Open 'The Doors of Perception' with Aldous Huxley

“Familiarity breeds contempt, and how to survive is a problem ranging in urgency from the chronically tedious to the excruciating. The outer world is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is the place where, willy-nilly, we must try to make our living. In the inner world there is neither work nor monotony. We visit it only in dreams and musings, and its strangeness is such that we never find the same world on two successive occasions. What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within! ” -- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. 1954.

In 1953, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley took hallucinogens for the first time. He reflected on his experiences in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, a pair of essays that challenge our ways of seeing the world we inhabit and create. Here, the great writer and philosopher considers our search for beauty in a sea of dullness. Huxley was chronicling a mescaline trip in The Doors of Perception, but we like to think of it as a challenge to change the way we look at the world everyday, with or without the influence of psychedelics.

Tanjun Pipe: Laundry Day
Flower: Golden Goddes Botanicals
Photo and Styling: The Grass Agency