Aldous and I - The Journey Begins - Page 2

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.

As I read through The Doors of Perception, I was amazed with the parallels in Huxley’s thinking and expression and my own. I was also aware of the differences. He was a European classicist with a noble pedigree. His grandfather Thomas had been the great proponent of the theory of evolution and was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” I come from a New World family where my father was a third grade dropout who didn’t want me to go to college. Rather than the classics, my tastes run to roots music and jazz. I can’t reference the classics very well, but I can reference our roots in this American landscape. My father’s family came to what is now the southern United States about 1650. My mother’s family came to California from Germany in the early 1850s at the end of the Gold Rush. Some family members came across the prairie in covered wagons and some came around stormy Cape Horn.

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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