Some thoughts on surviving the mundane from Aldous Huxley’s 'The Doors of Perception'

“To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness – to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.” – Aldous Huxley

As we settle in for three-plus weeks of forced isolation, we’re doing what people with too much time on their hands do: questioning the meaning of existence. With introspection inevitable in the coming days, we’ve employed Aldous Huxley’s great psychedelic essay, The Doors of Perception, to keep us sane. Huxley championed the use of psychedelics, like Mescaline, to shake us “out of  the ruts of ordinary perception,” acknowledging that, “The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.” 

While we didn’t think to stockpile hallucinogens before the lockdown, we’re comforted by Huxley’s comments on perception, and his wide-eyed way of seeing things as mundane as a pair of pants, or a chair in the shade: 

“For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. To-day the precept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I saw, that I could not be aware of anything else.” 

There’s no time like the present to shed our preconceived notions and take a long, hard look inside. Open your eyes and open the doors of perception. 

Love, 
The Grass Agency

P.S. s/o to James Edmonson of Oakland-based foundry Oh No Type Co. We made this type treatment using Chee, one of his fonts. It came with a really nice personal note from James. It’s the little things that count right now, so keep making things and support the artists in your life!