Opening the Doors of Perception

In this sophisticated and well-informed book, Anthony takes as his point of departure the experience of Aldous Huxley, updating his ideas with contributions from virtual reality and holographics and building on his own previous work postulating an important distinction between the Daimonic consciousness of the right hemisphere and what he calls the Eidolonic consciousness of the left, although this is clearly not informed by the work of Iain McGilchrist, who would question his use of the word dominant in this context. Building on previous work, he proposes that 'reality is generated by a form of simulation analogous to that of a first person computer game' (p. 23) working along digital or holographic principles. This means that 'consensual reality itself is an illusion and everything is simply digital information' - a rather startling statement for the naïve realist. Huxley himself felt that each of us was potentially Mind at Large, but the normal functioning of the brain prevented us from realising this and accessing what Anthony calls the Pleroma. Huxley's experience with mescaline convinced him that there were other realms of consciousness waiting to be discovered.

An original part of Anthony's thesis, covered in the second part, claims that there is a 'spectrum' of illnesses that trigger certain neurophysical and neurochemical processes opening up the channels of communication between Daemonic and Eidolonic awareness as a series of 'staging points': autism, savant syndrome, migraine, temporal lobe epilepsy, schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. He covers the phenomenology of these conditions in a series of chapters where patients get glimpses through the doors of perception and therefore of the Pleroma (an ancient Gnostic term). He continues his investigation by looking at a number of people who entered into trancelike states and discovered further reaches of consciousness: van Gogh, Strindberg, temporal lobe epileptic Jayne Burton, Australian autistic author Donna Williams, American neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, and Pat McCreath, the mother of member Maggie la Tourelle and the subject of her book on Alzheimer's. The final part is an extended theoretical discussion further developing the model that the brain acts as a receiver and that consciousness is located somewhere else (p. 210). Maybe our lives are also a form of simulation in which we temporarily forget who we are, caught up in maya, as Eastern sages have suggested. Occasionally, we get a hint that we have played the game before - this is a book that does more than open up the doors of perception, it also opens those of a new frontier of understanding and an exciting agenda for the science of consciousness.