Altered Perceptionf of Reality

I had to write this for a class - thought I'd post it here:

In one of his books, Frank Herbert posits: “Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world around us?” Certain writers, specifically Hazrat Inayat Khan, Aldous Huxley, and several Renaissance have attempted to answer this question. However, one question ultimately leads to another, and they arrived at the following: Why do altered perceptions of color and sound occur so frequently and play such a prominent role in mystical experiences? In this other universe, it is conceivable that there are sentient beings capable of communication (such as is in our universe) who attempt to do just that. We perceive our world of communication through sight (color) and sound. Within these mystic experiences, could the altered perceptions of color and sound simply be the attempt of these other beings to communicate with us?

Huxley begins by telling us of his first experience with a drug called mescaline. From what he has heard, he believes that the experience will be blunt (“I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of many-coloured geometrics, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation.”) but he describe something completely different.

Evident simply by his sudden understanding of a flower, we see that the “realm” he had entered was not so direct in its revelations. For example, as he looks at a self-proclaimed unconventional bouquet he proclaims: “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”

With mescaline, the communicator was able to express certain things about itself; such as its disregard for an object’s relation to its surroundings (“In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point.”) but rather stressing the importance of the object simply existing (“The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”); or that time is irrelevant (“ ‘There seems to be plenty of it,’ was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.”).

The other writers all refer to these same beings as deities.

Andreas Werckmeister says “So man and music stem from a single principle and origin, namely God himself, and music must therefore contain something divine.” In an instance like this, it would be prudent to understand “divine” as other-worldly.

In his conclusion, Athanasius Kircher calls a symphony of angels “incomprehensible.” He goes on to tell us of the ultimate compromise between ourselves and the sentient beings (“… the wondrous epithalamium and marriage-song of the Word of GOD who was wedded to human nature in the womb of an immaculate Virgin.”

Khan attributes all artistic inspiration to these other sentient beings. In fact, Khan believes these muses to be deities when he states: “What makes the soul of the poet dance? Music. What makes the painter paint beautiful pictures, the musician sing beautiful songs? It is the inspiration that beauty gives. The Sufi has called this beauty Saqi, the divine Giver, who gives the wine of life to all.” Before going any further, the reader must realize that music is the altered perception of just sound into purposeful rhythm. By understanding this, we see that Khan actually tells us that we all have the potential to respond, through movements that we call dance.

Werckmeister tells us that according to our ideologies, music comes from something beyond our own imaginations, supposedly from a “divine” (read super-terrestrial) source. Khan believes that communication takes place between our world and that which we cannot sense through music and dance, music signifying the message from that other world and the dance is our response. According to Kircher, there has already been a full conversation of our world and the other (“…in the womb of an immaculate Virgin.”). And Huxley gave us direct messages of what these sentient beings had to say through his unusual perceptions of reality, such as his statement declaring an abundance of time. Though there is no definite answer, there certainly is evidence to suggest another world which we can’t see, in which there are sentient beings attempting to communicate. Though we cannot understand it, their message still is given to us through the ways that they attempt to tell us (these changed experiences of reality).