The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 5 of 125
Mind at Large and the reducing valve
Earlier in his essay he had referred to possibilities broached by the English philosopher C. D. Broad. The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed. Now Huxley replaced this with a much more vigorous paraphrase: Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.1 What mescaline does, Huxley suggests, is temporarily bypass this “reducing valve” function of the brain, allowing through a flood of data that had previously been screened out as it served no “practical” purpose . . . a speculation that has remained the guiding image of theories as to how psychedelics work.