Psychedelia, page 25
The fullest presentation of his thoughts on visions and the visual can be found in a lecture he gave on several occasions in the early 1960s. This vital document of Huxley's psychedelic broodings has also been preserved on a posthumously released LP record, titled The Visionary Experience.6 Several years and a number of experiences with LSD and mescaline had passed since The Doors Of Perception was written, allowing for the great man's thoughts to evolve considerably.7 Thus, the Visionary Experience makes no mention at all of the earlier 'reducing valve' theory, suggesting that Huxley may have abandoned it. Instead, he examines the nature and history of visionary experiences with the child-like question 'Why are precious stones considered precious?' as a springboard for his monologue. As Huxley points out, precious stones such as diamonds, emeralds and rubies occur in some of man's earliest metaphysical texts, where they are associated with a higher world of radiating beauty. In the Book Of Ezekiel, the biblical prophet describes a Garden of Eden that is full of gems and jewels called 'stones of fire'. A similar statement about the heavenly origins of precious stones can be found in Plato's Socratic dialogue The Faedo, a central text in proto-psychedelic philosophy, which Huxley quotes with a clear-cut description of hallucinogenic vision:
This other world, where everything is brighter and clearer and more real than in our world is' a vision of blessed beholders.
The glowing light of the higher world recurs with the leading Neoplatonist Plotinus, who states that:
In the intelligible world, which is the world of platonic ideas, everything shines;
Huxley gathers from his ancient sources that the diamonds and rubies hold such great attraction to us because their glowing appearance remind us of a world of beauty and light that we no longer have access to. His fundamental belief is that the notion of a higher world is based on a 'quasi- sensory experience', rather than something purely cerebral. The concept of the eternal comes out of observation, it is not merely invented. When Plato states in the Faedo that precious stones such as diamonds are fragments of a higher world, Huxley finds confirmation of his thesis that ''a great metaphysical idea, the platonic system of an ideal world, is also based upon a world of vision'.
Huxley never takes the obvious step implied in his lecture, which would be to suggest that the visions underlying Plato's great metaphysical system were of a psychedelic nature. This is not due to any type of intellectual caution on Huxley's behalf, but simply reflects the fact that he was unaware of the psychedelic nature of the kykeon. Neither Eleusis nor kykeon are mentioned in any of his drug-related essays, and he may not even have been aware that Plato and Plotinus partook in the celebrations of the Greater Mysteries. Had Huxley known that a psychedelic drug was consumed at Eleusis, an event which Plato championed in a testimony that bore directly on his metaphysical philosophy (see Prologue above), he would have little reason not to make this last theoretical leap. In fact, considering Huxley's belief that Plato and Plotinus were not just making metaphors but spoke of ideas rooted in direct visual experience, the notion that their platonic metaphysics came partly from psychedelic visions at Eleusis is not radical, but obvious.
Some years later, Gordon Wasson suggested that Plato's metaphysics, which remain the most influential philosophical system the West has seen, may have come out of The Psychedelic Experiences at Eleusis. Wasson knew more than Huxley did about the kykeon and Eleusis, and we today know more than Wasson did, including the precise manner in which a psychedelic potion could have been prepared in ancient Greece. The effects upon Western philosophy and culture, if these origins for the platonic metaphysics had been known at some remote point in our pa st, are likely to have been profound. Of immediate concern for Psychedelia today is the realization of two distinct sources for Western spiritual cosmology: the animistic-pantheist, which places the minds of the gods in our nature, and the visionary-psychedelic, which reveals to us the eternal home of these gods. Both paths are ancient, and they converge inside the great temple at Eleusis.
Huxley refrains from making any direct connections to psychedelic drugs at this point of his lecture, but summarizes his view-point in plain language:
The precious stones remind us of a strange world in the back of our heads to which some people can obtain access, and to which some people are given access spontaneously.
Similar reminders of the brightly shining other world and its 'luminous living geometry' can be found scattered through our socio-cultural past, expressed in both the simple (tinder sticks and fireworks) and the extravagant (the splendor of the royal wardrobe). But for some members of society, the other world itself was accessible through visionary experience, either through skillful means or spontaneous visitation. Huxley discusses classic techniques such as breathing, self- starving, and mental exhaustion, and broadens the spectrum by invoking John Lilly's sensory deprivation experiments, which were just being launched at the time. Of course, the visionary technique that interests Huxley the most are psychedelic drugs, where his palette has now (1961) been expanded from Osmond's mescaline to include Hofmann's LSD and Psilocybin. Huxley finds the historical use of the sacred mushroom in Mexico and the ancient soma of the Vedic cultures to validate the path of 'chemical access', and suggests that, of all the different techniques of higher vision, the biochemical agents are 'the most powerful and most fool-proof methods to transport us to this other world that at presently exist'. 25 years later, Terence McKenna would echo Huxley's view in his own series of lectures: the psychedelic path is by far the most efficient way to higher mental states.8
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Huxley's scope was always broader than the propagation of new wonder-drugs to achieve higher states. His main concern was the higher states themselves, and so he would make no distinction between a chemically induced vision, a vision obtained via deliberate means, and a vision which was received spontaneously. The case of the latter occupies his interest as much as the drug-induced states, and in discussing the naturally gifted visionaries, Huxley returns naturally to William Blake and his 'doors of perception'. Blake, who was one of the most naturally gifted visionaries the West has ever seen, was as concerned as Huxley with the operation of human consciousness and the five senses in particular. Pre-dating the Romantics by a generation, he operated essentially alone in an era obsessed with rationalism and scientific progress, and even when he opposed and ridiculed the men who saw only 'Measures & Ratio', Blake's writings would reflect the precision and intellectual rigor that the era demanded. A statement he originally made in passing in an exhibition catalogue from 1809 has taken on increased significance in modern understanding of the visionary mind:
A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.
William Blake's model of the relationship between the physical world, human perception, and the inner imagination was not like that of Huxley or Stanislav Grof. To an active visionary artist mind like Blake's, the defining modality of what is possible is the inner imagination, not hypothetical qualities in the outer world. Blake's internal CEV experiences were of greater quality, more 'minutely articulated' than anything he perceived with his senses. The inner world was seen with greater clarity than the outer world. Such a position is difficult to understand, unless one has the same gifts as Blake, or has experienced high intensity psychedelic hallucinations. Blake describes the end of one of his visionary flights in metaphorical yet distinct terms:
When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.
(The Marriage Of Heaven & Hell, c1792)
The 'home' here is the human head, where all five senses are located, and Blake imagines his head as a cliff facing the outer world, frowning because of its perceptual insufficiency. In a way typical for the Marriage, he links his professional craftsmanship as an engraver with a Swedenborgian cast of angels and devils, and provocatively puts himself in the position of a Devil, surrounded by the smoke of his workshop, bent over his engraving plate. The reader thus watches the creation of the work he is currently reading, and the message that Blake brings back from his visionary 'Hell' to us here on earth maintains the meta-referential perspective:
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?
The Miltonian diction somewhat obscures the vital message: Blake does not lament the inability of our senses to properly appreciate a bird in flight; what he says is that if our 'senses five' didn't limit us, our experience of the world would be as free and delightful as that of the bird. The problem isn't so much that we can't fully take in the outer world, but that our perception is so much less developed than our imagination. This distinction is important, and it reaches back to the fundamental epistemology that Blake outlines in his earliest philosophical works.
Present from the very start and throughout the length of Blake's creative career was the notion of 'Poetic Genius', a quality found inside man which is both individual and common to all. Due to disposition and behavior, the Poetic Genius may be active to different degrees in different people. Blake's explicated concept is remarkably similar to the ur-myth paradigm described by Jessie Weston above (Chapter V), and the mythopoeic quality discussed there.
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.[…] Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
(ibid. Plate 11)
Here we find Blake taking a stance clearly resonant with the psychedelic cosmology of the Platonic Eleusis: the idea of a higher, divine state which originally evolved out of a pantheist-animistic experience of the world, and harkens back to ancient pastoral societies. This pantheon of nature spirits stood in immediate relation to the common man, and at times – such as inside the Temple of the Great Mysteries – the common man was able to ascend the divine ladder, from ordinary sense objects up to the realms of the gods. At Eleusis, this ancient heavenly connection was maintained by honoring the rites of the original vegetation myth, even as the purpose of the celebration had been developed into a personal vision of the eternal realms. As Blake states, the original knowledge was lost when 'a system was formed' that removed the link between the human perception of nature and the divine realm. A new Priesthood class abstracted and organized the notions of the divine nature into mediated 'worship from poetic tales', such as the Bible, and sacred Art degenerated into organized Religion.
Blake also liked to link the Poetic Genius to physical appearances, such as charisma, and wrote in one of his Proverbs Of Hell: 'He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star'; a view that seems more at home in our current media-visual age than the late 18th century. Blake's Poetic Genius differs not just between men but between nations, a theme later expressed in his large prophetic works. In his earliest illuminated book, the miniscule and painstakingly self-produced All Religions Are One (c1788), this geographical differentiation of Poetic Genius explains why different religions have arisen in different places; ultimately they are the same, expressing the same inner quality of man, as the title states. This short treatise and the subsequent There Is No Natural Religion (c1788), predate Blake's Swedenborg attacks, and take the rational empiricism of John Locke and Francis Bacon as inspirational opponents. Blake introduces the concept of Desire, and with the energy from Desire, man's Poetic Genius opens up inner realms of boundless imagination. Perhaps for reasons of contemporary jargon, Blake rarely uses the word 'imagination' here, but inserting it in place of 'Desire' and 'Poetic Genius' makes his philosophy easier to understand. Desire is the active principle of man's inner life, and it is vital to the potential infiniteness of his world.
The existence of desire negates the limited rationalist-positivist view of Locke and Bacon, and opens up vast realms for the individual spirit. Man is an infinite desirer, desire itself is infinite, and its object is infinite. Beyond the critique of Locke, this is one of several places in Blake where one may see a parallel to Eastern thought. The Buddha's Four Noble Truths state that desire is the cause of suffering, and an obstacle to enlightenment. Blake on the other hand sees no suffering except in the eyes of the uninformed, and instead posits Desire as an indication of Man's infinite nature. That's not to say that desire is the central element or trigger, but an expression of man's spiritual boundlessness. At the same time Blake dismisses the notion of Locke and others that God is to be approached via rational thought and observation, which is the main theme of There Is No Natural Religion. The reason why 'Natural Religion' is an impossibility is because it is derived from the senses, which according to Blake are 'fallen', unlike the Poetic Genius inside man. Since we can imagine more than the senses can perceive, Blake states that any thought of God should be linked to the vast imagination rather than the limited perception.
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It is tempting from the viewpoint of today to hold William Blake up as the ultimate visionary artist of the West. He had no need to reconfigure his brain with chemical agents, yet a large bulk of his work, his view of the world, and his irreverential personality, seem loaded with appeal for those embarking on a psychedelic lifestyle. Like the celebrants at Eleusis, he appears as a champion of both the mundane and the celestial:
Eternity is in love with the Productions of Time.
While his first two short books outlined a progressive philosophy of substantial promise, they were followed by the more conventional lyric collection Songs Of Innocence, which in turn was followed by one of Blake's most opaque works, The Song Of Thel. Even experienced Blake students throw their hands up before any definite interpretation of this pastoral parable, which seems to allegorize' something. In line with the works before and after it, one may take it as a metaphor for the pure spirit's descent into the corporeal world of the five senses, which it rejects. It may also be something completely different. But following that interpretation, it allows for a connecting thread through Blake's early philosophy as it deals with the tripartite division of flesh, spirit and soul.
The topic is dealt with again in the beginning of Blake's most significant philosophical work; The Marriage Of Heaven & Hell. This unique and genre-transcending treatise holds a treasured position among Blake aficionados, and it is undoubtedly the most psychedelic of all his works. Unsurprisingly, Blake's thoughts on the nature of the human soul were radical. The religious vilification of desire, a trait which Blake held as a positive trigger for creativity and art, inspired him to great strides in his fiercely independent philosophy. Written as an explicit protest against the errors found in 'sacred codes' such as the Bible and the Torah, Blake's spiritual Principles state that:
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
Energy is Eternal Delight.
These lines bear an interesting resemblance to impressions reported by seasoned psychedelic travelers. At the furthest reaches of the biochemical journey lie states akin to the classic mystic experience, where the ego dissolves, outer forms and distinctions break down, and the world is perceived as fields of pure energy. While difficult to verbalize, there is a pattern to such psychedelic peak experiences that can be defined. Mapping such a peak pattern against the knowledge Blake received on his visionary journeys, many of the key elements tend to overlap, up to and including the 'Eternal Delight' of a non-dualistic energy, which in the psychedelic state manifests as a feeling of profound joy and tranquility.
Outside the purely hallucinogenic frame of reference there is also an affinity to Eastern metaphysics. Blake's three Principles resemble the Mahayana Buddhist notion of the physical body as a delusion, an effect of the individual mindstream's (sanskrit: samtana) formation out of a flow of billions of atomic energy quanta called tsal, which are all that actually exists. As the Buddhist disciple approaches illumination he begins to perceive these energies, first as shapes and then as homogenous fields, instead of the outward manifestations that the deluded ego has invented. Blake seems to suggest something similar; corporeality is a fundamental, infinite energy locked inside individual forms due to the activity of our flawed and deluded senses. But again the Buddhist parallel only works so far, since Blake proceeds to stipulate the greatness of the 'spirit' over our body and soul. By spirit he means the infinity of each individual's imagination, a concept which contradicts the higher Buddhist teachings of non-dualism and anatma (no-self). Blake on his part had no use for non- dualism, and stated that 'Without contraries there is no progression'.
