Lila

Instead of past and future being understood as a function of present memories and expectations, the present becomes reduced to a single moment within a ‘time-stream’ understood to exist ‘out there’ - a container, as it were, like space, within which things exist and events occur. But in order for time to be a container, something must be contained within it: objects. And for objects to be ‘in’ time, they must in themselves be nontemporal - i.e. self-existing.¹²⁴

In this way, Loy writes, a delusive bifurcation occurs between time and ‘things’ generally, as a result of which each gains a spurious reality.¹²⁵ As we noted earlier, the most important ‘object’ to be deemed unchanging is the self - only in such a way could Spinoza write that ‘we feel and hence conclude that we know we are eternal.’¹²⁶ Similarly, then, the ‘objectification’ of time is the ’subjectification’ of self, resulting in the sensation of being a non-temporal entity inextricably ‘trapped’ in time.¹²⁷ In the same manner, conventional reasoning tells us that objects self-exist ‘in’ space, yet in the transactional character of the texts, objects have no intrinsic existence outside of the space in which they ‘thing’. The objects 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,’ and in this way they are irredeemably spatial. Indeed, analogous to the manner in which intervals between musical tones constitute the melody, space can be defined as the relationship between bodies, thereby foregrounding the entanglement and dissolving the superfluous ‘container’ dimension.¹²⁸

According to Loy, when we wish to express this state of affairs temporally we must describe one in terms of the other, ‘by saying either that objects are temporal (in which case they are not ‘objects’ as we usually conceive of them) or, conversely, that time is objects - that is, time expresses itself in the manifestations that we call objects.’¹²⁹ Indeed, Nagarjuna would argue that things are time - which means that there is no second, external time that they are ‘within’.¹³⁰ But by asserting that there is only time (change) amounts to saying that there is no time - there being no permanence as a counterpoint. As Watts understands it, time ‘passes by’ only when it is experienced dualistically, with the sense of a self that is outside it (unchanging) and looking at it.¹³¹ But this is no longer the case!

And so, having used temporality to deconstruct things, Loy points out that we must reverse the analysis and use the lack of a thing ‘in’ time to negate the objectivity of time also: when there is no ‘contained,’ there can be no ‘container.’¹³² This paradox can be expressed in either of two contradictory ways. We may say that there is only the present: not, of course, the present as usually understood - a series of fleeting moments which incessantly fall away to become the past - but a very different present that incorporates the past and the future because it always stays the same.¹³³ If there are no self-existing objects, then the present does not relate to past or future: each ‘event’ is complete in itself. In this way Watts can claim to experience ‘a world of events instead of things.’¹³⁴ Similarly, the ‘eternal life’ of Huxley’s flowers cannot be thought of as eternity in the usual sense - an infinite persistence in time that presupposes the usual duality between things and time; it is eternal because there is something that does not change: it is always now.¹³⁵

Huxley ruminates on this quality of the experience with reference to Platonic philosophy, claiming that ‘Plate seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea.’ Referring to the Timaeus which distinguishes a visible world of changing and hence delusive appearances from an invisible and timeless world of mental forms, Huxley’s new understanding is that change, or Becoming, is identical with the timelessness of eternity, or Being - in that the flowers comprise ‘a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being.’ Similarly, Watts terms it ‘a dancing present.’ In this interpretation, then, both writers claim to be the perceived transformation rather than an observer of it, as the dualism between time and objects - including the objectified self - is negated.

The problem in conceiving such a way of experiencing the world is that the mode of description is inherently dualistic, and necessarily rings false. Every which way of conceiving the ‘experience’ instantly attempts to impose a stable, subjective orientation. Recognise, however, that the concept of stability is dependent upon instability, because stability itself implies that which persists unchanged through time - while other things change!¹³⁶ With the loss of self as the stable anchor, all that can initially be said to be experienced is change. But a dialectical reverse occurs simultaneously: if there is no permanent self, there can be no notion of change. If everything is in flux, this amounts to no change whatsoever - there being no fixed standpoint from which to characterise change. In thus revealing their conceptual interdependence, neither can be said to apply in the final analysis.

Whorf would unearth the extent of conceiving the universe similarly in our perpetuation of causal agency dualities, and went on to demonstrate how the subject-predicate structure of most languages sets the favourable conditions for this linear dividing tendency. The importance of this notational feature is exposed in a surprisingly simple identification:

…we divide most of our words into two classes…Class 1 we call nouns, e.g. “house, man;” Class 2, verbs, e.g. “hit, run.” Many words of one class can act secondarily as of the other classes, e.g. “a hit, a run,” or “to man (the boat),” but, on the primary level, the division between the classes is absolute.¹³⁷

Verbs, or actions, have to be set in motion by things, or nouns. Indeed, language must distinguish subject and the predicate in order to describe at all. The impact of this division on conceptual awareness is evidenced when there is perception of movement or action: it is common-sense to ask the question, ‘Who (or what) moves?’ In this manner, Whorf asserts that we are constantly reading into nature fictional agents behind every action simply because our verbs must have causal substantives in front of them. Watts observes that this convention of grammar creates ‘ghosts’ in language, for example, the ‘it’ in ‘it is raining’ as the supposed cause of the action; or ‘the lightning flashed,’ when the flashing is obviously the same as the lightning.¹³⁸

In this way, language ascribes a semi-fictitious isolation to parts of experience in a way that mimics the ascription of causal agency to conceptual thought - recall Nietszche ’s presumed purposive ‘thinker’. The following passage from Nowell-Smith returns the notion inextricably to the intentional nature of conceptual thought that is inoperative in the textual descriptions:

The idea of cause has its roots in purposive activity and is employed in the first instance when we are concerned to produce or to prevent something. To discover the cause of something is to discover what has to be attested by our activity in order to produce or to prevent that thing; but once the “cause” comes to be applied to natural events, the notion of altering the course of events tends to be dropped. “Cause” is then used in a non-practical, purely diagnostic way in cases where we have no interest in altering events or power to alter them.¹³⁹

Hence, taken in the terms of concept formation, causation arises in tandem with purposive thought. Conventional causal experience of reality is a reflection of the intending aspect of conceptualisation. Causation, therefore, is defined by the purposive structure of language, but it is not the reflection of reality as described in The Doors or Cosmology!

For a cause to have an effect there must be a distinct active element which influences a separate passive other. However, in Watts’s perception, a seed, ‘floating in its white sunburst of down, drifts across the sky, sighing with the sound of a jet plane invisible above.’ To begin with, two apparently disparate phenomena are described as if coterminous. The lack of any causal relationship in the imagery engenders a reflexive sense of mutual interrelation. This could arguably be metaphor. However, the development of the imagery goes far deeper than a simple literary intermingling of coincident sense perceptions for poetic effect.

Watts catches the seed by one hair and watches the way it is blown about in the air, ruminating on the common sense notion which tells him that this tugging is the action of the wind, not of the thistledown. However, it spontaneously occurs to him that ‘it is the “intelligence” of the seed to have just such delicate antennae of silk that, in an environment of wind, it can move. Having such extensions, it moves itself with the wind.’ In a reversal of the linear concept of compulsion, the discretionary nomination of the causal agent exposes the arbitrary nature of the distinction, thereby nullifying its foundation. In the realisation of mutual interdependence, Watts notes, ‘When it comes down to it, is there any difference between putting up a sail and pulling an oar?’

This reflects Nietzsche’s view, in that ‘only because we have introduced subjects, “doers”, into things does it appear that all events are the consequences of compulsion exerted upon subjects.’¹⁴⁰ In dividing Whitehead’s ’seamless’ reality, then, causal objectification becomes interminable. It would be more accurate to say that the ’cause’ is the situation as a whole - but this does not make logical sense in the absence of an effect. These observations reveal something about the realisation of interdependence that is not immediately apparent, and which corresponds with Nagarjuna’s dialectic on the refutation of all metaphysical standpoints.

We should recall that the idea of distinguishable causes leading to equally distinguishable effects is a key characteristic of conventional subjective experience. It would be regarded as sensible to say that the mescaline ingested by Huxley subsequently caused him to have a ‘mystical experience’, which was the effect. This is our fundamental understanding of causation from an individual standpoint, again which takes place ‘in’ time. However, such dualistic division are consistently lacking in the analysis, and we must ply the conventional dualisms to understand the use of paradox that is crucial to both texts.

According to Loy, if causality explains the interaction among things, then things must in themselves be considered ‘noncausal’ - they must be separable from their conditions.¹⁴¹ In other words, objects must have an inherent unchanging essence upon which a cause or effect can act - this applies equally to the cause/effect itself. Indeed, it applies to our common-sense notion of what an object is: a thing whose continued (temporal) existence does not need to be explained - once created it ’self-exists’.¹⁴² However, as we have discovered from the literature, objects or ‘things’ regarded as separable entities are conceptual inferences with no intrinsic existence - including the objectified self. Not only do perceived ‘things’ lack essence outside of their total situation (their causal conditions), in the final analysis neither are they essentially divisible from the perceiver; these aspects of reality ‘mutually arise’.

Again this has an important reversal of implication. If there is no self-existent thing to cause or be effected, then there is no experiencing the world in terms of cause-and-effect. As Watts’s evolutionary description of a seed implies, any identification of a separable cause leading to a distinct effect is finally untenable: if ‘The active and the passive are two phases of the same act,’ such an interpretation of experience becomes indistinguishable from a view that negates causality altogether. According to Nagarjuna, conventional reality is itself based on the misunderstanding that objects are taken to be both self-existent and causally contingent.¹⁴³ So unless one objectifies something self-existent and noncausal (or nontemporal) in order to provide continuity between different conditioned (temporal) states, there is nothing apart from the changing conditions to be changed.¹⁴⁴ More pointedly, total interdependence dissolves the ‘thing’ into its relational conditions, with no residue of substance remaining.¹⁴⁵ This is consistent with Watts’s description of the world in terms of vibrations: for him, ‘The question, “Of what are they differing forms?” seems to have no meaning.’ In summation, a complete conditionality so radical that it dissolves all things must also dissolve itself.¹⁴⁶

This state-of-affairs is conceptually problematic because the inherent subject-predicate structure of language wants to posit some sort of material basis to shifting form, in that the world is composed of matter, whose constituent parts make up the compelled or compelling substance of causation. In Watts’s textual exposition, however, previously divided matter and form becomes ‘unified pattern-in-process.’ Furthermore, if ‘brain and world…interpenetrate inseparably,’ as Watts claims (and Huxley implies), the lack of ‘thingness’ in things must correspond with a way of experiencing in which there is no awareness of cause or effect because one is the cause/effect.¹⁴⁷ Sidestepping the main duality, the stability/change inherent in the notion of causation loses its necessary opposite in the form of the abiding self.

This insight reveals that self, time and causation stand and fall together.
The absence of both change and fixity leads to something altogether different but indecipherable to subject-predicate interpretation. This is exampled in the continuous transformation of the non-causal percept into itself described by Huxley as a ‘quiver’ in the light-infused flowers, rendered best metaphorically as the qualitative equivalent of breathing, but crucially in its subversion, ‘of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs…[my italics]‘¹⁴⁸ With the lack of any self-existing thing, the condition of ‘being at rest’ is negated, in the same way that a ‘thing moving’ becomes contradictory. As before, without conventional fixed referents there can be no temporal predicates. In a subversive expression of this paradox, Watts notes how ‘The hills are moving into their stillness.’

Only by conceding that all subject-predicate dualities are untenable can one allow descriptions such as Huxley’s ‘perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.’ But at the same time, it is patently not allowed. Language, in order to describe at all, must distinguish subject and predicate, mover and moved, cause and effect. As this is clarified, it is revealed also that the earlier intuition of any apparently incidental ‘object’ in the world being ‘intrinsically meaningful’ and ’simply its own point’ is an intimation of its intrinsic lack of existence - it being wholly dependent on other ‘things’, including a perceiving objectified ’self’. Referring to nature as the ultimate expression of this state of being, Watts notes how ‘there is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening,’ for ‘it isn’t being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself.’ In this manner, as every event that happens is interdependent with everything else in the world, only ‘empty’ events exist, none which can be said to occur for the sake of any other.¹⁴⁹ Each event is whole and complete in itself, because although conditioned by everything else in the universe and thus a manifestation of it, for precisely that reason it is not subordinated to anything else but becomes an unconditioned end-in-itself.¹⁵⁰

For Watts, this revelation comes when the elusive substance beneath all the forms of the universe is ‘discovered as the immediate gesture of my hand,’ and the moment of the world’s creation is ‘in the eternal now.’ So in this same sense Huxley could perceive a vase of flowers as ‘the divine source of all existence,’ and allow that ‘these…chair legs were St. Michael and all angels.’ To see one event, in this context, would be to see all events, and vice versa.

Clearly the writers in question are forced to employ contradictory statements in their attempts to describe an event that transcends dualistic conceptual logic. But it must be reiterated that no plea to conventional understanding will persuade us that such a state is possible, for it is ‘common sense’ that every pattern, shape, or structure is a form of something, and that this something can move or be at rest, act as a cause or be an effect of something else - all of which must happen ‘in’ linear time while ‘I’ stand by and watch! In the final analysis, a conceptual interpretation of a non-conceptual event meets the limit of its usefulness.

Final Thoughts

So much for eternity in a flower, infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers.

Tracing the line of inquiry of this analysis, it becomes clear that the reading of The Doors of Perception and The Joyous Cosmology has exhibited a consistent deconstructive leitmotif. In particular, what has emerged is the writers’ use of language as a means of pointing to something that fundamentally evades verbalisation. This fact is made explicit in the quality of paradox inherent in the texts which, when evinced, turns out to refer to reality as it is when not automatically subsumed by the underlying assumptions bound up in so-called ‘common sense’. With this verbal restriction in mind, the previous chapters are an attempt to define and clarify that very limitation by taking the underlying structure of language - the structure through which we comprehend ourselves and the world - to its logical conclusion, thereby undermining it.

As the focus of the dissertation centres on the literary description of so-called ‘mystical experience’, the context demands an elucidation of linguistic structure to a point of stress because the nature of the ‘experience’ is inherently paradoxical to the dualistic framework upon which the intellectual faculties rest. In the same way, then, that Derrida distilled his criticism of dichotomous thought in the ‘violent hierarchies’ of logocentrism, this literary analysis exposes the basic fallacies of dualistic thought which support our conventional awareness of reality.

The linguistic-purposive model that seemed to offer a complete interpretation of the texts in question turned out to be merely the opening framework in a deconstruction of language and, more significantly, reality as it is normally experienced. Extrapolating from the literary descriptions of Huxley and Watts, the subject-predicate structure of language and its conceptual distinctions are shown to contrive the dimensions that Kant believed to be the a priori conditions of being-in-the-world.¹⁵¹ The conceptual-purposive outlook of self-centred consciousness usually projects the potentiality of action onto an external world of apparently self-existing objects. When this structural support is suspended, reality is seen for what it is, prior to conceptualizing. Freed from these divisions, awareness dawns that the external world precludes the usual symbolic meaning so crucial to intentional concept formation. Allied with Wittgenstein’s understanding, it is revealed that there is no necessity in the forms of nature - indeed, ‘a necessity for one thing to happen because another thing has happened does not exist: there is only logical necessity.’¹⁵² In this way, appearances do not signify or refer to anything but themselves.

This reality brings with it a new understanding of the previously irreconcilable poles of subject and object, the primary conceptual division demarcating all conceptual divisions. When the self-concept fails to be objectified, the cessation of all objectifications necessarily follows; thus the divisive axiomatic notions of space, time and causation collapse into a continuum that can only loosely be defined as ‘consciousness’. But even this won’t do. Whose consciousness is being referred to? Consciousness of what? Certainly not self-consciousness!

What also occurs is the realisation that previously divided matter and form is simply pattern-in-process. There is no substantial (substanding) matter separate of ‘form’. Indeed, it turns out that this is not the heresy it first seems, since the idea of immaterial form or formless matter is quite ridiculous! Modern science exposes a similar state of affairs in the ever-receding microscopy of quantum physics which can never posit a fundamental ’stuff’ of which matter is ‘made’. Every level of magnification reveals ever more complex pattern. In the light of this infinite regress, the notion that unintelligent matter abides by set laws which push it around must be deemed inaccurate. So long as we make causal distinctions in the character of Newtonian billiards, the essential point is ignored. From this new understanding, then, the world can be more appreciably conceived of as a ’self-moving, self-designing, self-regulating’ pattern which is active intelligence.¹⁵³ In the character of nonduality, this necessarily includes human life as an expression of that intelligence.

This study has consciously attempted to shy away from religious interpretations in favour of a linguistic-conceptual model rooted in textual features, but this does not negate its relevance to comparative mysticism, which will be considered briefly.

With reference to Zaehner’s theism, God is consistently personified by him as a monarchical authority. If this personification were metaphorical in that it operated solely as a device for conceiving God, it could be regarded as just that - metaphor. However, as we have seen, theism defines itself thus: God is irrevocably other, and man is made in His image. Indeed, theistic mysticism distinguishes itself from other forms of mysticism in retaining a sense of distinctions even in the divine union of God and the ’soul’ of man. In the context of the current conceptual theory, then, God would only be personified God in relation to a separate self. God appears as ‘other’ only from the outside, dualistically, so that when the subject-object relation dissolves, there is no reference point from which distinctions of personhood can be drawn. In this way, the ‘impersonal’ Absolute is the more accurate way of describing God from the ‘vantage point’ of nonduality because it acknowledges the interdependence of all such conceptions and thereby realizes their lack of intrinsic existence. In the same way, Stace’s distinction between introvertive and extrovertive mystical experience does not stand up to scrutiny because the conceptual division no longer applies to a total situation where awareness is inclusive rather than exclusive.

With respect to the constructivist paradigm, evidently not all experiences are mediated and constructed by the terms, categories, beliefs and linguistic backgrounds which the subject brings to them. The fundamental character of the descriptions subvert the causal structure of language, therefore they bear no resemblance to the assumptions of such categories. More accurately, they can be said to subscribe to the content-less consciousness defined by Forman, in their being devoid of concept formation and in their lack of reference to any subjective position.

The key here is that the primary texts are descriptions after the fact, and in their attempt to describe a conceptualised memory of a nondual event they are consistently faced with the presentiment of the inherent limitations of language. In this way they denote only a conceptualised, second-remove relationship to the event itself. Their ineffability supports the theory that certain experiences are beyond language and expectations, and are outside the usual necessary relationships between language and experience.¹⁵⁴ Indeed, the original event cannot be defined as an ‘experience’ until it is conceptualised by an experiencer, but by that point it is irretrievably lost in dualisms resulting in paradoxical and irrational statements that operate, at best, as signposts in their self-refutation and logical redundancy. Their literary import corresponds with Forman’s notion of a via negativa language which serves a negative performative function - to project the subject beyond the limits of his or her linguistic system.¹⁵⁵

So in abstracting these notions from their direct apprehension we move them into the realm of duality. This is a double-bind manoeuvre illustrative of the impossibility of conceptualising it. From a similar perspective, it could be said that textual interpretations - including not only this analysis but the primary texts themselves - are fundamentally false in that they render conceptually something entirely inconceivable. That is not to say that they point to something which is not ‘real’. As the psychologist William James noted, no account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of awareness quite discarded.¹⁵⁶ But note that conventional reality is merely a biased way of looking at the same given reality which itself escapes description. From the ‘perspective’ of the nondual, there is no difference between the two. It is only from the conceptual perspective that the division is made.

In belated response to the metaphysical literary outpourings of the classical and medieval eras, Wittgenstein would write: ‘That of which we cannot speak, let us remain silent.’¹⁵⁷ If we were to fully heed this recommendation, the page you are now staring at would have remained blank. Analogously in the Zen spirit, to drop this paper from a window and observe the sound it makes as it falls to the ground might be said to provoke a more lucid realization of the nature of reality than any combination of words could ever hope to. Howsoever relevant such propositions might be, this paper stands in the character of academic convention by remaining firmly within the realm of pure discourse. Yet let silence in finality prove infinitely more revealing.

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¹ Wilson, C., The Occult, London: Watkins (2004), xxv. [back]

² Watts, A., In My Own Way: An Autobiography, New York USA: Vintage Books (1973), 186. [back]

³ Watts, A., ‘The New Alchemy‘, This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, New York USA: Vintage Books (1973), [Accessed 12 August 2005]. [back]

⁴ Forman, K. C., Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, New York USA: State University Press (1999), 4. [back]

⁵ Braden, W., ch.2, ‘Through Psychedelic Eyes’, The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God, Chicago USA: Quadrangle Books (1967), [Accessed 10 December 2005]. [back]

⁶ Ibid., ch.8, ‘The Evidence of Things Unseen’. [back]

⁷ The biologist T H Huxley, Aldous’ paternal grandfather, was a champion of the controversial theory, and became known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’. - Stevens, J., Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, New York USA: Harper Perennial (1988), 18. [back]

⁸ Tarnas, R., The Passion of the Western Mind, London: Random House (1991), 383. [back]

⁹ Ibid. [back]

¹⁰ Ibid., 22. [back]

¹¹ Stevens, J., Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, New York USA: Harper Perennial (1988), 24. [back]

¹² Osmond feared he would become known as ‘the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad.’ - Horowitz, M., Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on the Psychedelic and Visionary Experience, M. Horowitz & C. Palmer (eds.), Vermont USA: Park Street Press (1999), 32. [back]

¹³ Letter to Mr Raymond dated 21 June 1953, Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on the Psychedelic and Visionary Experience, M. Horowitz & C. Palmer (eds.), Vermont USA: Park Street Press (1999), 42. [back]

¹⁴ Stevens, J., Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, New York USA: Harper Perennial (1988), 28. [back]

¹⁵ Bedford, cited by Horowitz in Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on the Psychedelic and Visionary Experience, M. Horowitz & C. Palmer (eds.), Vermont USA: Park Street Press (1999), 51. [back]

¹⁶ Stevens, J., Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, New York USA: Harper Perennial (1988), 28. [back]

¹⁷ Letter to H Raymond dated 8 March 1954, Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on the Psychedelic and Visionary Experience, M. Horowitz & C. Palmer (eds.), Vermont USA: Park Street Press (1999), 55. [back]

¹⁸ Watts, A., In My Own Way: An Autobiography, New York USA: Vintage Books (1973), 396-397. [back]

¹⁹ Ibid., 399. Watts would later note: ‘I had not then learned how to direct my inquiries when under its influence.’ - ‘The New Alchemy‘, This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, London: Vintage Books (1973), [Accessed 1 March 2006]. [back]

²⁰ Ibid. [back]

²¹ Ibid., 400. [back]

²² Ibid. [back]

²³ Zaehner would note in his introduction that had The Doors of Perception not been published, ‘it is extremely doubtful whether the present author would have been rash enough to enter the field of comparative mysticism.’ - Mysticism Sacred and Profane, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1971), i. [back]

²⁴ Ibid. [back]

²⁵ This being the general assertion in Huxley’s earlier publication, The Perennial Philosophy (1945). [back]

²⁶ Ibid., 28. [back]

²⁷ Ibid, 21. [back]

²⁸ Ibid. [back]

²⁹ Ibid. [back]

³⁰ Stace, W. T., Mysticism and Philosophy, London: Macmillan (1961), 36. [back]

³¹ Ibid., 79-86. [back]

³² Ibid., 221. [back]

³³ Ibid., 212. [back]

³⁴ Ibid., 77-80. [back]

³⁵ Katz, S., ‘Language, Epistemology and Mysticism’, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, New York USA: Oxford University Press (1983),46. [back]

³⁶ Ibid., 3-6. [back]

³⁷ Ibid., 45. [back]

³⁸ Ibid., 27. [back]

³⁹ Forman, K. C., ‘Mysticism, Constructivism and Forgetting’, The Problem of Pure Consciousness, ed. K. C. Forman, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1990), 20. [back]

⁴⁰ Ibid., 23. [back]

⁴¹ Murfin, R., & Ray, S., The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, London: Macmillan Press Ltd (1998), 263. [back]

⁴² Zaehner, R.C., Mysticism: Sacred and Profane, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1971), 7. [back]

⁴³ Stace, W.T., Mysticism and Philosophy, London: Macmillan Press Ltd (1961), 278. [back]

⁴⁴ Two years after the 1954 publication of The Doors of Perception, in a letter to a Cincinnati physician, Aldous Huxley wrote that man’s perception of reality is ‘merely that slice of total fact which our linguistic heritage and our social conventions of thought and feeling make it possible for us to apprehend.’ - Huxley, A., ‘Letter to Dr. Howard Fabing’, M. Horowitz & C. Palmer (eds.), Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, Vermont USA: Park Street Press (1999), 101. [back]

⁴⁵ Huxley, A., ‘Culture and the Individual‘, Playboy magazine, November issue (1963), 84-88, [Accessed 6 December 2005]. [back]

⁴⁶ Whitehead, A. N., Modes of Thought, New York: Free Press (1968), 138. [back]

⁴⁷ Whorf, B. L., Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge: MIT Press (1956), 212-214. [back]

⁴⁸ Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 29. [back]

⁴⁹ Searle, J., from Searle’s conversation with Magee in Men of Ideas, ed. Magee, B., New York: Viking Press (1978), 184. [back]

⁵⁰ Ibid., 133. [back]

⁵¹ Popper, K., ‘Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report’, British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, ed. C. A. Mace, NSE Australia: Allen & Unwin (1957), 172. [back]

⁵² Leifer, R., The Happiness Project, New York USA: Snow Lion (1997), 229. [back]

⁵³ Wittgenstein, L., 1953, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1972), Aphorism I.31, 15. [back]

⁵⁴ Note both writers use terms usually associated with incalculable duration (time) or depth (space) to characterise their vision, e.g. ‘unfathomable’, ‘cavernous’, ‘infinite’, ‘endless’, ‘forever’ - this will be considered more closely in due course. [back]

⁵⁵ Loy, D., 1983, ‘The Difference Between Sams?ra and Nirv?na’, Philosophy East and West, vol.33, no.4, 359. [back]

⁵⁶ Berkeley, G., 1713, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, ed. J. Bennett, 26, [Accessed 7 June 2005]. [back]

⁵⁷ Ibid., 26. [back]

⁵⁸ Heidegger, M., 1962, Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell (1993), 207. [back]

⁵⁹ In relating this to the visual field, Searle points out that ‘it is a mistake to suppose that when I see a yellow station wagon the visual experience is also yellow and in the shape of a station wagon. Just as when I believe that it is raining I do not literally have a wet belief, so when I see something yellow I do not literally have a yellow visual experience.’ - Searle, J., Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge: University Press (1983), 43. [back]

⁶⁰ Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge (1962), 281. [back]

⁶¹ Gregory, R., 1968, ‘Visual Illusions’, Scientific American, issue 219, no. 5, 66. [back]

⁶² Watts, A., ‘The New Alchemy‘, This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, London: Vintage Books (1973), essay available from: [Accessed 1 March 2006]. [back]

⁶³ Cited in Loy, D., 1983, ‘The Difference Between Sams?ra and Nirv?na’, Philosophy East and West, vol.33, no.4, 361. [back]

⁶⁴ Leifer, R., The Happiness Project, New York USA: Snow Lion (1997), 164. [back]

⁶⁵ Ibid., 164. [back]

⁶⁶ Ibid., 165. [back]

⁶⁷ Maslow, A., 1943, ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review, 50, 370-396. [back]

⁶⁸ Watts, A., 1958, Nature, Man and Woman, New York USA: Vintage Books (1970), 54. [back]

⁶⁹ See Philip M. Merikle’s article on ‘Psychological Experiments in Unconscious Perception’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, v.5, n.1, 1998, 5-18. [back]

⁷⁰ Hampshire, S., Thought and Action, London: Chatto & Windus Ltd. (1960), 126. [back]

⁷¹ Keynes, J. M., Essays in Persuasion, London: W. W. Norton & Company (1991), quoted note 23, 107-8. [back]

⁷² Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 73-4. [back]

⁷³ Ibid., 74. - W. B. Yeats reflected similarly: ‘When I think of all the books I have read, wise words heard, anxieties given to parents, … of hopes I have had, all life weighed in the balance of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.’ - Cited in Yalom, I. D., Existential Psychotherapy, New York USA: Basic Books (1980), 469. [back]

⁷⁴ Watts, A., ‘The New Alchemy‘, This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, London: Vintage Books (1973), essay available from: [Accessed 1 March 2006]. [back]

⁷⁵ Attributed to Goethe in Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, Weimar, Vol. VII, 1892, article by Rudolf Steiner, fragment available here [Accessed 12 March 2005]. [back]

⁷⁶ This is the essence of Huxley’s use of the term ‘Suchness’, which is the limit of thought. In Suchness or ‘Isness’, affirmation and negation and all forms of opposites find their place of reconciliation or interpenetration; for affirmation implies negation and negation implies affirmation, and this interpenetration is only possible in Suchness. There is still another term for Suchness, considered principally to characterize the teaching of the Mahaprajna-paramita Sutra. It is Emptiness or Void (Shunyata) - one of the terms most frequently misinterpreted by Buddhist critics of the West. When we speak of Emptiness, we are apt to understand it in its relative sense, that is, in contrast to fullness, concreteness, or substantiality. But the Buddhist idea of Emptiness is not gathered from the negation of individual existences but from the transcendental point of view as it were, for Emptiness unites in itself both fullness and nothingness. - Suzuki, D. T., 1939, ‘The Shin Sect of Buddhism‘, Journal of Shin Buddhism, vol. 07-34, 227-284, pt. I, [Accessed 15 January 2006]. [back]

⁷⁷ Shakespeare, W., 1603, Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii. [back]

⁷⁸ Perls, F., Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, California: Real People Press (1969), 15. [back]

⁷⁹ Whorf, B. L., Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press (1956), 221. [back]

⁸⁰ Searle, J., from Searle’s conversation with Magee in Men of Ideas, ed. Magee, B., New York: Viking Press (1978), 184. [back]

⁸¹ Whitehead, A., N., Process and Reality, New York USA: Harper (1929), 11. [back]

⁸² Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 83. [back]

⁸³ Whorf, B. L., Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press (1956), 240, 213. [back]

⁸⁴ Watts, A., 1958, Nature, Man and Woman, New York USA: Vintage Books (1970), 54-5. [back]

⁸⁵ Watts, A., ‘The New Alchemy‘, This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, London: Vintage Books (1973), [Accessed 1 March 2006]. [back]

⁸⁶ Clarkson, P., Gestalt Counselling in Action, London: Sage (2000), 6. [back]

⁸⁷ Perls, F., Hefferline, R., & Goodman, P., Gestalt therapy: Excitement and growth in human personality, New York USA: Gestalt Journal Press (1994), 25. [back]

⁸⁸ James, W., 1890, The Principles of Psychology, Ch.11, ‘Attention‘, [Accessed 10 January 2006]. [back]

⁸⁹ Huxley, A., The Devils of Loudun, New York USA: Harper & Brothers (1953), x. [back]

⁹⁰ Huxley’s interest in the possible abuses of pharmacology is also seen in his depiction of ’soma’ as a stultifying inebriant propagated to subdue the populous in Brave New World. In Watts’s case the reader is referred back to the first chapter of this paper, which noted his belief that such drug experiences could only ever amount, at best, to ‘a taste of the mystical, like swimming with waterwings, perhaps.’ [back]

⁹¹ Hume, D., 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1, pt. 4, Sec. 6, ‘Of Personal Identity‘, [Accessed 26 August 2006]. [back]

⁹² Levy, J., The Nature of Man According to the Vedanta, London: Routledge (1956), 67. [back]

⁹³ Forman, R. K. C., Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, New York USA: State University of New York Press (1999), 119. [back]

⁹⁴ Ibid. [back]

⁹⁵ Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 49. [back]

⁹⁶ Braden, W., The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God, Chicago USA: Quadrangle Books (1967), [Accessed 16 August 2005]. [back]

⁹⁷ Levy, J., The Nature of Man According to the Vedanta, London: Routledge (1956), 67. [back]

⁹⁸ Ibid., 67. [back]

⁹⁹ Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 50. [back]

¹⁰⁰ Ibid. [back]

¹⁰¹ Watts, A., The Wisdom of Insecurity, London: Pantheon Books (1951), 85. Additionally, Watts considers that if memories are stored in neurons, there is no standing aside from the stream of events, for neurons flow along in the same stream as events outside the skull: ‘After all, your neurons are part of my external world, and mine of yours!’ - Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 50. [back]

¹⁰² Levy, J., The Nature of Man According to the Vedanta, London: Routledge (1956), 67. [back]

¹⁰³ ‘Without someone how can something exist?’ - Nagarjuna, Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, trans. J. Garfield, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995), 185. [back]

¹⁰⁴ Nietzsche, 1889, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classic, (1969), 38. [back]

¹⁰⁵ This accords with Merleau-Ponty’s observation that we have merely become accustomed, through the influence of the Cartesian tradition, to disengage from the object. - Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge (1962), 369. [back]

¹⁰⁶ Garfield, L., Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995), 188. [back]

¹⁰⁷ Nietzsche, F., The Will To Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York USA: Vintage Press (1968), 295-99, nos. 551-2. [back]

¹⁰⁸ Ibid. [back]

¹⁰⁹ Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 81. [back]

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 82. [back]

¹¹¹ Nietzsche, F., The Will To Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York USA: Vintage Press (1968), 295-99, nos. 551-2. [back]

¹¹² Loy, D., 1986, ‘Nondual Thinking’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, vol.13, 300. [back]

¹¹³ See footnote 28. [back]

¹¹⁴ Physicists use similar metaphors in trying to explain how vibrating wavicles produce the illusion of solid material. The impenetrability of granite, they say, is something like the apparently solid disk made by the blades of an electric fan: it is an intensely rapid motion of the same minute orbits of light that constitute our fingers. - Watts, A., ‘A Psychedelic Experience: Fact or Fantasy?‘, LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, ed. D. Solomon, New York USA: G. P. Putnam’s Sons (1964), [Accessed 25 July 2006]. [back]

¹¹⁵ Ibid., See web source. [back]

¹¹⁶ Ibid., 29. [back]

¹¹⁷ Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 94. [back]

¹¹⁸ Ibid., 95. [back]

¹¹⁹ Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 92. [back]

¹²⁰ Nietzsche, F., The Will To Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York USA: Vintage Press (1968), 295-99, nos. 551-2. [back]

¹²¹ Watts, A., The Wisdom of Insecurity, London: Pantheon Books (1951), 93. [back]

¹²² Russell, B., A History of Western Philosophy, New York USA: Simon and Schuster (1945), 136. [back]

¹²³ Loy, D., 1986, ‘The Mahayana Deconstruction of Time’, Philosophy East and West, vol.36, n.1, 17. [back]

¹²⁴ Ibid., 18. [back]

¹²⁵ Ibid. [back]

¹²⁶ Spinoza, B., The Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, London: Dover Publications (1883), [Accessed 5 March 2006]. [back]

¹²⁷ Ibid. [back]

¹²⁸ Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 25. [back]

¹²⁹ Loy, D., 1986, ‘The Mahayana Deconstruction of Time’, Philosophy East and West, vol.36, n.1, 19. [back]

¹³⁰ Time is merely a dependent set of relations, not an entity in its own right, and certainly not the inherently existent vessel of existence it might appear to be. - Garfield, J., Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995), 257. [back]

¹³¹ Watts, A., The Wisdom of Insecurity, London: Pantheon Books (1951), 94. [back]

¹³² Loy, D., 1986, ‘The Mahayana Deconstruction of Time’, Philosophy East and West, vol.36, n.1, 19. [back]

¹³³ Ibid., 19. [back]

¹³⁴ As he would consistently claim, one knows the past ‘only in the present and as part of the present. Past memories and future expectations are seen simply as present thoughts objectively conceived. Watts, A., The Wisdom of Insecurity, New York USA: Vintage Books (1968), 82. [back]

¹³⁵ Schrodinger, E., What is Life? and Mind and Matter, London: Cambridge University Press (1969), 145. [back]

¹³⁶ Loy, D., 1986, ‘The Mahayana Deconstruction of Time’, Philosophy East and West, vol.36, n.1, 16. [back]

¹³⁷ Whorf, B. L., Language, Thought and Reality, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press (1956), 215. [back]

¹³⁸ Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York USA: Vintage Books (1972), 87. [back]

¹³⁹ Nowell-Smith, P. H., ‘Causality or Causation’, cited in Loy, D., 1985, ‘The Paradox of Causality in Madhyamika’, International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.25, no.1, 69. [back]

¹⁴⁰ Nietzsche, F., The Will To Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York USA: Vintage Press (1968), 295-99, nos. 552. [back]

¹⁴¹ Loy, D., 1985, ‘The Paradox of Causality in Madhyamika’, International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.25, no.1, 66. [back]

¹⁴² Ibid. [back]

¹⁴³ Garfield, L., Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995), 173. [back]

¹⁴⁴ Loy, D., 1985, ‘The Paradox of Causality in Madhyamika’, International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.25, no.1, 66. [back]

¹⁴⁵ Ibid. [back]

¹⁴⁶ Ibid. [back]

¹⁴⁷ Ibid. [back]

¹⁴⁸ This has striking parallels with D. T. Suzuki’s description of ‘Eternal now’: ‘In this spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense . . . The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.’ - Suzuki, D. T., On Indian Mahayana Buddhism, London: Harper & Row (1968), 144-9. [back]

¹⁴⁹ Garfield, L., Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995), 173. [back]

¹⁵⁰ Loy, D., 1985, ‘The Paradox of Causality in Madhyamika’, International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.25, no.1, 66. [back]

¹⁵¹ Whereas Kant believed that any notion of reality not informed by these conditions was absurd, the findings of this analysis beg to differ. Kant’s error lay in rationalising an elusive causal principle to the appearances of the external world by positing the existence of the Thing-in-itself, without stopping to consider the cause behind his causal principle. [back]

¹⁵² Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1960), sec.6-37. [back]

¹⁵³ Watts, A., 1969, ‘The Nature of Consciousness’, The Love of Wisdom, California USA: The Electronic University, [audiotape]. [back]

¹⁵⁴ Forman, K. C., Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, New York USA: State University Press (1999)105. [back]

¹⁵⁵ Ibid., 100. [back]

¹⁵⁶ ‘At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.’ - James, W., Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: New American Library (1958), 299. [back]

¹⁵⁷ Wittgenstein, L., Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1960), sec.7. [back]