EXPLORING ANTIPODES
Schickel, Richard
Exploring Antipodes Heaven and Hell, by Aldous Huxley. Harper. 103 pp. $2. Reviewed by Richard Schickel ALDOUS HUXLEY, a man of tireless curiosity, has lately been occupying himself with...
...In this hell one suffers intense individualization, whereas in the visionary heaven one enjoys great deindividualization...
...Only in the last three pages, where Huxley attempts to bring this information to bear on the question of immortality, did this reader find his credulity strained...
...Our love of rare jewels and fireworks, of both non-objective and landscape painting, of spectacular stagecraft and of the intricacies revealed by close inspection of flowers and even grains of sand are all related to this psychological need to be transported to the realm of the mind which is just beyond the usually closed door at the far edge of everyday perception, but which we have all glimpsed now and then when a fresh wind has blown the door ajar...
...His great service is to advance a kind of unified field theory, based solidly on psychological truths, which brings together into a single hypothesis many previously unrelated ideas about the relationship of certain art forms and cultural phenomena to psychology...
...Nevertheless, Heaven and Hell is no search for Bridey Murphy...
...many of us enjoy technicolored movies...
...Whether one is transported to heaven or hell when he seeks to explore the mind's antipodes seems to depend on the psychological health of the subject...
...In an earlier book, The Doors of Perception, Huxley described the visions of transcendent beauty (and sometimes horror) which the imbiber of such drugs as mescalin and lysergic acid sees...
...There is, of course, a visual hell as well as heaven, and it is viewed by many a neurotic or psychotic...
...As such it is a most provocative book...
...But all of us seek a visionary heaven through art, if not through fasting, prayer, flagellation, or mescalin...
...He explains that the physiological effects of mescalin (which is non-habit forming) are similar to those induced by the fasting and self-abuse of mystics...
...In Heaven and Hell he relates these drug-induced experiences not only to those of religious mystics but to the endeavors of many artists as well...
...it represents a search for rational answers to some of the oldest and most interesting questions with which the mind of man has grappled...
...Throughout history, Huxley points out, man has sought these Edens...
...both have the effect of lowering the mind's and body's resistance to the dreamlike visions which usually begin as abstract designs that are gradually transformed into jeweled architecture or Utopian islands of indescribable beauty...
...Reviewed by Richard Schickel ALDOUS HUXLEY, a man of tireless curiosity, has lately been occupying himself with explorations of what he calls "the mind's antipodes," the realm of visionary (but not necessarily mystical) experiences which seem to lie just above and be yond the ordinary day to day workings of the mind...
...Huxley says that in our chrome and stainless steel world the "vision inducing" properties of the glittering and the highly polished have been cheapened and that we are looking for new forms to satisfy the old needs...
...He takes mescalin...
...Huxley presents his ideas with modesty becoming a first explorer of new and vast terrain...
Vol. 20 • September 1956 • No. 9
