"Aldous Huxley - The Doors Of Perception" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huxley Aldous)

favorite character in fiction. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self;
these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe. I felt the lesson
to be salutary, but was sorry, none the less, that it had had to be administered at this moment and in this
form. As a rule the mescalin taker discovers an inner world as manifestly a datum, as self-evidently
"infinite and holy," as that transfgured outer world which I had seen with my eyes open. From the first,
my own case had been different. Mescalin had endowed me temporarily with the power to see things
with my eyes shut; but it could not, or at least on this occasion did not, reveal an inscape remotely
comparable to my flowers or chair or flannels "out there." What it had allowed me to perceive inside
was not the Dharma-Body, in images, but my own mind; not Suchness, but a set of symbols - in other
words, a homemade substitute for Suchness.
Most visualizers are transformed by mescalin into visionaries. Some of them - and they are Perhaps
more numerous than is generally supposed - require no transformation; they are visionaries all the time.
The mental species to which Blake belonged is fairly widely distributed even in the urban-industrial
societies of the present day. The poet-artist's uniqueness does not consist in the fact that (to quote from
his Descriptive Catalogue) he actually saw "those wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the
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Cherubim." It does not consist in the fact that "these wonderful originals seen in my visions, were some
of them one hundred feet in height ... all containing mythological and recondite meaning." It consists
solely in his ability to render, in words or (somewhat less successfully) in line and color, some hint at
least of a not excessively uncommon experience. The untalented visionary may perceive an inner reality
no less tremendous, beautiful and significant than the world beheld by Blake; but he lacks altogether the
ability to express, in literary or plastic symbols, what he has seen.
From the records of religion and the surviving menuments of poetry and the plastic arts it is very
plain that, at most times and in most places, men have attached more importance to the inscape than to
objective existents, have felt that what they saw with their eyes shut possessed a spiritually higher
significance than what they saw with their eyes open. The reason? Familiarity breeds contempt, and how
to survive is a problem ranging in urgency from the chronically tedious to the excruciating. The outer
world is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is the place where, willy-nilly, we must try to
make our living. In the inner world there is neither work nor monotony. We visit it only in dreams and
musings, and its strangeness is such that we never find the same world on two successive occasions.
What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look
within! Generally, but not always. In their art no less than in their religion, the Taoists and the Zen
Buddhists looked beyond visions to the Void, and through the Void at "the ten thousand things" of
objective reality. Because of their doctrine of the Word made flesh, Christians should have been able,
from the first, to adopt a similar attitude towards the universe around them. But because of the doctrine
of the Fall, they found it very hard to do so. As recently as three hundred years ago an expression of
thoroughgoing world denial and even world condemnation was both orthodox and comprehensible.
"We should feel wonder at nothing at all in Nature except only the Incarnation of Christ." In the
seventeenth century, Lallemant's phrase seemed to make sense. Today it has the ring of madness.
In China the rise of landscape painting to the rank of a major art form took place about a thousand,
in Japan about six hundred and in Europe about three hundred, years ago. The equation of Dharma-
Body with hedge was made by those Zen Masters, who wedded Taoist naturalism with Buddhist
transcendentalism. It was, therefore, only in the Far East that landscape painters consciously regarded
their art as religious. In the West religious painting was a matter of portraying sacred personages, of
illustrating hallowed texts. Landscape painters regarded themselves as secularists. Today we recognize
in Seurat one of the supreme masters of what may be called mystical landscape painting. And yet this
man who was able, more effectively than any other, to render the One in the many, became quite
indignant when somebody praised him for the "poetry" of his work. '1 merely apply the System," he
protested. In other words he was merely a pointilliste and, in his own eyes, nothing else. A similar
anecdote is told of John Constable. One day towards the end of his life, Blake met Constable at