007 admin in Text 1 Comment Tags: alan watts, aldous huxley, entheogens

By Tim Hardwick

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Introduction

Self-conscious man thinks he thinks. But whether he regards his self-consciousness a blessing or a curse remains a question. This reflective point-of-view allows him to observe pattern in the world and make predictions based on rhythms in the pattern that are of inestimable aid to survival. Endowed with the faculties of memory and foresight, however, man cannot but be aware of his own eventual demise, for the price of being able to control the future is to know that, in the long run, he will not be able to. Powerless to reconcile mortal anxiety with the transient yet untroubled forms of nature, he would not be harangued for coming to the desperate conclusion that his perspective is somehow skewed.

Such an outlook has proved the impetus for salvation-seeking throughout history, from the alchemical pursuit of the elixir of immortality to the growth of world religions. The myriad paths men have followed down the years appear on the surface to be disparate and, at best, comparably vague. However, together they do indeed agree that, for various reasons, something is wrong with ‘ordinary consciousness’.1

The rise of existentialism was for many the inevitable explosion of this ever-present undercurrent of mortal unease. On the other hand, proponents of scientism argued such reasoning failed to take into account the lofty position humanity enjoys by virtue of self-awareness alone, evidenced by a collective technological progress and the harnessing and potential mastery of natural laws. Whatever the consensus, or lack of it, this debate is extremely pertinent to the present inquiry, whose principal concern is the non-ordinary state of consciousness crucial to understanding two historically pivotal literary pieces, The Doors of Perception (1954) by Aldous Huxley, and The Joyous Cosmology (1962) by Alan Watts. First, a little on the writers themselves.

Aldous was a member of the famous British Huxley family, which produced a number of brilliant scientific minds. Best known for his satirical dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) and for being the possessor of a broadly encyclopaedic intellect, he also published a number of short stories, essays, poetry, travel writing and film scripts. Huxley’s literary energies were often employed in examining and criticising the prevailing social mores of twentieth century Western culture, its ideals and unquestioned assumptions. In the latter part of his life, Huxley became intensely interested in the history of philosophical and religious mysticism. This first became evident in the themes of the semi-autobiographical novel Eyeless in Gaza (1955), in which one of the central characters adopts a Buddhist-centred philosophy, practices meditation, and becomes a pacifist. Huxley’s personal
interest culminated in the writing of an annotated anthology on the various mystical strands of historical religious thought, entitled The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Following this line of enquiry, Huxley eventually pursued a pharmacological path, his experiences and reflections published in the essay The Doors of Perception and, later, Heaven and Hell (1956). These latter works became important texts in the counterculture phenomenon that would eventually emerge out of the 1950s Beat movement and become synonymous with the civil unrest of the 1960s.

Alan Watts was born in Kent the only son of middle class parents. Largely self-educated, Watts eschewed his
Anglican upbringing at an early age and joined the London Buddhist Lodge, where he soon became organisation
secretary. During this time he read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry, and Eastern wisdom.
In 1936, at 21 years old, Watts had his first book published, The Spirit of Zen. Three years later he left
England for America and spent a five year period as an Episcopal minister at an Anglican school in an attempt
to bring his personal philosophy to a larger audience in a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical
Christianity and Asian wisdom traditions.2 Watts was awarded a master’s degree in Theology for writing a thesis that he would later publish under the title Behold the Spirit (1947). On leaving the church, Watts established himself as a writer and philosopher with the 1957 publication of one of his best-known books, The Way of Zen. Considered an authority in Eastern religion, Watts was asked by members of the psychiatric establishment to undergo LSD experiences in the hope that he might further an understanding of the drug’s effects.

3 Watts went on to write of his experiences in The Joyous Cosmology, a publication of similar importance for the emerging counterculture.

Now it is important to define the subject matter of this study more narrowly in the context of these two focal texts.
Both fall under the rubric of mysticism, but like religion, truth, and modernity, the word ‘mysticism’ is crucial but murky.4 For the purposes of the present inquiry, our attention is on the literary description of the so-called ‘mystical’ change of consciousness induced by a particular set of drugs termed by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond as psychedelic, or ‘mind-manifesting’.5 This literary focus does not dwell on the many, often fantastic descriptions of the hallucinatory period of such states, but is concerned specifically with what William Braden has called ‘the central experience,
which corresponds with the apprehension of the Clear Light.’6
It has been said that this type of experience is ‘beyond words’ and corresponds to the insights derived from the application of various spiritual practices. In the spirit of criticism, then, the aim of this analysis is to elucidate the characteristic nature of this phenomenon by a form of linguistic deconstruction, but only in so far as it relates to a cogent interpretation of the
descriptive passages located in the texts – our ideas of ‘subjective’ experience necessarily draw from such accounts.

This study will refer to a variety of disciplines and schools of thought in an attempt to formulate a new interpretive model that may allow us to comprehend – as far as is linguistically possible – the experiences described by Huxley and Watts. To put the pieces into context, the following chapter will trace the historical emergence of the texts and the discipline of comparative mysticism that they spawned, summarising the main arguments in the field. This is to provide not only a sense of the importance of the texts, but also an insight into the fundamental need to return to the original writings for a fresh interpretation. The second
chapter lays the foundation for the new model by identifying the common characteristics of the texts, with the intention that a basic ‘perceptual-conceptual theory’ will thereby develop spontaneously. Chapter three then moves beyond this theoretical groundwork by viewing the texts from a nonconceptual perspective, using the earlier model to ‘anchor’ the new reading. Chapter four focuses on the epistemological and ontological implications of the findings through a concurrent development of the reading method and logical analysis of the literature. What is desired by this approach is that a new understanding of the texts emerges, one which will then be presented as a call for a reconsideration of the contemporary myths which have long been perpetuated through conceptual formation – better known as language.

1 Forays into the Inconceivable

Whatever the circumstances of its emergence, language ushered into the realm of social interaction previously unknown vistas of possibility. Humans no longer had to rely on frail gestures and body language as the sole means of communication. From that time on, man could as if by telepathy instantly comprehend the mind of fellow man. The survival benefits were immense. Groups of formerly estranged individuals could debate and discuss anything as a collective, whether it concerned the ultimate meaning of life or the source of the next meal. The dialogic method known as philosophy held promise that the final answers to the questions of existence would be one day revealed. In light of the advantages language offered, what could not be resolved? Clearly a great deal. Language came with its own problems. Today conflict erupts across the globe just as it did down the annals of history, and if the average mind is a microcosm of the collective consciousness, the human species appears estranged as ever by the concept of otherness – even moreso if it can be named.

For Aldous Huxley, the 1954 publication of The Doors of Perception heralded the call to a sincere investigation into this intensely personal problem that language left unresolved. ‘By its very nature,’ wrote Huxley, ‘embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.’ Not only is the feeling of individual isolation from the world a seemingly insoluble issue, it presumes a separateness from all other, equally forsaken individuals. Solidarity is to be found in the pooling of information about experiences, but always, Huxley felt, at the expense of the experiences themselves; for ‘this inferential understanding or even mutual empathy between humans is trafficked through symbols and at second-hand only.’ What complicated matters, felt Huxley, was that the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live that, in matters of communication across these cavernous spaces, ‘words are uttered, but fail to enlighten.’ The human mind was on its own. Or was it? By what means could Huxley explore such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature, and the relationship between brain and consciousness?

The origin of his preoccupations can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, a time when scientific politics was experiencing significant upheaval. Darwin’s new evolutionary theory stated that natural selection was aimless and the result of random mutations; as it related to man, he was a mere biological fluke, and any existential suffering was to be considered the by-product of a mistake of nature.7 This interpretation competed with a teleological theory known as vitalism, championed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson argued that biological evolution was not aimless but was controlled by an immanent creative life force, an élan vital, which sought ever higher expressions of complexity and competence.8 As it related to mammals, homo sapiens best expressed this upward drive. In the view of Bergson, man’s ultimate future lay not in further outward evolution, but inward evolution in the form of human consciousness. In an embrace of emotion over mechanistic intellect, man would be granted a direct intuition of the life force that pervades all becoming and, by this wisdom, would eventually become god-like.9

Huxley leaned toward the latter camp. In his view, however, time was running out for the actualisation of this potential. Man was at the precipice of unmitigated disaster. As Jay Stevens writes, a way had to be found to heal the gap between homo faber, man the wielder of increasingly ingenious and dangerous tools, and homo sapiens, man the smart monkey who had mastered the planet but not his own inner flaws – flaws that were now threatening to bring the whole evolutionary game to a precipitous close.10 Accompanied by the writer-philosopher Gerald Heard, Huxley began an investigation into the esoteric wisdom traditions of the East in the hope of formulating a remedy to these ails. This culminated in 1945 in the publication of The Perennial Philosophy, an annotated compendium of the perceived similarities between widely divergent mystical experiences of centuries passed. Central to Huxley’s philosophy was the theory put forward by Bergson that the brain and the central nervous system operated as an eliminative system that screened much out of consciousness, leaving only that necessary for practical survival. In the twentieth century, however, Huxley felt that a way had to found which would bypass Bergson’s ‘reducing valve’ and tap the unlimited potentials of the brain. The mystical experience, in Huxley’s view, broached this issue squarely. How to achieve the experience was an entirely different matter.

By a series of extremely fortunate circumstances Huxley found himself, in the spring of 1953, directly athwart the trail. A chance reading of an article by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond on the effects of a little-known psychoactive compound called mescaline led Huxley to invite the author to his Los Angeles home for further discussion.11 Over half a century earlier, Havelock Ellis had written of his experiences with the alkaloid and assigned it a position among ‘drugs of unique distinction,’ but experimentation had since been sporadic. In spite of the passing of so many years, little agreement existed on the effect of the substance, which originated from the peyote cactus revered by the Indians of Mexico, and the psychological material at Osmond’s disposal was still inadequate. Tentative speculations associated the drug experience with the schizophrenic state, while others posited it as something altogether different in character. Despite these misgivings, Huxley was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig, and thus it came about that, one bright May morning, and with some trepidation on Osmond’s part, Huxley swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.12

Reflecting on the experience, Huxley could hardly contain his excitement; mescaline had proved itself to him ‘the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the Beatific Vision,’ as he described it to his New York editor, and in response to his visionary encounter he would begin a long essay that would raise ‘all manner of questions in the fields of aesthetics, religion, theory of knowledge.’13 The Doors of Perception was published in the spring of 1954 – to generally perplexed reviews. Had anyone else written a book recommending mescaline as ‘an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual,’ declared The Reporter‘s Marvin Barrett, it would have been dismissed ‘as the woolgathering of a misguided crackpot. But coming…from one of the current masters of English prose, a man of immense erudition and intellect who usually demonstrates a high moral seriousness, they deserve more careful scrutiny.’14

Yet this opinion did not convince Huxley’s critics. Self-respecting rationalists saw fresh evidence of quackery and intellectual abdication, while the serious and religious were troubled by the offer of a shortcut.15 The critical response to The Doors of Perception was almost an echo of the British Medical Journal’s condemnation of Ellis for his enthusiastic endorsement of peyote.16 Huxley, however, received these negative reactions with incongruence: ‘How odd it is that writers like Belloc and Chesterton may sing the praises of alcohol (which is responsible for about two thirds of the car accidents and three quarters of the crimes of violence) and be regarded as good Christians and noble fellows,’ Huxley complained, ‘whereas anyone who ventures to suggest that there may be other and less harmful short cuts to self transcendence is treated as a dangerous drug fiend and wicked perverter of weak minded humanity.’17

As interest in his discovery slowly gained momentum on both sides of the Atlantic, a good friend of Huxley’s entered the fray: the writer-philosopher Alan Watts. Watts initially became aware of the drug by reading Huxley’s published account, and in 1958 spoke personally to him, noting that the great writer, in contrast with his prior brand of ascetic mysticism, had ‘ceased to be Manichean,’ in that his vision of the divine now included nature, to which such a shift had left him ‘more relaxed and humane.’ Watts’s interest naturally piqued, yet he felt compelled to reserve his opinion that any such experience could only amount, at best, to ‘a taste of the mystical, like swimming with waterwings, perhaps.’18

Watts would eventually have the opportunity to undertake the experiment himself later the same year, when a member of the psychiatric community approached him. Dr. Keith Deitman of UCLA was studying the effect of LSD on alcoholic patients, but since so many of his subjects had reported states of consciousness that read like accounts of mystical experience, he quickly became interested in trying it out on ‘experts’ in this field. Watts would take the drug soon after, and concluded that his experience was best described as ‘aesthetic’ and thereupon made a tape for radio broadcast, saying that he had ‘looked into this phenomenon and found it most interesting,’ but, alas, in contrast with Huxley’s vision, Watts concluded it was ‘hardly what I would call mystical.’19

A year later, the tape was heard by two psychiatrists at the Langley-Porter Clinic in San Fransisco – Sterling Bunnell and Michael Agron – who were soon in touch with Watts, urging him to reconsider his views and attempt the experiment a second time, for ‘there was something of an art to getting it really working.’ Watts accepted the invitation and, shortly after ingesting the substance, found himself ‘reluctantly compelled to admit that – at least in my own case – LSD had brought me into an undeniably mystical state of consciousness.’20 Watts repeated the experiment five times, and these occasions would come to form the basis of his writings on the subject.21 Watts noted his initial reluctance to publish, fearing the prospect of these chemicals, uncontrolled in dosage and content, being bootlegged for use in inappropriate settings without any competent supervision. However, since Huxley had ‘already let the cat out of the bag’ and the subject was under discussion both in psychiatric journals and in the public press, Watts decided that more needed to be said, ‘mainly to soothe public alarm and to do what I could to forestall the disasters that would follow from legal repression.’22 In 1962, The Joyous Cosmology was published.

During the period between the two publications, a stir developed in the academic community owing to some of the tentative conclusions of Huxley’s narrative; conclusions that would be corroborated in Watts’s own account of the mind drugs. In 1957 a direct response to Huxley’s Doors of Perception was published in the form of R.C. Zaehner’s Mysticism Sacred and Profane.23 As this is to date the only existing published criticism specifically concerned with Huxley’s account, examining it briefly serves as a useful introduction to the literary context.

There are two fundamental aspects of Zaehner’s response to Huxley. First, Zaehner’s work can be seen as a critique of Huxley’s claim that drug-induced mystical experiences bear some resemblance to the mystical experiences of the major world religions.24 Second, Mysticism Sacred and Profane involves an explicit repudiation of Huxley’s perennialist claim that ‘mysticism’ represents a ‘common core’ at the centre of all religions.25 Instead, Zaehner argued, there are three fundamentally different types of ‘mysti-cism’: theistic (absorptive communion with a personal Lord or Creator), monistic (an individual’s identification with an impersonal Absolute) and panenhenic (the experience of oneness with Nature).26 Following these distinctions, the terminology used by Huxley would be particularly maligned by Zaehner. In his visionary apprehension of an incidental vase of flowers, ‘The Beatific Vision’ is the briefest summation of Huxley’s descriptive set: ‘for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.’ In response to this, Zaehner wrote, ‘I am afraid I cannot discern any likeness between what he experienced and what is generally understood as the Beatific Vision.’ According to Zaehner, the term corresponds to ‘a direct apperception of God, not through a glass, darkly,’ but with ‘all the veils of sense stripped aside.’ Therefore, ‘Why should we be asked to believe that a vision of nature transfigured in any way corresponds to a vision of God Himself?’27

The basis of Zaehner’s argument lies in his distinguishing between Zen Buddhist terminology and that of the Christian mystics. While Buddhists may describe everyday worldly objects as tantamount to a metaphysical ultimate, such as, in Huxley’s associated example, ‘the hedge at the bottom of the garden’, Zaehner contended that Christian mystics use no such terminology. Indeed, in his eagerness to dismiss Huxley’s case, he would equate it to ‘that of a maniac’ in so far as ‘the personality seems to be dissipated into the objective world,’ while in the case of theistic mystics, ‘the human personality is wholly absorbed in the Deity Who is felt and experienced as being something totally distinct and other than the objective world.’ This, he went on, is a state in which both the subject, ‘I’, and the object, ‘the world’, are momentarily excluded from consciousness and in which the soul is literally ‘filled’ through and through ‘with the Holy Ghost.’28 Here the distinction is made between the normal subjective sense of self, and the soul. This is particularly evident in Zaehner’s distinction between the central experience of theistic mysticism and Huxley’s claim of being that which he perceives: ‘In the first case we have the ‘deification’ of a human soul in God, the loss of consciousness of all things except God; in the second we have the identification of the self…with the external world to the exclusion, it would appear, of God.’29 As we will later observe, these conclusions bear much importance to the present analysis.

Zaehner’s distinction between theistic and monistic mysticism was later challenged by Walter Stace in his book, Mysticism and Philosophy (1960). First, Stace criticized Zaehner for his obvious Catholic bias, which could be seen as a motivation to rescue theism from the more general category of mysticism.30 Furthermore, he instead distinguished between two classes of mystical experience: introvertive and extrovertive, thereby replacing Zaehner’s threefold typology. For Stace, the introvertive mystical experience was a complete merging of everything and constituted not only the superior of the two types of experience but also the mystical core of all religions.31 The extrovertive experience, on the other hand, was only a partial realization of introvertive union that amounted to a sense of harmony between two things.32 According to Stace, mystical experiences were also characterized by paradox and were alleged to be ineffable by mystics.33 As to what was common amongst Stace’s typology, both extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences were described as the awareness of an underlying unity: a unifying vision of all things in the case of extrovertive cases, and a transcendent unitary consciousness beyond space and time in the case of introvertive mysticism.34

Future critics would distance themselves from this so-called perennial philosophy school attributed largely to Huxley and Watts, with a ‘plea for the recognition of differences’ in the form of constructivism – a counter-position that would arise with the 1978 publication of a number of articles under the general title Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. Steven Katz, the leading proponent of constructivism, sums up the position with the view that mystical experience is significantly shaped and formed by the subject’s beliefs, concepts and expectations. According to the constructivist paradigm, all experiences are in significant ways mediated and constructed by the terms, categories, beliefs and linguistic backgrounds which the subject brings to them.35 Following this paradigm, the claim is that mystics are so deeply imbued with the canonical literature in their religious tradition that there is a demonstrable intimate interconnection of the religious and canonical literature they have studied and their subsequent mystical experience.36 In this way, Katz argues, both mystical texts and the experiences they help to form all reflect and are dependent upon diverse ontological schemata which shape the configuration of the quest and its goal.37 Subsequently, there is no such thing as an experience that is free from interpretation, experience free from any recognisable content – such a ‘pure’ consciousness cannot exist.38

Other scholars have since directly opposed the constructivist argument. In The Problem of Pure Consciousness (1990), Robert Forman argues that constructivism has difficulty in explaining the feeling of novelty commonly experienced by mystical adepts. The person may well be surprised by her experience, not only the timing but also the nature of the experience itself: indeed, ‘The history of mysticism is rife with cases in which expectations, models, previously acquired concepts, and so on, were deeply and radically disconfirmed.’39 In addition, there is the peculiar character of so-called ‘Pure Consciousness Events’, in that they are content-less, a form of wakeful content-less consciousness; for while expectations may supply content to visionary experiences, according to Forman this is not so plausible with pure consciousness experiences, in so far as the latter have no content.40

We have traced this comparative discipline to its present state as far as is relevant to this inquiry. The arguments are cited for their worth with respect to the following extended textual analysis, for in a reinterpretation of the primary sources it is hoped that a fresh engagement with these debates can occur. The tentative prediction is that the distinctions made within the phenomenon of ‘mystical experience’ may yet be resolved in the formulation of a new experiential model. Let us now move on to substantiate this hypothesis.

2 The Purpose of Language

Rarely does the strictly rational thinker spend time attempting to fathom a seemingly illogical idea. Anything that is a direct affront to reason is likely to be dismissed as simple nonsense. Even in allowing a poetic contradiction-in-terms employed for rhetorical effect, the thinker is often comforted by the knowledge that the contradiction is only apparent and the combination of terms serves only as a novel expression of some perfectly sensible underlying concept.41

With this in mind, it is no great surprise that Aldous Huxley found detractors in ample supply following the 1954 publication of The Doors of Perception, in which he claims ‘the divine source of all existence’ to be a bunch of flowers, and describes not merely gazing at the bamboo legs of a chair, but ‘actually being them.’ As Oxford Professor R.C. Zaehner noted, to the normal, rational mind Huxley’s remarks make no sense whatsoever, and might therefore be dismissed as the illusions of a lunatic.42 By contrast, Huxley stoutly believed his experience to be an ‘unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox.’ This is the first of many apparent contradictions. Huxley writes that this ‘self-evident paradox’ is unspeakable; nevertheless, he goes on to speak about it. This resonates with Arthur Koestler’s commentary on his own self-proclaimed mystical experience: ‘it was meaningful though not in verbal terms’ – and of his own attempts to describe it – ‘to communicate what is incommunicable by its nature one must somehow put it into words, and so one moves in a vicious circle.’43

By virtue of this crux, in describing the experience as unspeakable Huxley indicates that it is not properly intelligible when interpreted linguistically. His understanding is ‘not on the verbal level’ yet it allows ‘a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things’ which is ‘as clear as day, as evident as Euclid.’ This is not a favourable premise for a committed writer! Huxley claims he is faced with an experience that is perfectly obvious to him, yet he cannot communicate it truthfully without rendering himself unintelligible. Granting for the purposes of this study that Huxley’s experience was not merely an illusion but in fact a valid mode of experiencing, might the problem of its communication lie in the verbal categories of language itself? Do they have a conditioning activity on consciousness, and is there a binding set of underlying assumptions governing that conditioning?

Following his experiment with mescaline, Huxley cast a critical eye over language and saw it as the primary antagonist in the pursuit of a holistic awareness. If nothing else came about in writing The Doors of Perception (hereafter The Doors), Huxley hoped at least for the common recognition that

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the 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 bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Huxley contends that preoccupation with symbols is detrimental to the things they symbolise, and that this is synonymous with a ‘reduced awareness’ in which something is always left out. This startling conclusion for a committed Man of Letters was the resounding message of his life thereafter.44 Dying of cancer in the latter part of 1963 and remaining concerned with what he saw as a prevailing and destructive cultural hypnotism, Huxley warned that the symbolic elements in the common-sense ‘cocktail of awareness’ were mistakenly taken to be more important than the elements contributed by immediate experience.45 Alan Watts continually emphasised the same point, often equating the condition with ‘eating the menu in lieu of the dinner,’ while Alfred Whitehead concluded similarly in noting that the symbolic process of abstraction, useful as it may be in everyday discourse, is ultimately false in that it operates by noting the salient features of the world and ignoring all else, and therefore ‘is nothing else than omission of part of the truth.’46

Twenty years prior to The Doors, cross-cultural investigations suggested to linguist Benjamin Whorf that language conditions our perception of reality as much as reality conditions language. In his Language, Thought and Reality (1934), human perception of the world is summarised as involving

…a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.47

Essentially this holds that language determines the world for us by the overriding force of social contract. As Alan Watts highlighted both before and after The Joyous Cosmology (hereafter Cosmology), we need a common notation for almost anything that can be noticed – and to notice is to regard some perceptions, or some features of the world, as more noteworthy, more significant than others.48 The contemporary philosopher John Searle drives the point home: what counts as reality is a matter of the categories we impose on the world, and those categories are for the most part linguistic.49 This suggests that certain properties of the world are not registered through symbolic representation of any kind – perhaps what Huxley dubbed the irreducibly ‘unspeakable’ aspect of his experience. On first consideration, however, the notion seems absurd. Language empowers human interaction with the world, and these interactions appear to self-validate the totality of our given picture of reality – yet perhaps this is the seed of the problem.

If Searle is right that language determines ‘what counts as reality’, this presumes the existence of a set of principles upon which language identifies what is significant as apart from what is not significant – a foundational premise from which language delineates the perceived salient features of the world, to the necessary relegation of others. Evidencing such a theory requires a return to the roots of language.

Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of Bicameral Mind (1976) delineates the first step in the evolution of human conscious awareness as the linguistic development of intentional calls – the intention being to effect change in the behaviour of another individual in order to promote survival of the group. The next stage was the development of antithetical words to modify intentional calls, after which nouns were introduced into the vocabulary.50 The sequence of these developments may have been different; what remains important is that such developments would have added a new dimension to the organisation of action in the world. But Huxley defines this dimension in harsher terms, as the ‘measly trickle of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on this particular planet,’ one that limits awareness in order to direct it toward the service of biological necessity. What theoretical underpinning exists for such a statement?

Pinpointing Huxley’s concern, Karl Popper describes the primitive nature of the human instinctual drive in largely categorical, action-oriented terms: a hungry animal ‘…divides the environment into edible and inedible things’ while an animal in flight ‘sees roads to escape and hiding places…Generally speaking, objects change according to the needs of the animal.’51 This focus on self-preservation is identified in early linguistic development when children first learn to put names to things in their environment. As they search for new appearances to name, they expand their capacity to speak and so enhance their mastery of what is henceforth experienced as a predominantly object-world.52 Crucially, as Wittgenstein noted, a name is not understood merely as a label.53 Names imply functions, in that the meaning of a name is usually discovered in how the object is used – its causal relationship with the naming child. From this perspective, it is never enough to provide a verbal description of something to demonstrate an understanding of its meaning. The certainty that a child understands the meaning of, for example, a chair, comes with the observation of their ability to use it appropriately.

In this way representational language can be described as subject-referential by means of its purposive nature. Language acquisition is a process of learning to make causal connections – to see the world as a collection of means to bring about certain ends – while the symbolic meaning of an object is derived from its practical relation to the perceiver. From this standpoint, perception would be of a different order if its purposive aspect was dropped – which suggests the potential experiencing of something hitherto overlooked about those perceptions. Huxley’s vision hints of such an order. A pastoral view in The Doors evokes this jarring disparity:

For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow – these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event.

In linguistic terms, language is a semiotic system of composite units, or ‘signs’, of which a necessary component is the mental concept, the signified. According to Huxley during his experience, ‘the percept had swallowed up the concept.’ Consistent with this, then, it may be said that the linguistic sign is not operational during his experience; that ‘half opaque medium of concepts’ which distorts the given fact into the ‘all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction’ is no longer felt to be active, and Huxley claims to have bypassed the conceptual filter to perceive directly. The ‘event’ is witnessed from the standpoint of a pure aesthete with a heightened perception that Huxley equates with ‘the perceptual innocence of childhood,’ when the sensum is not immediately subordinated to the concept. The convergent geometries of light, shadow and form are perceived primarily in terms of visual intensity as the scene now amounts to a ‘succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian.’ The observer is unusually aware of finer details in the perceptual field, ‘innumerable shades of difference,’ both in the relationships between things and within the things themselves; on close inspection, the woven textures and folds of clothing are imbued with ‘a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity,’ and the structure of leaves impart a ‘cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and shadows.’ What is asserted is an enhanced appreciation of the pattern of organisation in the external world.

Similarly in Watts’s Cosmology, this sensitivity is readily apprehended in natural forms: the depth of light and structure in a bursting bud ‘go on forever,’ and the pattern of wood grain seems ‘carved out with infinite patience and skill’ to such a degree that ‘a rotten log bearing rows of fungus and patches of moss become as precious as any work of Cellini.’ The implication is that usual awareness preoccupies itself with the prospect of purposive activity to the extent that the presence of form and colour is not so much observed as inferred on the basis of familiarity by reference to the presiding conceptual filter.54 If we grant, for the sake of argument, that normative perception has some degree of nonconceptual content, what is suggested here also is that conceptually driven awareness reduces the percept’s fine grain delineation. Related to this theory is Loy’s suggestion that such a constant filtering process is exacerbated by the abstract representation invoked whenever the mind wishes to refer to an object which is no longer present: although the mind can refer to ‘it’ in its absence, when the percept reappears the representation remains, and the two are experienced together. Such an ingrained habit is increasingly restrictive, because the more successfully a system of representation functions, the less likely that it will be possible to distinguish the representation from the immediate sense-data.55

Prior to Huxley and Watts’s heightened deliberations, the perceived imbalance in the concept-percept relation was a well-worn issue. Indeed, it is an unavoidable obstacle when formulating any epistemological theory. Eighteenth century phenomenalism is a case in point. Bishop Berkeley struggled with a variation of the problem in the wider context of sense perception. Consider the following reference to the acoustic faculty:

…When I hear a coach drive along the streets, all that I immediately perceive is the sound; but from my past experience that such a sound is connected with a coach, I am said to ‘hear the coach’. Still, it is obvious that in truth and strictness nothing can be heard but sound; and the coach in that example is not strictly perceived by sense but only suggested from experience.56

Berkeley contends that if a coach has not been seen or heard previously, then it is not possible to say that what is heard is ‘a coach’. This is not a controversial proposition. However, Berkeley goes on to suggest that once there is familiarity with the source of the sound, there is a conscious inference from the pure sensation that informs or affects perception; for what is taken by sense alone is identical to what would have been perceived ‘even if we had only just acquired that sense and were using it for the first time.’57 This implies that the inference can be pinpointed or ‘caught’ through inward observation.

Heidegger, in his own phenomenological approach, disagreed with this conclusion, and believed that the link is not quite so open to examination: ‘What we first “hear” is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle… It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to “hear” a “pure noise”.’58 Essentially, once ‘the sound of a motorcycle’ is familiar, that concept is normally not distinguishable from its source. What is heard, therefore, is the concept-motorcycle; it is simply that the inference is so automatic that it is unconscious.59 As Merleau-Ponty repeatedly asserts in his Phenomenology of Perception, the significance in the perceptual field is extracted from the very outset, presupposed from the set groupings with which we have become familiar in dealing with the world.60 From this approach, sense-objects in the perceptual manifold become the involuntary selection of the most appropriate stored concepts according to current sensory data.61 Taking this line of argument as evidence of a deeper operational level of the same conceptual problem, a more accurate way to describe the purposive structure of concept formation is to say that perception is conceptually selective and that this selective process is not always under conscious control.

Culled from his experiments, Watts came to a conclusion in keeping with the conceptual theory of normative awareness deduced from The Doors and Cosmology thus far; namely, that psychedelics partially suspend the linguistic ‘mechanism’ by which we usually screen our sense data and select only some of them as significant.62 Again, this selection of some sense data as significant and others as insignificant is always with relation to particular purposes which relate back to the preservation of the organism. In Heidegger’s words, subjective experience of the world consists of a ‘totality of destinations’ which ultimately refer back to me.63 Yet what lingers from the present analysis is the implication that everyday purposive perception has in some sense run amok. Notwithstanding the origins of conceptual representation in survival activity, a burgeoning issue remains: cursory observation of subjective experience does not readily reflect the notion that biological survival is the uppermost concern. For most of us, everyday awareness tends to operate under the relative guarantee of safety, free to attend to ‘higher’ self-interests. Conscious awareness can encompass an array of far-sighted intentions at different periods in time. It is not preoccupied by the immediate needs of survival. As Watts notes, only very occasionally is conscious awareness directly concerned with warding off physical damage or deprivation. Despite this initial setback, by tracing the development of our ‘primary purpose’ through language, concept formation in conscious awareness traces back to similar origins.

In anthropological terms, the development of socio-linguistic consciousness is said to transform desire through a process of polarisation.64 At the earliest stage an infant’s needs are purely physiological like those of an animal, but as the child grows and develops socially the body and its survival needs are ‘sublimated’ into the self-image which in turn creates the desire for self-esteem.65 This desire is the longing to be accepted and admired as an object of value within the social sphere. Consequently, writes Ernst Becker, the socialization of the child involves a transformation of survival consciousness into an active mind-meaning consciousness: hence the sublimation of the survival instinct is interpreted in terms of the need for a self-conscious happiness – for meaning, for purpose, for success, for victory.66

From the humanistic perspective, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs reflects a similar progression: when the foundational ‘deficit-needs’ of physiology and safety have been met, the need for belonging and self-esteem take precedence.67 Most significant to the present analysis is that Maslow labelled all of these needs as inherent survival needs, albeit translated into the social sphere. And so it is on this basis that Watts can meaningfully describe conscious attentional awareness as an ongoing exercise in ‘defending my defenses.’ Essentially the purposive-conceptual mechanism remains the same, only now – in equating conscious attention with the focused awareness of ‘spotlight consciousness’ – Watts can evince its structure as akin to the linear series of signs that constitute verbal language and, hence, sequential concept formation.68 With metaphorical likeness, Huxley equates conscious awareness with Bergson’s suggestion that the function of the brain and nervous system is the main eliminative and not productive – the so-called ‘reducing valve’. If this reasoning is accurate, a fitting analogy is that just as one cannot help but understand one’s native language when it is spoken, one cannot suppress concept formation by act of will alone.

3 Intending a Pointless Existence

There is no doubt that the senses receive infinitely more than the conscious mind attends to or thinks about, as numerous psychological experiments have shown.69 The problem lies in defining the extent to which language is involved in this filtering process. The previous chapter laid out the groundwork necessary to make sense of the experiences described by Huxley and Watts, specific accounts which record the suspension of a ‘re-presenting’ conceptual ‘grid’ that acts as an experiential-linguistic filter. In juxtaposing the texts, it emerged that the concept theory of perception is necessary to recognise their validity as accurate descriptions of a very non-ordinary mode of awareness. Further implied is the overbearing influence linguistic processes have on conscious experience – an influence of far greater degree than to that usually granted language.

Crucial to the former reading was an examination of the experiential mechanism of language and its role in concept formation, or ‘the perceptual net of purposive potentials’. This is the representation that perception operates through in producing the normative range of experience – Huxley’s ‘half opaque medium of concepts.’ This learned linguistic process has its origins in the survival reflex of the biological organism, uncritically preconditioning all perceptions as potential starting blocks of intentional action in order to serve and protect individual existence; this was labelled the ‘primary purpose’. Decisively, the complexity of concept formation emerges fully with the maturity of socialisation, as a nexus of the initial abstracting process that essentially remains. This specialised intentional awareness operates entirely through linguistic processes, but works in a linear and sequential pattern with an emphasis on discovering fulfilment within the newly emergent social sphere; put another way, it looks more for things rather than at things. Working from this new premise allows a coherent relationship to emerge between the two texts. In the context of a concept theory of perception, any text not describing this ever-present conditioning should reveal something wholly other than that contained in traditional discourse.

Stuart Hampshire argues in Thought and Action, ‘To be a thinking being, is to have intentions and plans, to be trying to bring about a certain effect…We are therefore always actively following what is happening now as leading into what is to happen next.’70 If representational language – or more specifically, thought – is intentional in that there is always something to be achieved and so action to be taken, this dictates that the subjective focus will be on the future result or upshot of that action, as reflected in the predictive approach necessary for any kind of advance planning. John Maynard Keanes treats this condition with no small measure of derision:

Purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment. The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward for ever to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam to-morrow and never jam to-day. Thus by pushing his jam always into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.71

Watts notes how this perspective is conditioned by educational ‘processing-systems’ that are arranged in grades or steps, supposedly leading to some ultimate Success.72 The tendency is repeated in work patterns in which the focus is on future reward, if not for the individual, then at least for his or her children.73 This ingrained intentional behavior can be described as thoughtful and deliberate goal-directedness that manifests in a linear conceptual stream. As it was earlier argued, purposive perception is a matter of designating particular features of the world as significant in the context of being potential initiating sites of interaction for future gain. Interpreted as such, the result of a dissolving conceptual filter would result in the features of the world becoming divested with a different order of being – with telling significance.

So passionately alive for Huxley are garden flowers that they appear suggestive of something significant in their ‘standing on the very brink of utterance.’ Inorganic objects share the same quality: books stored in the bookcase appear ‘on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves insistently on my attention.’ Watts identifies the new emphasis more precisely in a blossoming flower, whose leaves ‘fan out and curve back with a gesture which is unmistakably communicative but does not say anything except, “Thus!”‘ Yet on the writer’s further inspection, ‘somehow that is quite satisfactory, even startlingly clear.’ This is the first indication that a new perspective is emerging which is not oriented around the subject. The communicative ‘utterance’ ascribed to an appearance seems to refer to nothing other than itself, and only by the suspension of reference to the old intentional-symbolic structure does the revelation of a unique mode of comprehension follow. Reading from one of the more famous passages in The Doors, this new awareness is disclosed to Huxley’s eyes through a distinct lack of applied dualistic categories:

The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

“Is it agreeable?” somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)

“Neither agreeable nor disagreeable,” I answered. “It just is.”

The extract represents Huxley’s breakthrough to a form of direct perceiving as the purposive response to the percept is suppressed and the appearance is stripped of conceptual import. The symbolic ‘function’ of the plant as a decorative floral piece is relegated to the periphery of awareness, if not extinguished, so that now ‘what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were.’ In this way the flowers, like the folds in Huxley’s grey flannel trousers, are ‘without pretensions, satisfied to be themselves,’ and, in being of that nature, ‘sufficient in their Suchness.’

This interpretation throws light on Huxley’s reference to the ‘intrinsic significance of every existent’ and on the various descriptions of objects within his field of vision as ‘intrinsically meaningful.’ If the usage of the word ‘meaning’ is taken in its adjectival sense – that there is an intention to communicate something that is not directly expressed – it is not intelligible in this non-signifying context. Alternatively, if it is interpreted as Wittgenstein’s subjective linguistic definition of meaning – the extent of an object’s practical utility in relation to the observer – this implies that naked existence is self-justifying solely by its servitude to humanity. While this may be considered a veridical perspective within certain religious schools of thought, more objectively it smacks of arrogance; the percept does not fit the case (in standing outside the intentional-conceptual filter) and the ascription is inconsistent with Huxley’s essential precedent thus far.

More accordingly, it may be likened to Watts’s observation that the meaning of the world is ‘transparent,’ in that it embodies ‘a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point.’ The meaning is not substitutive but self-explanatory. The scheme of things seems to justify itself at every moment of its unfolding: ‘Flowers do not bloom in order to produce seeds, nor are seeds germinated in order to bring forth flowers.’74 Indeed, each stage of the process – seed, sprout, bud, flower, and fruit – is regarded as the goal. In this way, the significance or meaning of something is identical with its being. This insight allows the writer to make statements that at first strike the reader as subversive until it is understood that the perceived subversion in such statements depends on the frame of reference. As Watts explains, all of the involved delicacy of nature’s organisation may, from an intentional point of view, be ‘strictly functional for the purposes of reproduction and survival,’ but on deeper contemplation, ‘the survival of these creatures is the same as their very existence – and what is that for?’ Any sense of striving or necessity in nature is lost, and it is perceived intuitively in its non-intending presence; indeed, it is ‘purposeless play – exuberance which is its own end.’ Echoing Goethe’s Fragment uber die Natur: ‘At every moment [Nature] prepares for the longest race and at every moment she is done with it.’75

On first impression this state of affairs is disquieting to common-sense reasoning. If the world stands for nothing, this seems to imply that it has no meaning. However, to say that the world is meaningless or pointless does not imply that it is chaotic or absurd, for these are simply further meanings, albeit negative in tone. More accurately it is that the real world points to nothing nor can it be pointed to, and thus it is beyond meaning, whether positive or negative.76 The dualistic qualities and names assigned to things are seen as arbitrary social conventions enforced by mutual agreement and held fast by the sediment of long association and familiarity. To quote Shakespeare, ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’77

In the context of concept formation, a theoretical undercurrent exists in the textual commentary on the seeking aspect of conceptual activity. The irreducibly self-serving function of conceptual representation is exposed in its tendency to map or ‘superimpose’ its purposive nature onto the given world so that the necessity attached to the existence of things proliferates incessantly. In the words of Frederick Perls, momentary life becomes ‘nothing but an infinite number of unfinished situations.’78 As a result, the ‘purposelessness’ of appearances is overlooked. This ‘point-less’ revelation sheds light on the role and purpose of language and its unconscious perpetuation of a distinct way of experiencing the world.

For Whorf, this habitual everyday outlook reflects the forms of a person’s thoughts, the ‘inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious.’79 The descriptions by Huxley and Watts suggest the bringing to conscious awareness of these systematic laws, the breakdown of their habitual patterns and a subsequent relinquishing of the selective control of perception. The perceptual acuity in the initial stages of a diminishing conceptual filter symbolises an end to the lack of satisfaction with the present situation, and the beginning of a new attention to it.

The intuitive revelations hitherto revealed suggest as much about the subject as they do of the object when properly analysed. However, this is only half of the story. We have touched on the explicit nature of the descriptive passages of Huxley and Watts, underlining the ‘purposelessness’ of a non-signifying world. This appreciation deepens into something more dynamic in The Doors and Cosmology, and suggests that the aesthetic response of the sensum is incidental to a more penetrating intuition with philosophical implications. What is at first characterised as an increase in perceptual receptivity develops into something more implicit. At this stage of interpretation via the concept theory, the texts begin to make the causal relationship between the percept and the mental concept problematic. This ambiguous relationship cannot be understated and goes far beyond what has gone before in terms of the challenge to our usual understanding of awareness.

According to John Searle, it is a common-sense assumption that a mental concept is a representation of an independent self-existing ‘thing’ in the external world. For instance, we suppose that the mental concept ‘tree’ is assigned to the said object only after perception of it – the concept is predetermined by the percept. However, Searle contends that this premise is at fault: the mistake is to suppose that the application of language to the world consists of attaching labels to objects that are, so to speak, self-identifying.80 From this stance, it is not the case that the presented world is divided up into objects that are later re-presented. Rather, we divide up the world in the way that we do – that is, learn to notice what there is – using our system of representation. We see the world as a collection of isolated objects in space by giving names to the perceived salient features of the world (which are necessarily purposive). This symbolic mode of knowing, as Whitehead saw it, bifurcates reality by ‘dividing the seamless coat of the universe,’ leading the mind to commit what he termed the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness – mistaking the abstractions for concrete realities.81

Watts describes his visual perception as though it is not susceptible to Whitehead’s fallacy. For example, the recognition that ‘the shape of a leaf is its color’ becomes a liberating observation. The previously bifurcating boundary distinguishing any two objects is reconciled; the ‘outline’ is seen simply as the limit where one coloured surface becomes another. Indeed, the outline of a figure is the inline of the background.82 The understanding is that all isolated ‘things’ in the external world interpenetrate space and form instead of existing ‘within’ space. The visual features of the world are perceived to ‘hold their boundaries or limits in common in such a way as to define one another and to be impossible without each other.’ So while the delineation of things in language is commonly taken to follow the boundaries and divisions in nature, more accurately the situation is the reverse: the division is foremost one of concept-filtered perception.

As Whorf continually emphasised, we dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.83 Watts implies this by noting how things are only measuring units of thought.84 In other words, saying what something is divides it into a class or category because identity necessitates separation. This is most obvious when acknowledging, for instance, that stars shine out of space – one cannot exist without the other because light is recognised only in contrast with darkness, and vice versa. In the same way the various features of a situation ‘arise mutually’ or imply one another in the writer’s new apprehension.85 This contrasts sharply with the figure/ground distinction of normative perception long identified by Gestalt theorists, where figure is the focus of interest – an object, pattern or behaviour – and ground is the background, setting or context.86 In such situations, attention is almost automatically ‘won’ by any moving shape in contrast with the stationary background, or by any enclosed or tightly complex feature in contrast with the simpler, featureless background, as a result of the automatic prioritizing and satiation of needs.87

As William James claimed, a ‘thing’ is just a product of ‘attending to this and ignoring that.’88 However, perceptions released from conventional concept formation are revealed not as distinct from each other but together constituting a whole – the world itself is seen as non-plural. The human face for Watts ‘becomes clear in all its aspects,’ the total form together with each single hair and wrinkle. In such a way, the previous cognition of the visual field is recognised as an immediate manifestation of the conceptual filter that is not received or inferred from perception of the environment but intentionally ‘superimposed’ upon it.

This radical view of the world explains much about the affective operation of purposive concept formation. Indeed, in deciphering the non-ordinary state of consciousness described, our reference point must always lie in the normative mindstate. However, while the ending of concept formation explains the loss of duality in the writers’ perception of objects-in-space, it lacks a necessary accounting of objects-in-time – something which both texts go on to refute.

Above all, the theory avoids the issue of its own subjectivity. So far the abiding self has been taken for granted as a separate, autonomous entity that confronts a temporal world. Akin to the uneasy reasoning of subjective idealism, the dualities in the external environment are systematically deconstructed into the organising principle of a fixed subjective mind, while the observer looks on unaffected. But if the writers are still separate from the world in their observation of it, then the world is not truly experienced as non-plural!

So this is the highest obstacle: the distinction between subject and object, essential to the notion of ‘being in the world’ as it is commonly defined. A continuous sense of self is distinct from what is experienced – whether it is an object of the senses, a physical action, or a mental event. But for Huxley and Watts their understanding of the self is ‘no longer confined to the skin,’ and indeed extends to the appearances of the external world. In reflections of descriptively-prescribed clarity, the subject-object dichotomy breaks down yet some kind of experience is said to persist. In continuing to interpret two texts freed from the conceptual veil of purposive perception, the clue to accounting for this event may yet be uncovered.

4 Effing the Ineffable

Self-transcendence was a theme well considered in the life of Aldous Huxley. In the epilogue to the 1952 novel The Devils of Loudun, his historical account of mass hysteria and exorcism in a seventeenth century French Convent, Huxley entertained the idea that there were three kinds of self-transcendence: downward, upward, and horizontal.89 Interestingly, the writer would place drug-taking in the downward category of transcendence, which denotes the eventual change in conviction that proved decisive in the thinking of both Huxley and Watts.90 Demonstrating the full implications of such a reversal, this final chapter broaches the central and most challenging features of The Doors and Cosmology; those being the explicit contradictions and ontologically contestable statements that are sure to draw fire from the strictly rational inquirer.

In looking at the legs of a chair, Huxley claims to ‘actually being them – or rather being myself in them.’ Care should be taken to avoid hasty conclusions as to what this is describing. In order to make sense of this passage, we must examine the normal understanding of self and to what extent it corresponds to Huxley’s use of the term in this context, thereby coming to a more accurate reading of exactly what he is attempting, by degrees, to describe. It was noted that language serves principally the intender – that is, the observer, the thinker, the source of action. Western rationalism is based on such a proposition in the form of Descartes’s cogito. The reality of the independent subject – the ‘I’ – is based on the idea that the act of thinking requires the existence of a thinker thinking the thoughts. However, it may be more appropriate to say that what are really experienced are thoughts some of which involve the concept ‘I’, and it is this which gives rise to the belief that there is a thinker distinct from thoughts.

To reveal Descartes’s error, we must turn the clock forward one hundred years to David Hume. Hume denied the existence of any separately identifiable self by stating that consciousness always has a content – it is never without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception: when perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, ‘so long am I insensible to myself, and may truly be said not to exist.’91 Contemporary thinkers have not let this observation go unheeded. The modern day Vedantan John Levy explored this argument against the inviolability of the subject, noting that when there is consciousness of an object – be it mental or perceptual – that object alone is present. Furthermore, when ‘I’ am conscious of the perceiving, ‘what alone presents itself to consciousness is the notion that I perceive the object and therefore the notion of my being the perceiver also constitutes an object of consciousness.’ From this, Levy concludes, the so-called subject who thinks, and its apparent object, have no immediate relation:

…the notion, I am reading, does not occur while we are thus absorbed [in reading a book]: it occurs only when our attention wavers…a little reflection will show that even when we are not thus absorbed for any appreciable lapse of time, the subject who afterwards lays claim to the action was not present to consciousness when the action was taking place. The idea of our being the agent occurs to us as a separate thought, which is to say that it forms an entirely fresh object of consciousness. And since, at the time of the occurrence, we were present as neither the thinker, the agent, the percipient, nor the enjoyer, no subsequent claim on our part could alter the position…If the notions of subject and object are both the separate objects of consciousness, neither term has any real significance. An object, in the absence of a subject, cannot be what is normally called an object; and the subject, in the absence of an object, cannot be what is normally called the subject. It is in memory that the two notions seem to combine to form an entirely new notion, I am the perceiver or the thinker.92

So as the book is read there is only the one sensation of reading, and when reflection on this sensation occurs is it only inferred that the subject was present throughout. As Robert Forman notes, understanding that I am conscious and being conscious are not the same thing. The former comes to us through epistemological processes, involving language and its reflective conceptions, while the latter – awareness per se – is not involved in these processes.94

Huxley recognised this disparity, observing that ‘awareness was not referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own…For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.’ Similarly as Levy notes, when there is consciousness of a percept, only the percept is present, and when ‘I’ am conscious of a thought, there is only that thought: ‘I am conscious of…’ In Watts’s conclusion, what follows is that conceptual statements such as ‘I see sights’ or ‘I have feelings’ become redundant, for in the instance of seeing a sight there is just seeing and when feeling a feeling there is just feeling.95 Braden observes how common linear-dualistic thinking supports the illusion of the little man inside the man – the ego as controller somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears – and thus the corollaries of the illusory mind-body problem, and the notion of the soul.96 For Huxley, however, the illusion begins to dissolve as it strikes him as odd ‘to feel that “I” was not the same as these arms and legs “out there,” as this wholly objective trunk and neck and even head.’ The ‘I’ concept is revealed as an entirely separate object of consciousness, with the implication that the self itself cannot be known to exist, for to know it is to objectify it.97

From this Levy concludes that memory and the consciousness of individual existence are synonymous.98 This accords with Watts’s reflection of his own experience, in that the accumulation of memories is seen as an essential part of the ego-sensation.99 Thoughts give the sensation of oneself as something that remains still while life goes by ‘as if the conscious self were a stable mirror reflecting a passing procession.’100 Following this, memory is seen to perpetuate the perceived constancy of the self by seamlessly linking up objectifications of self that occur at disparate points in the linear flow of thought. In attempting to clarify this state of affairs, Watts employs the metaphor of whirling a burning stick to give the illusion of a continuous circle of fire.101 This implies that we are never aware of being aware. Consequently, in the rapidity of changes in thought, memory functions unconsciously to interpret a perception as an object presented to a subject.102

In a reversal of this, Huxley finds his primary duality suddenly quashed. Looking at his furniture, his purely aesthetic ‘Cubist’s-eye view’ gives place to what he can only describe as ‘the sacramental vision of reality.’ In describing his perception of the legs of the bamboo chair he is forced to redefine his previous statement of ‘being myself in them,’ for, to be more accurate, ‘”I” was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were “they”.’ As for the fate of the chair legs, the idea of an object with no subject is contradictory. As Nagarjuna argued, the very concept of an object is that of it being the object of a subject.103 Approached in Nietzschean terms, the concept of an objective ‘thing’ rests solely on a projection of the belief in a substantial ego.104 If the self-concept is rescinded, the object necessarily follows. Hence Huxley concludes with the verbally clumsy but experientially more appropriate: ‘being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.’ The linearity characteristic of conceptual thought, particularly its self-reflective quality, is no longer active. This reading acknowledges that the self-concept falls away, so that when the subject is no longer conceptualised, the percept in turn loses its orientation as an object of perception.105 In relating this absolute view more generally, Watts notes how ‘There is no point from which to confront life, or stand against it.’

Following this, we should clarify Huxley’s position by noting that he is not identifying any aspect of his personality with the external world, as Zaehner would have it. In no longer identifying the self-concept (or ego) with awareness, Huxley appears released to a nondual presence that denies any independently intrinsic existence to either subject or object. Once Huxley ceases hypostasizing the self – the entity that might seem to be, as Descartes notes, the most obviously existent and most easily known entity of all – the temptation to hypostasize other entities dissolves.106

While this theory of a linearly perpetuated self-concept accounts for Huxley’s literary description and Watts’s expansively narrated panorama, it appears to fly in the face of common experience. We may explain away the self-concept as just another link in the conceptual chain of relations, but we still feel ourselves to be willing and independent sources of action. However, a reminder of the purposeless character of the texts offers the hint toward reconciling this common vision with the more ordinary state of consciousness.

Huxley mentions that his will suffers ‘a profound change for the worse,’ throughout, which is an observation in no way at odds with the absence of intending. But it is significant in so far as the will to do this or that is normally an intractable sensation, apparently corroborated by the initiation of action in order to manifest that will. We take it for granted that there exists some sort of causal relationship between intentions and actions, which, again we assume, proves the existence of a causal agent – the abiding self. However, in a colossal denial characteristic of his precursor brand of existentialism, Nietzsche posits that intention is never the cause of any action:

We have absolutely no experience of a cause; psychologically considered, we derive the entire concept from the subjective conviction that we are causes, namely, that the arm moves – but that is an error. We separate ourselves, the doers, from the deed, and we make use of this pattern everywhere – we seek a doer for every event. What is it we have done? We have misunderstood the feeling of strength, tension, resistence, a muscular feeling that is already the beginning of the act, as the cause, or we have taken the will to do this or that for a cause because the action follows upon it…107

In his summation, an event is neither effected nor does it effect: cause is a capacity to produce effects that has been super-added to the events.108

The point here, then, is that intention and the will in general are never the cause of action. Watts writes that ‘Everything I claim to will and intend has a common boundary with all I pretend to disown.’ As he would later qualify, the problem with accepting this lies in man’s definition of himself – his self-image – as a separate and independent being in the world, as distinct from a special action of the world.109 This latter view strikes us as uncomfortable partly because it seems deterministic, in that man is no more than a puppet of outside forces. But to say man is an action of the world is not to define him as a ‘thing’ which is helplessly pushed around by other ‘things’, because what are called ‘things’ are no more than glimpses of a unified process.110

A deterministic view cannot help but presume the existence of a separate self helpless before causal influences, simply because it is conceptual – hence dualistic. Again, continued resistance to this notion stems from the certainty of feeling that ‘I’ am the thinker. In contrast, Nietzsche believed that thinking simply doesn’t occur. It is an ‘arbitrary fiction, arrived at by selecting one element from the process [our self-concept] and eliminating all the rest…’ The purported thinker is ‘a second derivative of the false introspection which believes in “thinking”.’ What is fictitious is the imagined ‘subject-substratum in which every act of thinking…has its origin.’111 Belief in an act of thinking stems from the view that the act is what the thinker does – if there is no such thinker, there need be no such act.112 That leaves only uncaused conceptual thoughts that arise in sequential pattern – to presume nothing of a self.

To emphasize the importance of this self-less experience to the texts, it is useful to relate it back to the descriptive features identified earlier and to elaborate on their nature. We may recall the intensification of perceptual acuity and the descriptive terms used with regard to the visual field. All were associated with incalculable duration (time) or depth (space).113 This applied particularly to the perception of intense light. Beyond The Doors, Huxley identified the illuminative quality as central to all experiences of this type. In describing the common features of the visionary state at a 1954 lecture titled ‘The Far Continents of the Mind’, Huxley notes that ‘First, and most important, is the experience of light. Everything is brilliantly illuminated, shining from within,’ as a result of the ‘riot of colours’ that are ‘intensified to a pitch unknown in the normal state.’

This harks back to Watts’s observation that ‘the depth of light…in a bursting bud go[es] on forever,’ but in a development that is consistent with the present dissolution of duality, it is a ‘light which does not seem to fall upon surfaces from above but to be right inside the structure and color.’ In a similar vein, during contemplation of his non-signifying flowers, Huxley relates that they are ‘shining with their own inner light’ and ‘quivering under the pressure’ of their significance. Watts speculates that the intensification of the light of an object is tantamount to the awareness of it as ‘vibration, electronic and luminous,’ to the extent that he interprets this phenomenon as the possible macroscopic awareness of quanta.114 As this feeling develops it appears that these vibrations are ‘continuous with one’s own consciousness and that the external world is in some odd way inside the mind-brain.’115

One way of explaining this descriptive feature is that if there is no essential separation between subject and object, such light must comprise not only the object-surface that it illuminates, but also the consciousness that is aware of it. Demonstrating an agreement with Huxley, Watts notes that the light is synonymous with the perceived object in that not only is it apparent that ‘the chemistry of the leaf is its color, its light,’ but at the same time ‘color and light are the gift of the eye to the leaf and the sun.’116

Watts would later expound on the ontological reality of this light in his transactional consideration of a rainbow, which appears ‘only when there is a certain triangular relationship between three components: the sun, moisture in the atmosphere, and an observer.’117 Watts’s point is that an observer in the right place is as necessary for the existence of the rainbow as the other two components, the sun and the moisture. This is explained as the interaction between physical vibrations and the brain with its various organs of sense, in that ‘creatures with brains are an integral feature of the pattern…and without this integral feature the whole cosmos would be as unmanifested as a rainbow without droplets in the sky, or without an observer.’118 In relation to this characteristic of indwelling light, it is a transactional relationship in the same way that the light of the sun does not manifest as light unless it interacts with a nervous system.

The obvious objection to this theory lies in the notion that light is the reflective medium between a self-existing material object and an observer, as a corollary of the subject-object dichotomy. However, as Watts now sees it, even ‘Solidity is a neurological invention,’ in the same way that notions of weight and density are purely relative tactile responses that are objectively meaningless. The notion of extant matter relates only to tempo-spatial nervous systems, for knowing is a translation of external events into bodily processes; in this way, ‘we know the world in terms of the body.’119

>> Continued in Part 2 >>

« Effing the Ineffable: Reconciling Nonduality in The Doors of Perception and The Joyous Cosmology – Part 2 » Forest Dweller : A Song of Gaia Sophia

One Comment

  1. Effing the Ineffable: Reconciling Nonduality in The Doors of Perception and The Joyous Cosmology - Part 2 | Lila
    Dec 06, 2007 @ 15:44

    [...] Effing the Ineffable: Reconciling Nonduality in The Doors of Perception and The Joyous Cosmology – P… [...]

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