# Quote — Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

> “What about spatial relationships?” the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books. It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far?—How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.

- Author: [Aldous Huxley](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley.md)
- Book: [The Doors of Perception](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/the-doors-of-perception.md)
- Page: 19
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley#The_Doors_of_Perception_(1954)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/the-doors-of-perception/what-about-spatial

## More from this book

> What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful.

p. 168 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/the-doors-of-perception/what-the-rest.md)

> The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.

p. 191 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/the-doors-of-perception/the-man-who-comes.md)

> I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/aldous-huxley/the-doors-of-perception/i-was-seeing.md)