doors of perception 2...

I have been continuing my reading of Huxley's Doors of Perception. I began reading it because there are interesting things to compare between our engagement in the expansive world of computer technology and the expansive views created by mescaline use. The computer screen itself is a door of perception that tends to draw us in and isolate us from other possible realms and potentials of perception. Huxley in his essay addresses education as follows:

"Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's..."

"In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem; Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. ...when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system--when it comes to any form of non-verbal education... no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it."

There are ways to open doorways of perception without mescaline. Education in the arts is the key. Unlike drugs (and unlike addictive technologies), the arts alter perceptions in ways that lead to action, service, investigation, and offer results that enrich the lives of others in directly meaningful ways.

Make, fix and for God's sake, create...