the reducing valve and the therapeutic index

Recently I wrote about Aldous Huxley’s blame-the-victim attitude towards people who have bad trips. I want to expand on those thoughts. In The Doors of Perception, after describing one of his first trips, Huxley quotes a 1949 paper by C. D. Broad:

We should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

Huxley’s commentary:

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been bornthe beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

The “reducing valve” is a helpful metaphor. Huxley goes on to say that some people seem by nature to lack this valve, or have an ineffectual one. These are the natural mystics — Blake, for instance, who was quite aware that other people did not perceive what he perceived:

What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty….

But most of us, whose reducing valves are in good working order, need some external power to inhibit the working of that valve, to relax it so that more information from the Universe can stream in. This may be achieved in various ways, but Huxley prefers drugs, which are easy and efficient in comparison to old-fashioned techniques like prayer and fasting.

Huxley’s essential assumption is that almost everyone would benefit from opening their valves (AKA “cleansing the doors of perception”). Yes, some have bad trips, but that’s because they are bad people. For the rest of us, tripping is a reliable path to enlightenment.

Setting aside the question of means — Are mescaline and LSD safe and appropriate ways to open that valve? — I’d like to ask a couple of questions about ends. First of all, how does Huxley know that what he perceives when tripping is a more adequate representation of the whole of reality than what we see when our reducing valve is in good working order? Can we be sure that increased perception is increased perception of the real? It may to the tripper feel real, but how reliable are our feelings in such matters?

This is an especially important question because Huxley wants us to believe that the sense of bliss that he experienced is a genuine encounter with the Real, while the horror that others experience is a projection of their own internal disorders. As I said in my previous post: Isn’t it pretty to think so?

In evaluating these experiences, we face four possibilities:

The bliss is real, the horror is false — call this the Huxley Thesis

The bliss is false, the horror is real — call this the Lovecraft Thesis

The bliss and the horror are equally real

The bliss and the horror alike are mere projections of our own inner states

Given the mixture of Good and Bad that we experience in everyday life, it seems to me clear that the third and fourth possibilities are far more likely that either the Huxley Thesis or the Lovecraft Thesis.

And if that is so, then I strongly question the assumption — made not just by Huxley but by our current apostles of Enchantment — that an increased openness to the Ultimate is better than life with a functioning reducing valve. I don’t think everyone is prepared for what they might see when the doors of perception are cleansed. (“You can’t handle the truth!”) This is true whether what’s perceived is radical evil — see The Exorcist — or the glories of Creation — see Job’s abashed response to God’s self-proclamation in the final chapters of his story. “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exodus 33:20).

When evaluating the uses of certain drugs, scientists employ an important criterion: the therapeutic index. Some drugs have a very narrow therapeutic index, that is, the difference between the amount that is therapeutically useful and the amount that is toxic is small and difficult to calculate. Conversely, a drug with a broad therapeutic index can be administered without fear of an overdose.

My belief is that there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy (Hamlet I.5), but few of us are prepared to perceive them without incurring damage: the therapeutic index of any given strategy of re-enchantment is exceptionally narrow. Our reducing valves may well be the mercies of God, and the Christians of old were wise to embed the opening of our minds and hearts within structures of rigorous spiritual discipline. People advocating an easy re-enchantment may well be, like the snake-oil salesmen of old, prescribing poison.