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

questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they
know to be true - namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside - the problems
posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in
exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that
I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had
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always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or autohypnosis, by means of
systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of
consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic
were talking about.
From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was convinced in advance that the drug would
admit me, at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake and AE. But what I
had expected did not happen. I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of many-
colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with
heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I
had not reckoned, it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental make-up, the facts of my
temperament, training and habits.
I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the
pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the
verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen
event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday
afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater
Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an
hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand
to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood,
who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come
to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem
curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world - a poor thing but my own - which I
expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself.
The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. Half an hour after
swallowing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were
sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a
continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray
structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged,
would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight. But at no time were there faces or forms of men or
animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings,
nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the
world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in
the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.
I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small
glass vase. 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.)