Biological Blinders
Laura informed me that I missed out on a discussion about entheogens last night, and so I thought I'd make up for it by sharing a passage from "The Doors of Perception." (See below... That's right. Keep scrolling.) It reminds me also of what you guys were saying about our natural psychological tendencies to separate the world and other human beings into convenient categories, and to see them as fundamentally different. I don't mean to suggest that it's necessarily a bad thing, either. There are obvious evolutionary advantages to this way of thinking -- it allowed us to survive and adapt to a harsh environment, and without it we wouldn't be capable of things like problem-solving, creating an orientation for ourselves in time and space, or constructing and maintaining a coherent view of reality.
On the other hand, however, our "normal" consciousness sometimes amounts to a collection of biological "tricks" which attempt to bring certainty to a confusing, chaotic, alien universe: what I gather from my senses is reduced to simple concepts and the lowest common denominator, often focusing on pairs of opposites (think: the conservative O'Reilly worldview which tends to see all things in terms of black and white -- good versus evil, right versus wrong, "us" versus "them" and so on). Even our religious imagery evokes these themes. The Fall in the Garden of Eden is a symbolic story of man becoming conscious of himself -- of his desires as well as his limitations and mortality -- and thus separating himself from nature and from "God." It could almost be read as a condensed version of our evolutionary history, as we became more and more dependent on the intellect and on our abilities to manipulate the environment.
To the extent that we discover what can be known, though, there is a heightened, innate sense of the Unknown. Intuition tells us that beyond what we see and experience there exists an inaccessible, immense, profound mystery. No scientific achievements will ever diminish that -- rather, they will only intensify the feeling of awe that one gets when contemplating the new horizons. Because of this, we need to recognize first that we have all been co-opted by our own biology into accepting a fragmented and incomplete view of ourselves and the universe. Unless we find some way to explore the deeper regions of the psyche, either through conventional disciplines of concentration or (dare I say it?) drug use, we will continue to miss out on a huge part of what life really is.
What I like about this passage are the clumsy metaphors he uses as he tries to explain himself using scientific terms and uniquely modern ideas. I can imagine people one day looking back on the book as a sort of rough sketch highlighting the early attempts made to unify scientific and religious thought...
Okay, take it away, Huxley:
"Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C.D. Broad, 'that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any given moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.'
"According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet... Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate 'spiritual exercises,' or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception 'of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe' (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality."
On the other hand, however, our "normal" consciousness sometimes amounts to a collection of biological "tricks" which attempt to bring certainty to a confusing, chaotic, alien universe: what I gather from my senses is reduced to simple concepts and the lowest common denominator, often focusing on pairs of opposites (think: the conservative O'Reilly worldview which tends to see all things in terms of black and white -- good versus evil, right versus wrong, "us" versus "them" and so on). Even our religious imagery evokes these themes. The Fall in the Garden of Eden is a symbolic story of man becoming conscious of himself -- of his desires as well as his limitations and mortality -- and thus separating himself from nature and from "God." It could almost be read as a condensed version of our evolutionary history, as we became more and more dependent on the intellect and on our abilities to manipulate the environment.
To the extent that we discover what can be known, though, there is a heightened, innate sense of the Unknown. Intuition tells us that beyond what we see and experience there exists an inaccessible, immense, profound mystery. No scientific achievements will ever diminish that -- rather, they will only intensify the feeling of awe that one gets when contemplating the new horizons. Because of this, we need to recognize first that we have all been co-opted by our own biology into accepting a fragmented and incomplete view of ourselves and the universe. Unless we find some way to explore the deeper regions of the psyche, either through conventional disciplines of concentration or (dare I say it?) drug use, we will continue to miss out on a huge part of what life really is.
What I like about this passage are the clumsy metaphors he uses as he tries to explain himself using scientific terms and uniquely modern ideas. I can imagine people one day looking back on the book as a sort of rough sketch highlighting the early attempts made to unify scientific and religious thought...
Okay, take it away, Huxley:
"Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C.D. Broad, 'that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any given moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.'
"According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet... Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate 'spiritual exercises,' or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception 'of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe' (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality."
posted by Joe at
7:13 PM
1 Comments:
Is the bid for "certainty" tied to our experience of time? We live in the past and future, looking back and forward in order to make sense of our experience. I don't know if this is as much a biological trick as a cultural one (both, I suppose). When I read Huxley's use of the word "eliminative," I thought of time—the elimination of messy and often confusing context. And I thought of Michael Pollan's writing on marijuana (in The Botany of Desire). He points out that when one is high, one tends to be forgetful (what was I going to say?). We make jokes about this, and some use it as evidence to demonize marijuana. But Pollan claims that "forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation." Since we are moment by moment overwhelmed by sensory data—not to mention awareness of past and future—we can benefit from a means of forgetting (sounds like a rationalization, I know, but a convincing one, it seems to me). By forgetting we are better able to experience the present moment, to be in the moment. And isn't the present a wild season not a ruse? As for a link to religious experience, Pollan claims that "Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present." Maybe "wonder" is another word for what Joe called "an innate sense of the Unknown."
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Capper, at 8:53 AM
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