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book1954

The Doors of Perception

Disciplines:
psychedelics
consciousness
literature/huxley

Summary

Aldous Huxley's 1954 account of his mescaline experience — arguing that psychedelics work by reducing the brain's filtering function, allowing more of reality (which Huxley associated with Bergson's Mind at Large) to enter consciousness — the founding text of the psychedelic intellectual movement.

Core Contribution

Proposed the filter theory of consciousness — the brain doesn't produce consciousness but filters it, reducing the infinite to what is biologically useful — and that psychedelics temporarily reduce this filter, giving access to wider consciousness that mystics access through other means.

Historical Influences

Aldous Huxley

Intellectual Lineage

Aldous Huxley ResearchHollywood California

Allied Works

The Perennial Philosophy Irreducible Mind

Contemporaries & Peers

Brave New World Heaven and Hell

Minds Influenced

Psychedelic research Jeff Kripal Jonathan Bi

Intellectual Posterity

The Doors of Perception Filter theory of consciousnessDoorsPsychedelic intellectual movement

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