Heaven And Hell ( Appendixes) by Aldous Huxley

Author:Aldous Huxley
Language: es
Format: mobi
Tags: Filosophy
Published: 2010-10-15T23:00:00+00:00

I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience and of its interpretation in terms of theology, its translation into art. But visionary experience is not always blissful, It is sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.

Like heaven, the visionary hell has its praeternatural light and its praeternatural significance. But the significance is intrinsically appalling and the light is 'the smoky light' of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the 'darkness visible' of Milton. In the Journal d'une schizophrene (M. A. Sechehaye. Paris, 1950), the autobiographical record of a young girl's passage through madness, the world of the schizophrenic is called le pays d'eclairement — 'the country of lit-upness'. It is a name which a mystic might have used to denote his heaven.

But for poor Renee, the schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal — an intense electric glare without a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a source of bliss, brings to Renee only fear and a nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive, not of gems, but of machinery and enamelled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a menace.

And then there is the horror of infinity. For the healthy visionary, the perception of the infinite in a finite particular is a revelation of divine immanence; for Renee, it was a revelation of what she calls 'the System', the vast cosmic mechanism which exists only to grind out guilt and punishment, solitude and unreality. (See Appendix vi.)

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