The Doors Of Perception

"When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when the sea flows in our veins and the stars are our jewels, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have to covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power of the drearier forms of pleasure?

Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor."


"Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantlyverbaland 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 completely umaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world studentsof the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's."


"But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

He will never be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."


Aldous Huxley - The Doors Of Perception