: \u201cIn this other earth the colors are much purer and much more brilliant than they are here\u2026the very mountains, the very stones have a richer gloss a lovelier transparency and intensity and hue.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAgain, it\u2019s worth noting here that Huxley is not using the religious and spiritual roles of bright, profound colors to leverage a thesis that psychedelics are a replacement for religion. Instead, he is using psychedelics as a launching point for discussion about the religious and spiritual roles of bright, profound colors. He\u2019s not being a polemicist for drug decriminalization; throughout you\u2019re not even sure what his perspective on drug legislation would be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSome further insightful passages along with my commentary.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Half of all morality is negative and consists of keeping out of mischief\u2026.The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but to make up for it , he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do. <\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
This is one reason why Buddhism and other Eastern religions whose raison d\u2019\u00eatre is overcoming desire and finding restful peace don\u2019t sit as well with me as the restored gospel. Of course there\u2019s nothing wrong with restful peace, but Mormonism has a particularly generative dimension where creation and expansion is divine and not something to overcome. So while calmness and \u201cfear not\u201d has its place, so too does blood-pumping excitement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n- Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories. I remember what an old friend, dead these many years, told me about his mad wife. One day in the early stages of the disease, when she still had her lucid intervals he had gone to talk to her about their children. She listened for a time, then cut him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of absent children, when all that really mattered, here and now was the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in his brown tweed jacket, every time he moved his arms? Alas, this paradise of cleansed perception, of pure one-sided contemplation, was not to endure. The blissful intermissions became rarer, become briefer, until finally there were no more of them; there was only horror.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I like the idea that the banal and everyday has a sort of unspeakable divine glory if we saw it through the right eyes. This calls to mind CS Lewis\u2019 point on this.<\/span><\/p>\nIt is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nFor all his faults like not telling his sexual partners he had AIDS, I find inspirational (even if it\u2019s not factually correct, I don\u2019t know, I wouldn\u2019t put it past him to make it up), Foucault\u2019s writings about how the Middle Age Christians saw the mentally ill as having a special connection to Christ since the atonement was itself considered \u201ccrazy\u201d or unprofitable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n- By John of Patmos and his contemporaries walls of glass were conceivable only in the New Jerusalem. Today they are a feature of every up-to-date office, building, and bungalow. And this glut of glass has been parallel by a glut of chrome and nickel, of stainless steel and aluminum and a host of alloys old and new\u2026Those rich convex reflections, which so fascinated Rembrandt that he never tired of rendering them in paint, are now the commonplaces of home and street and factory\u2026What was once a needle of visionary delight has now become a piece of disregarded linoleum.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Another reminder that so much that we don\u2019t think twice about today, be it cinnamon, stained glass windows, ochre, or colored dyes, were objects of unspeakable beauty or value that caused wars and hero’s [trading] journeys.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI went into Huxley on the defensive, ready to defend against the implication that psychedelics were some sort of replacement for faith, but he simply used it as an excuse to write a homage to the beauty of the everyday and the holiness of the visual.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Psychedelics are having quite the moment right now, with many people claiming, or at least implying that they can provide a chemical shortcut to the kind of numinous affect that has traditionally been the purview of conventional religious practice, whether it\u2019s praying in the celestial room while fasting, focusing on the Eucharist in a perpetual adoration chapel, or meditating under the Bodhi tree.\u00a0 As you can imagine, I\u2019m skeptical. Warm fuzzies are definitely part of religion, but it\u2019s not the main thing. Christ didn\u2019t die for us to feel the spirit, he died to redeem us and to pave the way for us to inherit all the Father hath. However, to be intellectually honest, having never done psychedelics, I also don\u2019t know to what extent psychedelics can replicate the feeling of the spirit, or whether it\u2019s an obvious counterfeit.\u00a0 On that note, the closest thing to doing psychedelics is reading about them from people who know how to write and describe the kind of difficult-to-describe feelings inherent in chemical trips, and to that end I recently finished Aldous Huxley\u2019s The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t what I was expecting. My previous experience with a psychedelic memoir […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":52058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-nature-and-environment"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/unnamed.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52055"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52123,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52055\/revisions\/52123"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/unnamed-800x437.jpg\")
<\/p>\n