The Doors Of Perception
''The Doors of Perception'' is an autobiographical book written by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it elaborates on his psychedelic experience under the influence of mescaline in May 1953. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, ranging from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision", and reflects on their philosophical and psychological implications. In 1956, he published '' Heaven and Hell'', another essay which elaborates these reflections further. The two works have since often been published together as one book; the title of both comes from William Blake's 1793 book ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''. ''The Doors of Perception'' provoked strong reactions for its evaluation of psychedelic drugs as facilitators of mystical insight with great potential benefits for science, art, and religion. While many found the argument compelling, others including German writer Thomas Mann, Vedantic monk Swami Prabhavananda, Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, and Orientalist sc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books, both novels and non-fiction works, as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine ''Oxford Poetry'', before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addre ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Peyote
The peyote (; ''Lophophora williamsii'' ) is a small, spineless cactus which contains psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline. ''Peyote'' is a Spanish word derived from the Nahuatl (), meaning "caterpillar cocoon", from a root , "to glisten". p. 246. See peyotl in Wiktionary. Peyote is native to Mexico and southwestern Texas. It is found primarily in the Sierra Madre Occidental, the Chihuahuan Desert and in the states of Nayarit, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and San Luis Potosí among scrub. It flowers from March to May, and sometimes as late as September. The flowers are pink, with thigmotactic anthers (like ''Opuntia''). Known for its psychoactive properties when ingested, peyote has at least 5,500 years of entheogenic and traditional medicine, medicinal use by Indigenous people of the Americas, indigenous North Americans. Description The various species of the genus ''Lophophora'' grow low to the ground and they often form groups with numerous, crowded sho ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Peyote Cactus
The peyote (; ''Lophophora williamsii'' ) is a small, spineless cactus which contains psychoactive alkaloids, particularly mescaline. ''Peyote'' is a Spanish word derived from the Nahuatl (), meaning "caterpillar cocoon", from a root , "to glisten". p. 246. See peyotl in Wiktionary. Peyote is native to Mexico and southwestern Texas. It is found primarily in the Sierra Madre Occidental, the Chihuahuan Desert and in the states of Nayarit, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, and San Luis Potosí among scrub. It flowers from March to May, and sometimes as late as September. The flowers are pink, with thigmotactic anthers (like '' Opuntia''). Known for its psychoactive properties when ingested, peyote has at least 5,500 years of entheogenic and medicinal use by indigenous North Americans. Description The various species of the genus ''Lophophora'' grow low to the ground and they often form groups with numerous, crowded shoots. The blue-green, yellow-green or sometimes r ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Heinrich Klüver
Heinrich Klüver (; May 25, 1897 – February 8, 1979) was a German-American biological psychologist and philosopher born in Holstein. After having served in the Imperial German Army during World War I, he studied at both the University of Hamburg and the University of Berlin from 1920-23. In the latter year, he arrived in the United States to attend Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in physiological psychology from Stanford University. In 1927 he married Cessa Feyerabend and settled in the United States permanently, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1934. Klüver was a member of the 'core group' of cybernetics pioneers that participated in the Macy Conferences of the 1940s and 1950s. He collaborated most often and fruitfully with Paul Bucy and made various contributions to neuroanatomy throughout his career among others the Klüver–Bucy syndrome. His expositions of and experiments with mescaline were also groundbreaking at the time. He coined the term "cobweb fig ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Havelock Ellis
Henry Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 – 8 July 1939) was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis. Ellis was among the pioneering investigators of psychedelic drugs and the author of one of the first written reports to the public about an experience with mescaline, which he conducted on himself in 1896. He supported eugenics and served as one of 16 vice-presidents of the Eugenics Society from 1909 to 1912. Early life and career Ellis, son of Edward Peppen Ellis and Susannah Mary Wheatley, was born in Croydon, Surrey (now part of Greater London). He had four sisters, none of whom married. His father was a sea ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Silas Weir Mitchell (physician)
Silas Weir Mitchell (February 15, 1829 – January 4, 1914) was an American physician, scientist, novelist, and poet. He is considered the father of medical neurology, and he discovered causalgia (complex regional pain syndrome) and erythromelalgia, and pioneered the rest cure. Biography Silas Weir Mitchell was born on February 15, 1829, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to John Kearsley Mitchell and Sarah Henry Mitchell. He studied at Philadelphia's renowned University of Pennsylvania and later earned the degree of MD at the city's Jefferson Medical College in 1850. During the Civil War, he was director of treatment of nervous injuries and maladies at Turners Lane Hospital, Philadelphia, and at the close of the war became a specialist in neurology. In this field Mitchell pioneered the rest cure for diseases now termed "psychiatric", particularly neurasthenia and hysteria, subsequently taken up by the medical world. The treatment consisted primarily in isolation, confinement to b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ernst Späth
Ernst Späth (; 14 May 1886 in Moravský Beroun – 30 September 1946 in Zurich) was an Austrian chemist, specializing in natural products. Life Späth was the first to synthesise mescaline and was one of the first to synthesize cuscohygrine on a small scale with Hans Tuppy. He lost everything in World War II, and died with no money. His former student Percy Lavon Julian returned to Vienna, paid for his funeral, and commissioned a bust of Späth, which is still displayed in the foyer of the ''Faculty of Chemistry'' of the University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich histor .... A second cast of the bust was erected in 1961 in the ''Arkadenhof'' of the University of Vienna. References Biography * Publications * Austrian chemists 1886 births 1946 deat ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Psychoactive Drug
A psychoactive drug, psychopharmaceutical, psychoactive agent or psychotropic drug is a chemical substance, that changes functions of the nervous system, and results in alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition or behavior. These substances may be used medically, recreationally or spiritually to a. Purposefully improve one’s perceived performance b. Alter one's consciousness (such as with entheogens for ritual, spiritual or shamanic purposes) or c. For research. Some categories of psychoactive drugs - which are believed, by some, to have therapeutic value - may be prescribed by some physicians and other healthcare practitioners. Examples of medication categories that may contain potentially beneficial psychoactive drugs include, but are not limited to: # Anesthetics # Analgesics # Anticonvulsants # Anti-Parkinson’s medications # Medications used to treat Neuropsychiatric Disorders a. Antidepressants b. Anxiolytics c. Antipsychotics ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Self-experimentation
Self-experimentation refers to the special case of single-subject research in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on themselves. Usually this means that a single person is the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment. Also referred to as Personal science or N-of-1 research, self-experimentation is an example of citizen science, since it can also be led by patients or people interested in their own health and well-being, as both research subjects and self-experimenters. Current pioners and practitioners of self-experimentation include the late Seth Roberts, Tim Ferriss, and a sprawling community of Quantified Self. Biology and medicine Human scientific self-experimentation principally (though not necessarily) falls into the fields of medicine and psychology. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present day. For example, after failed attempts to infect piglets in 1984, Bar ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Animal Testing
Animal testing, also known as animal experimentation, animal research, and ''in vivo'' testing, is the use of non-human animals in experiments that seek to control the variables that affect the behavior or biological system under study. This approach can be contrasted with field studies in which animals are observed in their natural environments or habitats. Experimental research with animals is usually conducted in universities, medical schools, pharmaceutical companies, defense establishments, and commercial facilities that provide animal-testing services to the industry. The focus of animal testing varies on a continuum from pure research, focusing on developing fundamental knowledge of an organism, to applied research, which may focus on answering some questions of great practical importance, such as finding a cure for a disease. Examples of applied research include testing disease treatments, breeding, defense research, and toxicology, including cosmetics testing. In edu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Alkaloids
Alkaloids are a class of basic, naturally occurring organic compounds that contain at least one nitrogen atom. This group also includes some related compounds with neutral and even weakly acidic properties. Some synthetic compounds of similar structure may also be termed alkaloids. In addition to carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, alkaloids may also contain oxygen, sulfur and, more rarely, other elements such as chlorine, bromine, and phosphorus.Chemical Encyclopedia: alkaloids xumuk.ru Alkaloids are produced by a large variety of organisms including , , [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Arthur Heffter
Arthur Carl Wilhelm Heffter (15 June 1859, in Leipzig – 8 February 1925, in Berlin) was a German pharmacologist and chemist. He was the first chairman of the German Society of Pharmacologists, and was largely responsible for the first ''Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology''. He isolated mescaline from the peyote cactus in 1897, the first such isolation of a naturally occurring psychedelic substance in pure form. In addition, he conducted experiments on its effects by comparing the effects of peyote and mescaline on himself. Works * ''Die chronische Bleivergiftung im Maler-Gewerbe''. .l.190Digital editionby the University and State Library Düsseldorf. * ''Die Auffindung von Arzneimitteln''. Hirschwald, Berlin 191Digital editionby the University and State Library Düsseldorf. See also * Heffter Research Institute The Heffter Research Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes research with classic hallucinogens and psychedelics, predominantly psilocy ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |