Saturday 18 April 2009

Above


1 comment:

  1. In his deep trance, Huxley found himself in a deep, wide, ravine, high up on the steep side of which, on the very edge, I sat, identifiable only by name and as annoyingly verbose.
    Before him, in a wide expanse of soft, dry sand was a nude infant lying on it's stomach. Acceptingly, unquestioning of its actuality, Huxley gazed at the infant, vastly curious about its behavior, vastly intent on trying to understand its flailing movements with its hands and the creeping of its legs. To his amazement, he felt himself experiencing a vague curious sense of wonderment as if he himself were the infant and looking at the soft sand and trying to understand what it was.
    As he watched, he became annoyed with me since I was apparently trying to talk to him, and he experienced a wave of impatience and requested that I be silent. He turned back and noted that the infant was growing before his eyes, was creeping, sitting, standing, toddling, walking, playing, talking. In utter fascination he watched this growing child, sensed its subjective experiences of learning, of wanting, of feeling. He followed it in distorted time through a multitude of experiences as it passed from infancy to childhood to school days to early youth to teenage. He watched the child's physical development, sensed its physical and subjective mental experiences, sympathized with it, empathized with it, rejoiced with it, thought and wondered and learned with it. He felt as one with it, as if it were he himself, and he continued to watch it until finally he realized that he had watched that infant grow to the maturity of 23 years. He stepped closer to see what the young man was looking at, and suddenly realized that the young man was Aldous Huxley himself, and that this Aldous Huxley was looking at another Aldous Huxley, obviously in his early fifties, just across the vestibule in which they both were standing; and that he, aged 52, was looking at himself, Aldous, aged 23. Then Aldous, aged 23, and Aldous, aged 52, apparently realized simultaneously that they were looking at each other and the curious questions at once arose in the minds of both of them. For one the question was "Is that really my idea of what I'll be like when I am 52?" and, "Is that really the way I appeared when I was 23?" Each was aware of the question in the other's mind. Each found the question of "extraordinarily fascinating interest" and each tried to determine which was the "actual reality" and which was the "mere subjective experience outwardly projected in hallucinatory form." -[From the notes of Milton Erickson, 1950]

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