Episode Four: Cleanse Your Doors (of Perception) . . . or Just Rent an Electric Monk

Join us today as we beagle about in questions of belief, starting with total denial – Douglas Adams’ electric monk from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency! We’ll also look at the more serious side as we consider the filters we all use to protect ourselves through our discussion of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, and The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Published in 1987, Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detection Agency is a departure for Adams from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series.  He had finished So Long and Thanks for All the Fish  and was turning to something new.  It’s a very clever and funny novel in which the basic premise is that since in theory everything is interconnected with everything else, solving a crime – or more likely – the location of a lost feline – can involve literally anything, like a trip to the Bahamas, and any expenses associate therewith.  The novel involves time travel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and, most importantly for our purposes,  an “Electric Monk.” This monk is an appliance, like a dishwasher or washing machine.  But instead of doing the tedious cleaning of dishes for you, an electric monk saves you from the tedious task of believing all the things the world expects you to believe.  One of the plot threads is driven by a malfunctioning electric monk whose belief in absurd things has driven it to need a new motherboard, and it’s been put out to pasture, so to speak, since it’s cheaper to upgrade to a new model.  Adams is poking fun at consumerism run amok, to the point where we even buy labor-saving devices to handle what our culture challenges us to believe about “reality.”

In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley suggests that we filter out most of what our senses are capable of perceiving. Huxley was an English writer – many of us remember him for his dystopian science fiction novel, Brave New World.  Grandson of 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley – known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his advocacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution – Huxley was born just before the turn of the 20th-century to a family with a history of exploring evolving understandings of the relation of humanity to the universe accompanying rapid advances in all the sciences.

In May 1953, Aldous Huxley was 59 and had an abiding interest in mysticism. He had been following the literature in the emerging field of psychedelic drugs and self-transcendence when he took advantage of an opportunity to play “guinea pig” with a dose of mescaline. Mescaline, a psychedelic drug like LSD, is derived from the peyote cactus and is used in Native American religious observances. Huxley’s short book Doors of Perception recounts his experiences on mescaline and explores interpretations of the sense of self-transcendence that can occur under its influence.  More to the point of our discussion today is the passage from 19th-century poet William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to which the title of Huxley’s book refers: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

If Huxley explores the idea of bypassing the filter that insulates us from reality of Being, John Lennon embraces the paradox of existence in Tomorrow Never Knows. Taking the listener on a musical “trip” he explores ideas from Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, which uses the  Tibetan Book of the Dead to metaphorically explain the death of the self.  Leary’s  book is dedicated to Huxley and cites the Doors of Perception.  The song evokes the feeling of a drug trip that breaks down the filter that separates us from reality.

To Learn More:

Read about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Check out The Doors of Perception.

And Tomorrow Never Knows.