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Mar. 19th, 2025
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Mar. 19th, 2025 07:16 pm"Глаза не видят факта, пока в голове нет [его] идеи - The eyes don't see the fact when there's no idea of it in the head"
The favourite saying of Dr Pavel Kilochitsky, an invertebrate zoologist and one of my favourite university professors (now deceased)
Another thing to say about spaces between bits. We don't know about so many things, because we don't see them, and we don't see them, because we don't have an idea that they may exist.
The favourite saying of Dr Pavel Kilochitsky, an invertebrate zoologist and one of my favourite university professors (now deceased)
Another thing to say about spaces between bits. We don't know about so many things, because we don't see them, and we don't see them, because we don't have an idea that they may exist.
The Doors of Perception
Mar. 19th, 2025 07:32 pmAldous Huxley - The doors of perception
One of the greatest and the most influential books I've ever read.
"The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense - the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions.
The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. And once embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be able to stop. That, now, was only too obvious."
Here he speaks about mental illness and it's similarity to his drug use experience. Also, Huxley interpreted his psychedelic experience according to the concept that our mind is a regulator (a valve) between an individual consciousness and so-called Mind in Large (if I understood it right, that should be something similar to the conscious universe of Buddhists).
The problem is, Huxley would probably have the same or similar experience if he would suddenly acquire the vision of an insect or sense of smell of a hunting dog. Or just went into a state when all neural filters between his 5(?) senses and his brain would suddenly stop working.
The world around us (not only inside us) contains immense amount of information, but if we could perceive it all at once, we'd gone mad.
One of the greatest and the most influential books I've ever read.
"The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense - the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions.
The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. And once embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be able to stop. That, now, was only too obvious."
Here he speaks about mental illness and it's similarity to his drug use experience. Also, Huxley interpreted his psychedelic experience according to the concept that our mind is a regulator (a valve) between an individual consciousness and so-called Mind in Large (if I understood it right, that should be something similar to the conscious universe of Buddhists).
The problem is, Huxley would probably have the same or similar experience if he would suddenly acquire the vision of an insect or sense of smell of a hunting dog. Or just went into a state when all neural filters between his 5(?) senses and his brain would suddenly stop working.
The world around us (not only inside us) contains immense amount of information, but if we could perceive it all at once, we'd gone mad.
A. Huxley "The Doors of Perception"
Mar. 19th, 2025 08:53 pm"...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."
A. Huxley "The Doors of Perception"
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."
A. Huxley "The Doors of Perception"