The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
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The Doors of Perception

Author: Aldous Huxley

Narrator: Rudolph Schirmer

Unabridged: 2 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/01/2009

Synopsis

The critically acclaimed novelist and social critic Aldous Huxley describes his personal experimentation with the drug mescaline and explores the nature of visionary experience. The title of this classic comes from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”

About Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963) was an English poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, and humanist philosopher. He attended Eton and Oxford and briefly taught at Eton before devoting himself solely to writing. His fifth novel, Brave New World, is one of the most read books in literary history.

About Rudolph Schirmer

Rudolph Schirmer (1919–2000) was educated at St. Mark’s and Princeton University. His father’s music publishing business, G. Schirmer, Inc., was responsible for bringing classical music to America and for nurturing leading composers of the twentieth century. A talented poet and writer, he was published in various journals and had a long association with the Huxley family.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Keith on November 05, 2010

Generally, I greatly prefer to read books in the dead-trees format—actual paper in my hand. This was the first I've read in a long time where I found myself desperately longing, not only for an electronic edition, but for a fully hypertextual version, rich with links. Over the two months I spent on......more

Goodreads review by Lisa on April 10, 2013

Increasingly, I'm learning that perception is far more complicated than I ever imagined. Sight, as an example, isn't simply eyes acting like cameras, sending image data to the brain for interpretation. An article in the online journal, Nature, described the mechanism by which the brain "sees" what o......more

Goodreads review by Leonard on October 19, 2023

Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and its appendix, Heaven and Hell, offer a philosophical exploration into the effects of mind-altering substances, especially the mescaline compound found in the peyote cactus (also present in San Pedro cacti). Through his own mescaline experiments, Huxley exp......more

Goodreads review by Ian on May 02, 2019

Teenage Kicks I read this book in the early 70's in my early teenage years. The first thing about "The Doors of Perception" is that it was the source of the name of the band, "The Doors". The second is that it shaped the views of many people about drugs for 20 years. Aldous Huxley came from a scientif......more

Quotes

“There is nothing the pen of Huxley touches which it does not illuminate, and as the record of a highly civilized, brilliantly articulate man under the influence of an astonishing drug, The Doors of Perception is a tour de force.” Daily Telegraph (London)

“You can look at Aldous Huxley and draw parallels with the Beatles…with The Doors of Perception his full-blown Sergeant Pepper trip. Like the Beatles, Huxley had so many ideas in his head that it was natural he would want to expand and experiment. What drugs provided for them both was not escape, but reevaluation.” Times (London)

“The Doors of Perception is a poignant book, partly because it reveals the human frailties and yearnings of a very cerebral writer.” Financial Times (London)

“Sometimes a writer has to revisit the classics, and here we find that ‘gonzo journalism’—gutsy first-person accounts wherein the author is part of the story—didn’t originate with Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolfe. Aldous Huxley took some mescaline and wrote about it some ten or twelve years earlier than those others. The book he came up with is part bemused essay and part mystical treatise—‘suchness’ is everywhere to be found while under the influence. This is a good example of essay writing, journal keeping, and the value of controversy—always—in one’s work.” Amazon.com, editorial review

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