Doors of perception

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as
it is, infinite. -William Blake

Of course, though no one knows what the heck that means, everyone seem to repeat it. No one seems to know the guy that well. William Blake himself is primarily known for being an engraver, poet, and prophet, he is also a zany anti-Semite denier of the Old Testament. Even his other platitude " The road of excess leads to the palace of reason" is taken from a number of "Proverbs of Hell." And what's the deal with the burning tigers?

The phrase 'the doors of perception', was later used by Aldous Huxley to title his book on his experiences taking mescaline. Whereas Hunter S. Thompson went on an explosive Las Vegas bender with the same drug, Huxley delivered the following lovely gems:

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large— this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."


"Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience. "

Other than to demonstrate the fact that stoner prose has gotten progressively worse, my point in all this is as follows. We tend to look at the 'infinite' rather than the 'cleansing of the doors of perception' As much as we try to perceive, we will always be up against things beyond our grasp of reasoning. This has a lot to do with conspiracy theories.

I consider myself (rather naively) as an applied epistemologist. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the question of knowledge. In other words, how do we know the things that we know? To this end, I diligently question statistics, compare encyclopedia articles, read back issues of newspapers, and basically try to gear my mind from being a trivia lord towards being an information junkie. A trivia lord tries to take in everything that is accepted as fact, but no one else cares to know. An info junkie accepts nothing as fact, only as leads and claims that should be investigated further. In either case, it is supreme hubris of the intellect that any one person can know it all. And I know I'm not photogenic enough to go on jeopardy, so knowing things is just a pastime of nerd ego.

The cause for all this factoid metaphysics is an essay I read that had a profound effect on me. It is Losing the War by Lee Sandlin. Here is the link.

www.leesandlin.com

Basically, he writes about WWII and how it not only fails to have meaning for the generations that came after, but also how it was incomprehensible for those going through it. From Journalists to soldiers and Hitler's therapeutic opera, there were a myriad of ways to deal with the shock of war. And that shock of war made the human scale incomprehensible. Meanwhile, the sheer size of the war made it impossible for the world to make sense of it afterwards. He does a great analysis of the battle of Midway that, though speculative, seems to demonstrate the point that all perceptions of the war, even the perceptions of those actually experiencing it, are wrong!

I defended Gonzo journalism by saying that certain types of reality are done a disservice if reported accurately. Therefore, it is well advised to be use the tools of fiction to describe realities that are beyond reason. But Lee Sandlin's piece offers the alternative that there is NO WAY to describe, or experience the portions of reality that are truly transcendent. It is beyond the scope of the mind, and we can only look towards the bromide of oblivion.

This applies to conspiracy theories as such. Traditionally the Hegelian look at conspiracies was as follows:

Thesis: Most historians and witnesses say X.
Antithesis: A few witnesses and several mavericks say Y.
Synthesis: Most people believe X on paper while holding Y in the back of their mind.

This applies for everything from JFK assassination attempts (where Y is fairly strong) to '9/11 as an inside job' theories (where Y is either too crazy or there isn't enough distance yet).

But actually I think it's like this:

Thesis: Most historians and witnesses say X.
Antithesis: A few witnesses and several mavericks say Y.
Anti-Synthesis: Though X and Y are valid and believable, what really happened is Z, which is beyond your reach or perception.

I was taught that whatever God is, God is totally unlike anything you could quantify with thought. Even the perception of God's oneness (which is pretty important to a little jewish boy) is beyond any concept of oneness humans could come up with. No matter how much data, facts, proof or statistics we amass, what really goes on will forever elude us. And as an atheist, I think that's a notion of faith I can live with.


The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love. - Meister Eckhardt