Brand Verzer aimed at the happy freak, he doesn't wear a tie-dye, he doesn't preach free love, he doesn't trip on acid, the best of knowledge, the Hillsdale professor, Russell Kirk biographer, and father of six, arguably serves as the archetype of everything he isn't. But that doesn't prevent him from admiring Aldous Huxley. Verzer once called Huxley one of his quote favorite 20th-century figures unquote. Yeah, in first glance, such a compliment seemed as unlikely as Bonne offered Mari Nichi, but Verzer's appreciation for Huxley isn't misplaced.
Huxley was far more profound than the average circa 1965 hate ash braid innocent might have realized. So the doors released the first single in 1967, break-on through to the other side, a tribute of source to Aldous Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception. You see, Hux had been trying to break-on through to the other side for years. He put together a splendid book in the 1940s called The Perennial Philosophy, which looks at the empirical theology of saints and sages when it comes to the macro issues, contemplation, the ground of existence, truth, charity, suffering, and a score of other subjects.
He got to check it out sometime. It's approach kind of reasonable as he appendixes C.S. Lewis as the abolition of man, but expanded 500 fold of them. I'm not exaggerating this.
It's a fairly thick book. You get mostly just excerpts of other writings and an anthology of sorts. But anyway, it seemed like Huxley was always knocking on the door, trying to get through to something that wasn't part of everyday experience. When he read about Dr.
Humphrey Osman's experiments with Mescaline in Canada, Huxley wrote to him about trying it. Osman later came to Huxley's Hollywood home and administered the trip, which lasted from about 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. on May 4th, 1953.
It was, said Huxley by Aldous Huxley biographer Nicholas Murray, the most famous quote English literary drug taking since De Quincey took opium. De Quincey wrote the confessions of an English opium eater, something like that. Huxley later wrote about the experience in The Doors of Perception, which was published 70 years ago in 1954. It became one of the most important books in the 1960s counter-cultured canon.
The Beatles even put Huxley on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which featured people that Beatles would would invite to a party. It became Huxley's second most recognized book, After Brave New World, the 1960s generation loved Huxley. In return, Huxley deplored them. And that fact has escaped us.
It is a part of our pop culture memory, and neither is a fact that Huxley didn't think psychedelics were that great. When he decided to try psychedelics, Huxley was convinced they would admit him, quote, into the kind of inner world described by unquote, way of like, they didn't. Huxley knew it. Here's a quote from Huxley.
I am also foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of Mescaline or of any other drug prepared in the future, prepared or in the future, prepareable with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life, enlightenment, the beatific vision finishes quote. It's basically Huxley saying, no drugs are going to to be a beatific vision. I don't think that. He's trying out for the reasons.
And he apparently tried Mescaline only once more, even though, according to the Baga from Murray, the psychedelic experience and the quote, Fauna and Flora are the deeper subconscious on quote, explore by psychedelics, continue to fasten Huxley. All right, shift forward in 2024, 70 years after Huxley's experiment, a sleuss of ideas are trying to break on through to the other side. You see it all over today, thinkers and writers are trying to reach understanding a way of knowing or seeing that doesn't rely on what Russell Kirk decried as quote defecated rationality, unquote, a view of the world governed by abstract ideas detached from the permanent things, another favorite Kirk term, and logical conclusions loosely derived from the instructions. These movements are all over the place.
Again, trying to get beyond defecated rationality and abstractions for my mind, like our Cartesian ideas that we just didn't apply all sorts of weird ideas. We were being detached from embodied experiences because it comes from our heads, and we rationalize from them. And people are finally understanding that beginning to close out since the time of day card that these things just don't work. And these movements are popping up and it's so many of them.
It's impossible to catalog the movements, but they are popping up like mushrooms on a wood pile after heavy rain, like Merlin's shelter exploration, a fungus of all things, and his book in Tango Life. And how mushrooms, mycelium, I believe I pronounced it, mycelium's coordinated activity might point to a different way of knowing that defies rationality, much along the lines of quote unquote systems theory, which causes human knowledge as a mass of dynamic interconnected in some ways mysterious networks. Another fascinated person, Diana Passuca, author of encounters experiences with non human intelligences, and also author of American cosmic UFO's religion technology, and also a Joe Rogan guest that describes the different kinds of knowing and seeing offered by UFOs, the possibility of angels, the mystery that is the shot of current. And one UFO's experience was chance of meeting with Fulton Sheen that changed his experience of life.
As a corollary, she also describes how media, culture, and ingrained presuppositions of skier are ability to seek differently. At one point, citing the quote unquote invisible ape experiment in which researchers quote, showed a group of subjects to videos of people passing the basketball. They're asked to count the number of passes. And one of the videos, a person wearing a gorilla suit makes an entrance and walks slowly through the basketball players as they pass the ball to one another.
The researchers found that only half of the subjects noticed that the enormous gorilla had has to the scene, the other half didn't notice it. There's even a neo psychedelic movement, the federal government fed up with Timothy Larry's self-righteous and irresponsible promotion of LSD, classified most psychedelics that schedule one's control substances thereby stigmatizing them and killing ongoing medical studies. And by the way, if you're into Joe Rogan, he was with good evidence, says there's a whole another reason to get rid of psychedelics, it was to kill the anti war movement. Anyway, today many scientists are discovering that psychedelics have potential medical medicinal uses, especially in micro doses, and people are again turning on knocking on that door.
Again, all different ways of seeing getting past the door. Now, our recent essay in the new criterion refers to Ian McGilcrest's hemisphere hypothesis as a quote unquote Copernican revolution in metaphysics. I don't think that praises adsorbent it. McGilcrest publishes bestseller the master in his ministry in 2009.
He filed it with his massive two volume matter of things in 2021, the daunting and nuanced works, but the books can be boiled out at three points. First point, the left hemisphere's and right hemisphere's brains do the same things but in different ways, they attend to the world differently. Two, among other things, the left hemisphere tries to apprehend the world, and the right hemisphere seeks to comprehend it. The left hemisphere is a part of the brain that gets things done, it values things like mental shortcuts, and the explicit knowledge that allows it to function effectively.
The right hemisphere leans toward nuance and mystery, embracing even the paradoxical and respects implicit knowledge that can't be articulated. Three, even though the right hemisphere is supposed to be the master, the left hemisphere has usurped the master's role. Modern culture is a left hemisphere culture is creating all sorts of problems. Let's shift a bit.
Before he became a philosopher, Harvard Divinity Schools, David Abraham worked magic gigs. He traveled the world as an itinerant magician and worked as a house magician at Alice's restaurant. Yeah, that's the same restaurant that inspired Arnold Guthrie's famous Vietnam protest song, which kind of sucks. But no matter.
Anyway, the magician Abraham says something weird happened while he's working as the house magician there at Alice's. Every night Merlin Sheldon explains entangled life, Abraham's quote passed around the tables, coins walk through his fingers, reappeared exactly where they should disappear to get divided into vanishing to nothing, unquote. One day, two customers in the previous day came back to the restaurant as Abraham, if you spike their drinks. After they left the show, the customers told them the sky was shockingly blue and the clouds large and vivid.
Abraham assured them that he hadn't spiked their drinks. But then the same thing kept occurring, customers coming back to the restaurant to ask what it happened to them. And Sheldon explains, quote, customers returned to state of traffic and seemed louder than it was before. The streetlights brighter, the pattern of the sidewalk more fascinating, the rain more refreshing, the magic tricks were changing the way people experienced the world, unquote.
Now, Abraham, the magician didn't know why this was happening. But Abraham, the philosopher had a hunch, magicians, Abraham notes, take advantage of people's blind spots, blind spots come from people's preconceptions that are the product their expectations. When magic tricks produce results that people don't expect their preconceptions get shaken. The result blind spots get removed.
And because blind spots are our ordinary way of perceiving things when they get removed, we see the world as it is, not as refracted through expectations and preconceptions. And the world as it really is, is far more beautiful and awesome than people customarily think. It's a recurrent theme throughout the modern era. Henry David Thoreau, for instance, wrote, quote, if you would make a claims with the ferns, you must forget your botany, unquote, a hundred years later, Huxley experienced the same thing with Dr.
Osmond after taking Mescalin, he described looking at a base of flowers, he said, quote, I was seen what Adam has seen on the morning of his creation, the miracle moment by moment of naked existence. Is it agreeable or disagreeable? Someone asked, neither agreeable nor disagreeable, I answered, it just is. Huxley's describing experience of no preconceptions, no preconceptions, no expectations, just seeing things as they actually are.
Now, he later described looking at a wall of books like this, quote, like the flowers they glowed when I looked at them with brighter colors, a profound significance, red books like rubies, emerald books, books bound in white jade. Our left hemispheres are overactive and controlling seismic illcrest. Because the left hemisphere is responsible for day to day living and surviving, it likes things to be predictable. It welcomes preconceptions and expectations.
It is a oblivious to and completely comfortable with the resulting blind spots. If the left hemisphere grip on people's minds can be loosened, the girl cress says their perceptions will change, they will see into the depths of things all at once and recognize them for what they are, no longer overlaid by our projections, or as the magician discovered her expectations. Anyway, when this happens, the conventional notions and mental cliches we live by in our everyday world will get shoved aside. And the quote unquote Hall of Mirrors, one of the girl cress's favorite phrases to describe our left hemisphere perception and experience will come crashing down as we see things in the naked, beautiful existence.
We will then get a taste of Huxley's experience with Mescaline. We'll get a glimpse of what Thoreau saw at Walden. We become like those patrons at Alice's restaurant. We start to break through that door to the other side.
Okay, in conclusion, a former Marine taught me jurisprudence and Notre Dame. Professor Charles Rice was a tough Irishman, a no nonsense guy who raised 10 children, was fiercely loyal to the Catholic Church and provided much intellectual firepower to the early pro-life movement. I think it back to 1990s. I don't think he carried much rabies.
In class one day, he said, and this was close to exact quote, you don't need to wear sandals to be counter cultural, you just need to be a good Catholic. Now the advice from Rice to be a good Catholic, that wasn't surprising, but his implicit suggestion that would be counter cultural, that struck me then and is stuck with me for decades. Now, at the same time that Charles Rice was teaching jurisprudence, explaining natural law and fighting against abortion, the postmodern icon, Mr. Michael Foucault was traveling to San Francisco bathhouses at the height of the AIDS crisis, engaging in such reckless homosexual extravagance that biographers have speculated he had a death wish.
Now, I don't think I can find two guys more different than Michelle, Foucault, and Charles Rice, not even Aldous Huxley and Brad Burser. Shortly before AIDS killed him, Foucault told followers that Western civilization and his governments had reached such massive penopticon power that it needed to be resisted how it was possible. He coined the term quote, counter conduct, unquote, describe any method of resisting the power structures, such as creating different ways of thinking that defy the mainstream, disrupting surveillance, building solidarity with other like minor resistors. The ex-Marine, Charlie Rice, urge counterculture resistance at the same time, the homosessentially promiscuous Foucault urge counter conduct.
I think they were both right. But whereas Rice framed his advice in terms of resistance and anti-Catholic culture, and Foucault framed it in terms of resistance to the modern power structures, I'd frame it in terms of resistance to the left hemisphere. We are Miguel Cress Warren's engaged in a deathmatch with the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is apparently intent on eliminating our right hemisphere.
Artificial intelligence says Miguel Cress might be the left hemisphere's endgame. Unfortunately, there's not much you and I can do about it. We're mostly helpless, but only mostly. We have one form of resistance.
We can be countercultural in our day to day living. We can engage in Foucaultian counter conduct. We can be guerrilla resistance fighters against left hemisphere's enveloping and mechanistic doom. We can do the things that the left hemisphere hates or doesn't understand.
There are scores of possibilities. Heck, they're probably hundreds. A handful, we can repoetry. We can do angels things.
We can garden and golf and birdwatch. But without the left hemisphere's obsession with success. I mean, go out there and scatter sees haphazardly play without a scorecard. Don't keep a list of all the species.
We could take an interest in the things around us, things that don't fall within the left hemisphere power structures, join a service club, drink with friends at a local bar, spend time with people for no purpose. And for the fricking love of Charlie Rice, don't quote unquote network, love some word, hate it. Anyway, there are many more ways exercising right hemisphere and resist left hemisphere's looming dominance. Find these things and pursue them whatever suits your taste.
You'll then be doing your part to stop the left hemisphere's quest to quelch the right hemisphere. It might not make much of a difference, but it'll at least make a difference in your life into those closest to you, which is after all, the only difference that ultimately matters. Thanks for listening.