Heaven and hell: Aldous Huxley opens the doors of perception

Unlike any other mammal on earth, man possesses the unique ability to traverse various levels of the mind in order to alter and create his own perceptions of reality. Unlike any author in modern literature, aldous huxley charts man's explorations into the realms of the mind in his books The doors of perception and heaven and hell. In these two works, huxley travels to "the antipodes of the mind" (huxley 85) to explore the concepts of "heaven and hell" in order to determine their place of origin. He comes back from his travels to share what he found, and offer a new way of viewing the world. huxley borrows upon the words of William Blake for the title of his book, and in an opening quotation: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." huxley realized that our limited perceptions are what prevent us from reaching the illuminated state visionaries and mystics often refer to as "heaven," and in our struggles against this illuminated state, we plunge ourselves into the darker recesses of the mind, commonly referred to as "hell." aldous huxley spent much of his lifetime exploring ways to connect to the inner world of the mind in order to improve our outer reality. In aldous huxley and the Way to Reality, Charles M. Holmes declares that huxley "believes the outer world depends on the inner" (Holmes 48). huxley disliked the idea of "somebody out there, apart from the percipient and different from him" (Holmes 117). For huxley, the quality of our lives depended on how in touch we were with ourselves, and that could not be determined by any outside source, such as a deity, it was determined by the qualities found within each of us.