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    The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
    The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
    The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
    Ebook191 pages3 hours

    The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell

    By Aldous Huxley

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    "A genuine spiritual quest. . . . Extraordinary." — New York Times

    Among the most profound and influential explorations of mind-expanding psychedelic drugs ever written, here are two complete classic books—The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell—in which Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, reveals the mind's remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. This edition also features an additional essay, "Drugs That Shape Men's Minds," now included for the first time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 29, 2009
    ISBN9780061892820
    The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
    Author

    Aldous Huxley

    Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.

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    Reviews for The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell

    4/5

    1,031 ratings31 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Careful- the Doors of Perception is a life-changer.
    • 4/5
      Interesting read about how a great writer experiences mescalin. Second part (heaven and hell), I found less interesting. Appendices are interesting again..
    • 5/5
      "the doors..." changed the way i look at things [ like black moon (movie) ]. "heaven hell" brings to mind jewels. i am thankful for the former.
    • 5/5
      Reads like no other book - mesmerising! The title incidently, is where the band 'The Doors' took their name from.
    • 5/5
      As did AA co-founder Bill Wilson and former senator Eugene MacCarthy and Ram Doss and manyh others, Huxley writes of the experience of ingesting mescalinl, also known as peyote, a drug that southwest American natives have used for eons as a spiritual aid. he explained things that put its proper use into place for me. When I was raging and thinking hurtful things, if I had dropped that or LSD then I would have had a "bad trip," but now that I have a serene heart and a loving soul, I want to have some; i want the experience.
    • 4/5
      Huxley's theory is that the mind takes in all sorts of incredible experiences but that it then filters those (through what he calls the "reducing valve") into what we're conscious of. In the first part of the book, The Doors of Perception, he experiments with peyote. He has a psychiatrist present and records everything he says, so the account of his actions and experiences is presumably reliable. This part of the book was highly entertaining. He is fascinated by details like chair legs, and he sees cosmic significance in them. He also advocates allowing the use of peyote over alcohol and tobacco because he thinks it has fewer downsides (and because he thinks people will always seek some kind of drug-induced escape from their lives). In the second part of the book, Heaven and Hell, he talks about "transporting" artwork--stained glass, jewels, and certain kinds of paintings. He thinks that the colors and ways of representing landscapes are similar to what people experience when they have visions of an "other world" or heaven, and we like these because they give us a glimpse of that world. He also argues that while for most visionaries the visions are blissful, for some, like schizophrenics, visions of this other world are terrifying and hellish. At the end, he includes a couple of short sections on the various ways to have visions--carbon dioxide, strobe lights, fasting, etc. I thought his comments on fasting were really interesting. He speculates that people in earlier times had more religious visions because they were malnourished and engaged in more religious fasting, and the lack of vitamins affects brain chemistry enough that the "reducing valve" is opened to allow for visionary experiences. I read the more scientific sections with skepticism because I'm not sure Huxley is a reliable source, but the book is nonetheless interesting and often entertaining.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed Huxley's perspective as a research subject experiencing the effects of mescalin for the first time. Also enjoyed the description of art/artists and how Huxley sees art history as connected to the visionary experience of a 'mescalin taker.'
    • 4/5
      Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" is one of the most interesting books i've encountered. Obviously, its notable for its account of an experiment with the drug mescalin, found in peyote. The fundamental notion of the work is that the mind acts, in its most normal and evolved state, as a "reducing valve." The world of perception is way too intense for one mind to encounter so it seeks to reduce experiences as a need for survival. A drug induced experience allows for the opening of said "reducing valve" ushering in opportunities to see things "isness" and "suchness." I found it particularly interesting that Huxleys suggested that the increase in drug use is in direct relationship to the lack of "transcendance" provided by organized religion. A shortcoming Huxley thinks the church should be addressing. I found this book to be interesting, informative, and challenging. All symptoms of a good read.
    • 5/5
      could huxley get any better? i think not.
    • 5/5
      Huxley's fascinating account of LSD experimentation in the early 1950's.......Title of his book was taken as a nameby the Rock group, "The Doors of Perception"
    • 5/5
      anyone who has interest in the future and everyone who has experimented with acid or psychedelic drugs in general must this book (preferably before the drugs)
    • 3/5
      I think I read this when I was in college years ago. I don't remember much but it was interesting material.
    • 4/5
      This is the second time that I read this book. The first time was when I was in college, and we were very open to all things psychedelic. At that time we were all reading the books of Carlos Castaneda, and were fascinated by anything and everything that had to do with mescalin and peyote.When I read the book at that time, I read it as an endorsement for the use of mescalin. However, times changed, and when I read it again, I read it as a rather erudite writing on the use of the drug, as well as the experience. Some of that earlier, innocent, magic was missing in this re-reading of the book.Having said that, it is a very good book. The appendices are well worth the read, and while he does reduce some mystical experiences to the level of an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the body, I don't think that he debunks the actual experience. This is a remarkable book, by a remarkable author.
    • 5/5
      A brilliant description of the indescribable - a true genius.
    • 5/5
      Incredible. The Doors of Perception is like a zen haiku turned up to 11! Heaven and Hell is equally as fascinating (and scholarly). Wish I'd read this years ago.
    • 1/5
      This is 79 pages and I could not be more bored if I tried. This book recounts the time the author took mescalin. One would think it would be a very mesmerizing read but it's actually dull as tombs.Huxley's experience is described in the most boring and numbing words possible. This is frankly an absolute shock since I am quite fond of Brave New World. The telling is in some ways a stream of consciousness but also telling from the outside looking in while looking out from the inside...if that makes any sort of sense. Huxley seems to simultaneously describe the mescalin trip as it's happening to him and as he's being watched while having it. And this should be a very unique understanding but it just isn't. This brought me to:DNF'd after 40 pages.This will be leaving my collection.**All thoughts and opinions are my own.**
    • 4/5
      most interesting part is def the connections made bw (1) various mystical (non)conceptions of splendorous emptiness, (2) the xp of mescaline, and (3) the aesthetic meanings of material ornaments in religious art
    • 4/5
      This was an interesting read, especially in the reference frame of more modern research on human perception. Our knowledge of the inner workings of the brain has expanded considerably since Huxley's days, but he's got the basic idea narrowed down surprisingly well. It's quite a testament to how reality can be explored by looking into within.What especially stands out in this book is the quality of the writing. Huxley has extraordinary ability to convey exotic internal experiences in text, and it's no wonder the book gained quite a following during the rise of the hippie movement. I disagree with the spiritual implications Huxley drew from his experiences, but the parallels to how artists perceive the world are doubly interesting. Transporting, indeed!
    • 5/5
      Visionary piece
    • 5/5
      The best one
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      please any shopping book is there let me know
      -- subkuchsell
    • 5/5
      Aldous Huxley: respectable when one mentions "Brave New World", despised for "The Doors of Perception". This book is two books in one, the first well known. Huxley experimented with mescaline and LSD, going so far as order himself injected with many cc's of LSD on his deathbed. What a trip that must have been! He believed that LSD and other "pschedelic" drugs opened up a "valve" that normally stays closed except for intense periods when humans are mating, meditating or engaged in some intense activity. The valve is required for evolutionary survival, but it closes of much perception that is useful, just not for the everday.

      A wonderful book by a legend.
    • 5/5
      This particular reading had my mind space cornered in several areas of subjective reality. Huxley's illucidating writing was defined and very subjective of course from his own experience with the ontological experiences of perception. Subjectivity begets subjectivity, and the beauty which is invoked within this text is provacative beyond reasonable doubt, and in my opinion unparralled by any other pschedellic laureate from this particular era. Huxley was well into his fifties when Albert Hoffman's LSD came to market; leading me to believe Aldous had quite the foundation of intellect and knowledge to extrapolate upon. And the greatest Door of Perception...Huxley's wife administering LSD directly into his blood, while he lay dying in the hospital, sending him to the heavens on Nov. 22, 1963....the day John F. Kennedy was assasinated...."People are strange, when you're a Stranger"
    • 5/5
      I've never had someone parallel my thoughts on psilocybin so perfectly, yet in the absolute best wording possible... Worth a read for all of you who have had an eye-opening trip and need to consolidate some of your thoughts. Huxley somehow predicted our building of perception when we would not solidify these theories until just recently with modern neuroscience. He did it with his own doors of perception, and an excellent philosophical mindset. He predicted many things that are true. I was shocked when I found out this was written in the '50s. A true renegade of his time.
      "Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken except under doctor’s orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk. For unrestricted use, the West has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All the other chemical Doors in the Wall are labeled Dope, and their unauthorized takers are Fiends."
    • 3/5
      It was good- but pretty matter-of-fact. I felt as though he was just recounting what he did. It was interesting, but nothing novel or inspirational for me- probably because I had already known.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Wonderfully written eye opening account of another level our minds can reach.
    • 2/5
      When I first read The Doors of Perception / Heaven and Hell, most of it was lost on me, and I assumed this was because at the time I lacked any experience with psychedelics. The second time I read the book — many years and many psychedelics later — I still found myself struggling to follow along. I generally don't write negative reviews, but I think this book offers at least two valuable lessons to writers.Lesson One: don't alienate the reader.I'm not sure who Huxley's intended audience might have been, but it certainly was not the casual reader, regardless of psychedelic experience. Below is a list of the names that Huxley casually references without any explanation, seemingly under the assumption that the reader is already well familiar with each:Pickwick, Sir John Falstaff, Joe Louis, Lungarno, Meister Eckhart, Suzuki, Braque, Juan Gris, Bergson, Wordsworth, St. John of the Cross, Hakuin, Hui-neng, William Law, Laurent Tailhade, Botticelli, Ruskin, Piero, El Greco, Cosimo Tura, Watteau, Cythera, Ingres, Mme. Moitessier, Cezanne, Arnold Bennett, Vermeer, The Le Nain brothers, VuillardThat's just from the first forty pages or so. I gave up and stopped writing them down after that.Lesson Two: be clear and concise.In the passage below, Huxley describes a chair that caught his attention during his mescaline experience:--------------------I spent several minutes — or was it several centuries? — not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them — or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.--------------------Under the influence of psychedelics, I too have felt entranced by common household objects, toiled over the distinction between self & not-self, etc., so I can relate to the sentiment, but the passage above (along with many others) struck me as rather confusing.Huxley was clearly a pretty smart dude, and the book contains interesting ideas (some more believable than others), but overall the book simply left me scratching my head.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The Doors of Perception is very interesting, but Heaven and Hell is complete nonsense. The former is fascinating for being a trip report by a person born pre-1900. In addition, Huxley was definitely an excellent writer who was able to accurately relay his experience. And his experience was remarkably similar to mine! I especially enjoyed the kind of 'literary criticism' he performed during and after the experience, in which he discussed the similarities between the psychedelic experience and Buddhist notions of the dharmakāya & Buddha nature, as well as its relations to art and literature. An interesting fact that I just stumbled upon when writing this: at the time of the book, Huxley was if not blind, then quite visually impaired. This calls into question the intensely visual aspect of his experience. In the book he described with what seemed to be perfect clarity his visual experiences. How much of this was his experience, how much was mescalin, and how much was his experience with the aforementioned literature of art and visionary writers? Overall though, The Doors of Perception was compelling and well worth reading.The latter piece is a bunch of hogwash, written 2-3 years after his mescalin experience, that largely attempts to rationally explain psychedelic phenomena. Huxley seems to have drunk the Jungian Kool-Aid and sincerely believes that the chemical changes in the brain due to mescalin have the effect of allowing us to access sense-data from the collective unconscious - in his words "the Mind-at-Large". There are many similarly foolish claims here too. One could give the excuse that he lived long enough ago to make these ideas plausible, but Huxley himself opened Heaven and Hell by remarking that at that point in time (1953) the study of the mind was in the naturalist/collector stage of scientific progress, and that they were not yet ready for classification, analysis, and theory. He knew what he was doing was likely to be without merit, but he did it anyway. Skip Heaven and Hell.
    • 3/5
      An interesting read, although very lacking in parts. I enjoyed Doors of Perception quite a bit, and found Huxley's insights onto mystic visions and their relation to religion insightful. He also does a nice job giving the feeling of experiencing mescalin with him. Heave and Hell, however, was very dissappointing. I felt that most of his claims were ill founded and that he made several leaps in logic that weren't valid (like religious singing's purpose is to expel oxygen to create visions). Huxley is also very much an art scholar, so familiarity with various art styles is a must. The appendixes are worth a read as well. I would recommend this book to someone interested in how visions/drug experiences are reflected in art and the social conscience.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I bought this book a long time ago and only recently started reading it. Initially it caught my eye as something that might be interesting from a psychology perspective. Doors of Perception is difficult to define in terms of who will like it. It deals with how we perceive images, colour and the reality around us, and tries to analyse what makes this perception vivid or lacking in different people. It covers the use of drugs such as Mescalin and the effects that these drugs have on our perception. He takes the drug as part of an experiment and undergoes an interview and practical session to see how it has affected his vision and thinking.

      The book also covers many aspects of different paintings by various artists and touches on spiritual experiences. It talks about a valve that filters the world so that our brains can cope with the level of input, and how to open that valve to allow more input into our brains so that we experience beyond the normal reality.

      Large parts of the book are rambling and lack focus. It uses the word 'preternatural' more times than you will find anywhere else on earth.
      Probably a more oppressive editor would have done wonders for this book. There is some good content, largely in the latter sections of the book and the appendices, but you need a fair amount of stamina to dig them out of Huxley's clearly intelligent but rambling discourse. If he'd found someone to help shape his thoughts into a more concise and structured book it would be easier to chew. Still, if you have an interest in perception, hallucinations, or mind altering substances and experiences, you may well find some insight here. Artists with an edge in how we perceive and render colours and objects may also enjoy this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      If you ever have or ever plan to do any kind of mind-altering substance, you might want to check this book (written back in 1954 !) out, along with Timothy Leary/Ram Das (Richard Alpert) and Ralph Metzner's book _The Psychedelic Experience_ which was written back in 1964. A clear message now - be here now - when you worry about the past or try to project yourself into some certain future riddled with expectation, you will almost certainly be unsuccessful. This is also, in case you hadn't already noticed a central part of both the teachings of this guy we all know as Jesus and also of that poker/happy-faced guy from India known as Buddha.

    Book preview

    The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell - Aldous Huxley

    The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

    Aldous Huxley

    For M

    "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."

    —WILLIAM BLAKE

    Contents

    Epigraph

    The Doors of Perception

    Heaven and Hell

    Appendices

    P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

    About the Author

    Books by Aldous Huxley

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    The DOORS of PERCEPTION

    It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium Lewinii was new to science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.

    Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True, they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a position among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist’s repertory.

    Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis. Chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no longer depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed themselves with mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand, understanding of their patients’ mental processes. Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of the drug’s more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists have found out something about the mechanism of its action upon the central nervous system. And at least one professional philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.

    There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and perhaps highly significant fact was observed.* Actually the fact had been staring everyone in the face for several decades; but nobody, as it happened, had noticed it until a young English psychiatrist, at present working in Canada, was struck by the close similarity, in chemical composition, between mescalin and adrenalin. Further research revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is the mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the adrenals? It would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that some kind of a prima facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being systematically followed, the sleuths—biochemists, psychiatrists, psychologists—are on the trail.

    By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953, squarely athwart that trail. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy years of mescalin research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.

    We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

    Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or feeling into. Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

    To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true—namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside—the problems posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or autohypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about.

    From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was convinced in advance that the drug would admit me, at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake and Æ. But what I had expected did not happen. I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of many-colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I had not reckoned, it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental make-up, the facts of my temperament, training and habits.

    I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer’s ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world—a poor thing but my own—which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself.

    The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. Half an hour after swallowing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight. But at no time were there faces or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant.

    I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers—a fullblown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

    Is it agreeable? somebody asked. (During this part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)

    Neither agreeable nor disagreeable, I answered. "It just is."

    Istigkeit—wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? Is-ness. The Being of Platonic philosophy—except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

    I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing—but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like grace and transfiguration came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss—for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki’s essays. "What is the Dharma-Body

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