Breaking Through to the Other Side
Breaking Through to the Other Side
Iain McGilchrist is Explaining What Aldous Huxley was Trying to Experience
Brad Birzer ain’t a hippy freak. He doesn’t wear tie-dye, preach free love, or trip on acid. The Hillsdale professor, Russell Kirk biographer, and father of six arguably serves as the archetype of everything a hippy isn’t.
But that doesn’t prevent him from admiring Aldous Huxley. Birzer calls Huxley one of his “favorite twentieth-century figures.” On first glance, such a compliment seems as unlikely as Bonhoeffer admiring Nietzsche, but Birzer’s appreciation for Huxley isn’t misplaced. Huxley was far more profound than the average circa-1965 Haight-Ashbury denizen might have realized.
The Doors released their first single in 1967: “Break on Through (to the Other Side),” a tribute of sorts to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.
Huxley had been trying to break on through to the other side for years. He put together a splendid book in the 1940s called The Perennial Philosophy, which looks at the empirical theology of saints and sages when it comes to the “macro” issues: contemplation, the ground of existence, truth, charity, suffering, and a score of other subjects. Its approach resembles the appendix to C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, expanded 500-fold.
It seems Huxley was always knocking on the door, trying to get through to something that wasn’t part of everyday experience. When he read about Dr. Humphry Osmond’s experiments with mescalin in Canada, Huxley wrote to him about trying it. Osmond later came to Huxley’s Hollywood home and administered the trip, which lasted from about 11:00 AM until 7:00 PM on May 4, 1953.
It was, said biographer Nicholas Murray, the most famous “English literary drug taking since DeQuincey” took opium. Huxley later wrote about the experience in The Doors of Perception, which was published seventy years ago, in 1954. It became one of the most important books in the 1960s counterculture canon. The Beatles put Huxley on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (which featured people the Beatles would invite to a party). It became Huxley’s second most-recognized book (after Brave New World). The 1960s generation loved Huxley.
In return, Huxley deplored that generation. That fact isn’t part of our pop culture memory, and neither is the fact that Huxley didn’t think psychedelics were that great. When he decided to try psychedelics, Huxley was convinced they would admit him “into the kind of inner world described by” William Blake. They didn’t. Huxley knew it:
I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision.
He apparently tried mescalin only once more, even though, according to Murray, the psychedelic experience and “the fauna and flora of the deeper subconscious” explored by psychedelics continued to fascinate him.
Seventy years after Huxley’s experiment, a sluice of ideas is trying to break on through to the other side.
Thinkers and writers are trying to reach an understanding, a way of knowing or seeing, that doesn’t rely on what Russell Kirk decried as “defecated rationality,” a view of the world governed by abstract ideas detached from “permanent things” (another favorite Kirk term) and logical conclusions ruthlessly derived from the abstractions.
It's impossible to catalog the movements, but they’re popping up like mushrooms on a woodpile after heavy rain, like Merlin Sheldrake’s exploration of fungus in Entangled Life and how mycelium’s coordinated activity might point to a different way of knowing that defies rationality, much along the lines of “systems theory,” which posits human knowledge as a mass of dynamic and interconnected (and in some ways mysterious) networks.
Diana Pasulka, author of Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences and American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, and Joe Rogan guest, describes the different kinds of knowing and seeing offered by UFOs, the possibility of angels, the mystery that is the Shroud of Turin, and one UFO experiencer’s chance meeting with Fulton Sheen that changed his experience of life. As a corollary, she also describes how media, culture, and engrained presuppositions obscure our ability to see differently, at one point citing the “Invisible Ape” experiment in which researchers
showed a group of subjects two videos of people passing a basketball. They were asked to count the number of passes. In one of the videos a person wearing a gorilla suit makes an entrance and walks slowly through the basketball players as they pass the ball to one another. [The researchers] found that half of the subjects did not notice that an enormous gorilla had passed through the scene.
There’s even a neo-psychedelic movement. The federal government, fed up with Timothy Leary’s self-righteous and irresponsible promotion of LSD and wanting to kill the anti-war movement, classified most psychedelics as Schedule 1 Controlled Substances, thereby stigmatizing them and killing ongoing medical studies. Today, many scientists are discovering that psychedelics have potential medicinal uses, especially in micro-doses, and people are again “turning on” and knocking on that door.
A recent essay in The New Criterion refers to Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere hypothesis as a “Copernican revolution in metaphysics.” The praise isn’t excessive.
McGilchrist published his bestseller, The Master and His Emissary, in 2009. He followed it with his massive two-volume The Matter with Things, in 2021. They’re daunting and nuanced works, but the books can be boiled down to three points:
1. The left hemispheres and right hemispheres of our brains do the same things but in different ways: they attend to the world differently.
2. Among other things, the left hemisphere tries to apprehend the world and the right hemisphere seeks to comprehend it. The left hemisphere is the part of the brain that gets things done. It values things like mental shortcuts and the explicit knowledge that allows it to function effectively. The right hemisphere leans toward nuance and mystery, embracing even the paradoxical, and respects implicit knowledge that can’t be articulated.
3. Even though the right hemisphere is supposed to be the master, the left hemisphere has usurped the master role. Modern culture is a left-hemispheric culture, and it’s creating all sorts of problems.
Before he became a philosopher, Harvard Divinity School's David Abram worked magic gigs.
He traveled the world as an itinerant magician and worked as the house magician at Alice's Restaurant (the same restaurant that inspired Arlo Guthrie's famous Vietnam War protest song). Abram said something weird happened at Alice's.
“Every night," Merlin Sheldrake explains in Entangled Life, he "passed around the tables; coins walked through his fingers, reappeared exactly where they shouldn't, disappeared again, divided in two, vanished into nothing."
One day, two customers came back to the restaurant and asked Abram if he had spiked their drinks. After they left the show, the customers told him, the sky was "shockingly blue and the clouds large and vivid." Abram assured them he hadn't spiked their drinks.
And then the same thing kept occurring: customers coming back to the restaurant to ask what had happened to them. In Sheldrake's words:
Customers returned to say the traffic had seemed louder than it was before, the streetlights brighter, the patterns on the sidewalk more fascinating, the rain more refreshing. The magic tricks were changing the way people experienced the world.
Abram the magician didn't know why this was happening, but Abram the philosopher had a hunch.
Magicians, Abram notes, take advantage of people's blind spots. Blind spots come from people's preconceptions that are the product of their expectations. When magic tricks produce results that people don't expect, their preconceptions get shaken.
The result?
Blind spots get removed. And because blind spots are our ordinary way of perceiving things, when they get removed, we see the world as it is, not as refracted through expectations and preconceptions. And the world as it really is, is far more beautiful and awesome than people customarily think.
It's a recurring theme throughout the modern era. Henry David Thoreau, for instance, wrote, "If you would make acquaintance with the ferns, you must forget your botany." A hundred years later, Huxley experienced the same thing with Dr. Osmond after taking mescalin. He described looking at a vase of flowers:
I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation--the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
"Is it agreeable or disagreeable?" someone asked.
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "It just is."
No preconceptions, no expectations. Just seeing things as they actually are. He later described looking at a wall of books:
Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz . . .
Our left hemispheres are over-active and controlling, says McGilchrist.
Because the left hemisphere is responsible for day-to-day living (and surviving), it likes things to be predictable. It welcomes preconceptions and expectations. It is oblivious to, and completely comfortable with, the resulting blind spots.
If the left hemisphere's grip on people's minds can be loosened, McGilchrist says, their perceptions will change. They will see "into the depth of things . . . all at once [and] recognize them for what they are, no longer overlaid by our projections."
When this happens, the conventional notions and mental clichés we live by in our everyday world get shoved aside, and the "hall of mirrors" (a favorite McGilchrist phrase to describe our left-hemispheric perception and experience) will come crashing down as we see things in their naked--beautiful--existence.
We then get a taste of Huxley's experience with mescalin. We get a glimpse of what Thoreau saw at Walden. We become like those patrons at Alice's Restaurant.
We start to break through that door to the other side.
A former marine taught me jurisprudence at Notre Dame.
Professor Charles Rice was a tough Irishman, a no-nonsense guy who raised ten children, was fiercely loyal to the Catholic Church, and provided much intellectual firepower to the early pro-life movement.
I don’t think he much cared for hippies. In class one day, he said, “You don’t need to wear sandals to be counter-cultural. You just need to be a good Catholic.”
Advice from Rice to “be a good Catholic” wasn’t surprising, but his implicit suggestion that we “be counter-cultural”? That struck me then and has stuck with me for decades.
At the same time that Charles Rice was teaching jurisprudence, explaining natural law, and fighting against abortion, postmodernist icon Michel Foucault was traveling to San Fransisco bathhouses at the height of the AIDS crisis, engaging in such reckless homosexual extravagance that biographers have speculated he had a death wish.
I don’t think I could find two guys more different than Michel Foucault and Charles Rice, not even a hippie and Brad Birzer.
Shortly before AIDS killed him, Foucault told followers that Western civilization and its governments had reached such massive “panopticon” power that they needed to be resisted however possible. He coined the term “counter-conduct” to describe any method of resisting the power structures: creating different ways of thinking that defied the mainstream, disrupting surveillance, and building solidarity with other like-minded resisters.
The ex-marine Rice urged counter-cultural resistance at the same time the homosexually promiscuous Foucault urged counter-conduct.
I think they were both right, but whereas Rice framed his advice in terms of resistance to an anti-Catholic culture and Foucault framed it in terms of resistance to the modern power structures, I’d frame it in terms of resistance to the left hemisphere.
We are, McGilchrist warns, engaged in a death match with the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere wants to eliminate our right hemisphere. Artificial intelligence, says McGilchrist, might be the left hemisphere’s end game.
Unfortunately, there’s not much you and I can do about it. We’re mostly helpless.
But only “mostly.” We have one form of resistance: we can be counter-cultural in our day-to-day living. We can engage in Foucauldian counter-conduct. We can be guerrilla resistance fighters against the left hemisphere’s enveloping and mechanistic doom.
We can do the things that the left hemisphere hates or doesn’t understand. There are scores of possibilities. We can read poetry. We can do aimless things. We can garden and golf and bird watch, but without the left hemisphere’s obsession with success (scatter seeds haphazardly; play without a scorecard; don’t keep a list of all the species).
We can take an interest in the things around us, things that don’t fall within the left-hemispheric power structures. Join a service club. Drink with friends at a local bar. Spend time with people for no purpose (for the love of Charles Rice, don’t “network”).
There are many more ways to exercise your right hemisphere and resist the left hemisphere’s looming dominance. Find them and pursue them.
You’ll then be doing your part to stop the left hemisphere’s quest to quelch the right hemisphere. It might not make much of a difference, but it’ll at least make a difference in your life and to those closest to you, which is the only difference that ultimately matters.
Eric Scheske is a writer in Sturgis, Michigan. He is a former National Catholic Register columnist and Gilbert Magazine editor. He has written for dozens of publications, including Touchstone, the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, Columbia, Our Sunday Visitor, Philosophy Now, and Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture.