Aldous and I - The Journey Begins

“If the doors to perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” —William Blake

With the above quote Aldous Huxley began his book The Doors of Perception. The book was nominally about his experiences taking mescaline in the early 1950s, but it was more a critical examination of the processes by which we apprehend reality and an examination of the nature of spiritual experience.

A month ago I was installing a new set of doors for two men in their eighties, a gay couple. One of the men had read my book, The Great Western Divide, and enjoyed it very much. The room where we installed the doors was a small back bedroom that had cinderblock walls, plastered on the inside and stuccoed on the outside, and two small windows with no direct access to the outdoors. We had to have a concrete-cutting service come in to saw a hole in the wall so that I could install a small set of double French doors. As I finished the job, the partner of the man who read my book came up to me and said, “Tom and I both agree that you remind us of Aldous Huxley.”

I looked up, a bit baffled and amazed by the comment. “Do I look like him?”

“A bit,” my client replied, “but it’s more in the way you carry yourself and express yourself, your mind.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied with a slight smile. “We used to take LSD together.”

I immediately thought of The Doors of Perception, of how it had been a must-read during the sixties. I also thought of the doors I was installing. I’ve installed a lot of doors in my time, even designed and made some of them. The time I’ve spent teaching is also, in a great sense, about the finding of doors or the creation of new doors. It’s all about providing a well-crafted passageway between the inside and outside worlds.

During the sixties I had picked up the book, but never really read it. Reading the book seemed secondary to the experience of the times. It’s pretty faddish now to diss the sixties as self-indulgent and irrelevant, but between tokes we managed to end a presidency, end a war, and help bring about a bit more racial justice. What can be said of the present?

The salient feature of the time seemed to be that many of the people I knew were trying to figure out a better way to do things and were actively trying to cleanse their doors of perception, either through drugs or nascent spiritual practice. It was a time of felt community. We were trying to gain a vision, but never figured out how to bring that vision into this world. We foundered on the rocks of drugs or the necessity of making a living. Deep within us though is the memory that we had a dream, a vision, and it’s still incomplete. It’s time for completion.

Article Author: John Spivey

John Spivey is a writer and furniture maker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his family. His personal blog is called Nature, Craft, & Soul. He can be contacted here.

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