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

without Peyote during this period without feeling any craving for it. Personally, even after a series of rites occurring
on four successive weekends. I neither increased the amount of Peyote consumed nor felt any continued need for it."
It is evidently with good reason that "Peyote has never been legally declared a narcotic, or its use prohibited by the
federal government." However, "during the long history of Indian-white contact, white officials have usually tried to
suppress the use of Peyote, because it has been conceived to violate their own mores. But these at- tempts have
always failed." In a footnote Dr. Slotkin adds that "it is amazing to hear the fantastic stories about the effects of
Peyote and the nature of the ritual, which are told by the white and Catholic Indian officials in the Menomini
Reservation. None of them have had the slightest first-hand experience with the plant or with the religion, yet some
fancy themselves to be authorities and write official reports on the subject."
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revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural
biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product
of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin
intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words,
each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause
Profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that
most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is the mental disorder due to a
chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the
adrenals? It would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that some kind of a prima
facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being systematically followed, the sleuths -
biochemists , psychiatrists, psychologists - are on the trail.
By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953,
squarely athwart that trail. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy
years of mescalin research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and
he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came
about that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a
glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are
by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers
desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very
nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights,
fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We
can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation,
every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another
to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our
own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put
ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases
communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the
Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where
ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for
understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which
the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see
others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a
radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be
mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit
the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a
man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the
limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings
of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such