Effing the Ineffable *NEW*
A close reading of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception and Alan Watts' The Joyous Cosmology. Draws on linguistics, conceptual dynamics, philosophy, and perceptual theory in an effort to reconcile the contradictory aspects of the texts within a nondual framework that necessarily subverts language.
Huxley leaned toward the latter camp. In his view, however, time was running out for the actualisation of this potential. Man was at the precipice of unmitigated disaster. As Jay Stevens writes, a way had to be found to heal the gap between homo faber, man the wielder of increasingly ingenious and dangerous tools, and homo sapiens, man the smart monkey who had mastered the planet but not his own inner flaws - flaws that were now threatening to bring the whole evolutionary game to a precipitous close.10 Accompanied by the writer-philosopher Gerald Heard, Huxley began an investigation into the esoteric wisdom traditions of the East in the hope of formulating a remedy to these ails. This culminated in 1945 in the publication of The Perennial Philosophy, an annotated compendium of the perceived similarities between widely divergent mystical experiences of centuries passed. Central to Huxley's philosophy was the theory put forward by Bergson that the brain and the central nervous system operated as an eliminative system that screened much out of consciousness, leaving only that necessary for practical survival. In the twentieth century, however, Huxley felt that a way had to found which would bypass Bergson's 'reducing valve' and tap the unlimited potentials of the brain. The mystical experience, in Huxley's view, broached this issue squarely. How to achieve the experience was an entirely different matter.
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