Natural History of Visions, Aldous Huxley
Natural History of Visions
I shall begin this lecture with a question. It is one of those seemingly innocent but extremely searching and profound questions which inquisitive children pose to their parents and their parents simply don’t know how to answer and so just say, Well, now, don’t be silly, run along and play. It is a question like, Why is grass green? To answer that question you have to go into botany, biochemistry, physics, astronomy, and even metaphysics or theology. Similarly, this question which I am going to start with, though perhaps not so searching as Why is grass green? is one which takes us very far afield. The question is, Why are precious stones precious? And we shall find that in the course of trying to answer this question we shall go a long way into the whole problem of the structure of the mind and the relation of what I may call the stranger and more remote areas of the mind with all kinds of cultural and religious and philosophical aspects of our life.
Why are precious stones precious? The moment one starts to think about this question, it seems unutterably queer that human beings in the course of history should have spent such an enormous amount of time, energy, and money on collecting transparent or variously coloured pebbles and hoarding them up and cutting them and setting them in the most elaborate forms and fighting battles over them. There is quite obviously no economic justification. Of course, if one does have a lot of precious stones, given the fact that they are by convention precious, it does help one economically. But precious stones in themselves don’t help us in any basic way. You can’t eat precious stones, you can’t till the soil with precious stones; there is nothing they can do for you.
Even from a purely aesthetic point of view, the preciousness of precious stones is very strange. One wonders exactly why they have such great charm. They can’t be said to be beautiful in the sense that works of art are beautiful. A work of art is beautiful in the sense that it has parts which are beautifully harmonized. A work of art, whether it is musical art or visual art or poetic art, is always a system, but a precious stone is simply a single object; it is like a single note out of a piece of music. Now, if you play a single note, although it may have a great deal of charm, it is not something that you feel to be intrinsically very beautiful; but in regard to precious stones, people will spend tremendous energies and time and money in trying to get hold of them. So we see that there must be something in the precious stone to which the human mind responds in a very obscure and, on the face of it, rather unaccountable way.
One of the reasons for our interest in precious stones is given, curiously enough, in the Phaedo, where Socrates is speaking about the ideal world, a basic metaphysical idea of Plato. Socrates says that there is an ideal world, of which our world is in a sense a rather bad copy, beyond and above the material world.
In this other earth the colours are much purer and more brilliant than they are down here. The mountains and stones have a richer gloss, a livelier transparency and intensity of hue. The precious stones of this lower world, our highly prized cornelians, topazes, emeralds, jaspers and all the rest of them are but tiny fragments of these stones above. In the other earth there is no stone but that is precious and equals in beauty every gem of ours.
Plato adds that the view of this earth is ‘a sight to gladden the beholder’s eye’. This is a very curious remark because it makes quite clear that when Plato speaks about the ideal world, he isn’t speaking merely of a metaphysical idea. This other world has a landscape with stones and mountains in it, and these stones and mountains have the quality precisely of precious stones in our world. More than a mere philosophic abstraction, it is something which exists in the human mind, which is part of our inner world of thought and feeling and insight, and which, in a certain sense, we can actually see. This inner world is what I call the world of visions, and it has something very closely to do with the preciousness of precious stones. But before we get into this, let me talk a little in general about the different regions of man’s inner world.
We carry about inside our skulls a large and very variegated universe, with regions in it exceedingly strange, regions which most of us at most times don’t penetrate at all, but which are always there. There is the world of memory, of fantasy and imagination, and of dreams closely connected with what the Freudians and the Jungians call the personal unconscious. There is the world of what Jung calls the collective unconscious, with archetypal forms and symbols which seem to be common to all human beings. And there is, finally, the most remote of all our inner worlds, which I call the world of visions. It is literally another world, very different from the personal worlds of our experience.
Now let me elaborate a little on these classifications, first of all on the world of memory. Memory is something unutterably strange, as anybody who has ever thought about it must have discovered, and one of the strangest facts about memory is that it can be clearly divided into two quite distinct and separate types. There is the memory which may be called complete recall, the actual re-living in present time of past experience; and there is what we normally call memory, which is a much vaguer and more concentrated form.
Complete recall is something which a few people seem to be capable of all the time. It was said of the great American novelist Thomas Wolfe that he had the capacity for complete recall. As a novelist myself I can see that this would be in some ways a great advantage, but in other ways it must be extremely difficult to deal with because it must be very hard to know when to stop. If one has absolutely complete recall of everything that has happened to one, one can obviously go on writing for just as long as one’s life has lasted without ever coming to an end, and this we do see in Wolfe’s books. But one can also see in his books an extraordinary vividness in everything that he visualized.
Most of us do not have this capacity at will, but in certain circumstances it can be evoked in a great number of people. It can be evoked, for example, by means of hypnosis. The hypnotized person can bring to the surface all kinds of material which he has consciously forgotten—and in the utmost detail. Something like complete recall can also be evoked in a state of reverie, particularly if the person in reverie is prompted and helped by a capable psychiatrist or psychologist. And there are certain drugs which will help evoke recall. During the Second World War battle fatigue resulting in breakdowns, very often with hysterical blindness or deafness or paralysis, was treated either by hypnosis or, when there was no time to administer hypnosis, by giving such drugs as sodium amytal or ether, which somehow lowered the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious and permitted the recall of the traumatic material which was causing the trouble. The psychiatrists were then able to produce an abreaction to this material and were able to get these unfortunate soldiers out of their traumatic condition.
There seems to be no doubt at all, from the evidence of hypnosis and of drugs, that all of our experiences are stored in the mind and, under certain favourable circumstances, may be completely recalled. In recent years the eminent Canadian surgeon Wilder Penfield has done some very interesting experiments during his brain operations on people who had epilepsy of a kind which is due to brain damage. As you know, the brain feels no pain at all; consequently the operations are performed under a local anaesthetic just sufficient to permit the skull to be opened.
While the patients were on the table, Penfield would touch certain areas of the temporal lobe with a tiny electrode, and this would evoke a complete recall of incidents which had happened many years before. So there was this very strange phenomenon of the patient existing in two worlds simultaneously, in the operating room and in some place, possibly thousands of miles away and many years earlier, which the touch of the electrode had caused him suddenly to recall in its full intensity and with all the emotions which he had at the time. When a particular spot was touched again, exactly the same recall would be produced, as though a record had been put on and were being replayed. Whether or not this peculiarity of localized recall in the brain is confined to epileptic patients, I don’t think anybody knows, and I rather hope nobody will try experiments on normal people, cutting holes in their skulls, to find the answer. Meanwhile, we see that there are these possibilities of physically inducing complete recall.
On the rare occasions when total recall happens, it is obviously of extraordinary interest. A total recall has never happened to me, but people who have had them find them very exciting and also
