Aldous Huxley's "The Doors to Perception" vol. 3

Religion is mentioned in the novel “The Doors of Perception” and is reviewed to pass a negative judgment on mind altering substances such as mescaline or LSD. Huxley was in a minority’s opinion of the matter. He felt that a mind altering substance that may seem as a religious experience should be accepted by religions. Instead he thinks the support of alcohol. This he thought was absurd and very out of character for religions considering that mind altering substances have surfaced in many cultures religions on many different continents.

He believes this urge to alter ones mind to find their own self hood is part of the “appetite of the soul.” The soul in many ways seeks to experience life in as many different ways as possible. He also notes that both the east and west have various substances that provide intoxication for the numerous souls that inhabit both sides of the world. In the west it is alcohol and pills of various sorts while in the east it is opium and hashish. This is a good point to make to bring the east and west together because it sheds light on the fact that both cultures offer the same things in a different form. This should unify people with this common interest, not divide them.

Huxley made strong point about this use of these substances within their respective cultures. They offer a person the ability to comprehend and translate the meaning of things they had not before taken the time to decipher. This is true of many people any where in the world. Do these people try to lable things in one specific cold case order? No, instead they look for multiple meanings in the things that a sober person would find uninteresting and entirely unimportant. To a user of any mind altering drugs the concept of keeping a concept written in stone and only for that stone (or matter of discussion of labeling) seems almost like copywriting a concept that has a copy right law on multiple trendy items that a culture misinterprets nearly every day in their life.