Aldous Huxley - Language and Perception

To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those simple systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born. The beneficiary, inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim, insofar as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness, and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which in the language of religion is called this world is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and as it were, petrified by language. The various other worlds with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to mind at large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of bypass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others, temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously or as the result of deliberate spiritual exercises, or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary bypasses there flows, not indeed the perception of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe, for the bypass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of mind at large, but something more than and above all something different from the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality. As mind at large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there may be extrasensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an obscure knowledge that all is in all, that all is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.