Opening the Doors of Perception

Book excerpt: An eye-opening response to Aldous Huxley’s widely influential work on psychedelics, physical reality, and consciousness What exactly are hallucinations? Are they actually doors to another reality? Anthony Peake thinks so. In this stunning book, he takes Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and updates it using the latest information from quantum mechanics, neurochemistry, and consciousness studies. Most human beings perceive the doors of perception as being securely closed. But here, Peake analyzes the concept of ‘the scale of transcendence’ and suggests there is a scale of perceptions whereby the doors are slowly opened, bit by bit, to reveal the true nature of reality. For ‘normal’ people, glimpses of this reality—what the Gnostics called ‘The Pleroma’—are experienced during ‘noetic’ experiences. However, for others, the doors are prized open by certain neurological processes starting with migraine and progressing through various altered states such as temporal lobe epilepsy, bipolar syndrome, autism, and schizophrenia. A pioneering work on the relationship between physical reality and consciousness, Opening the Doors of Perception suggests that man can, indeed, perceive reality in its true glory.