What does this idea mean to you? What is the nature or the value of experiences that transcend or are outside the understanding of the world that can be expressed in language and concepts? What authors express these ideas in a way that is meaningful for you? What exercises or activities might help you to achieve this state, assuming that you desire to do so? What do you get out of such experiences?
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The concept (or anti-concept) seems to be that we tend to encounter the world through concepts and language, and in the process we discard or lose a vital part of the experience of living. As Wittgenstein was saying, language fails when trying to express an actual experience. You can sum up your experience by framing it as a series of concepts, and I might get the general idea and relate it to similar experiences I have had, yet I'll never get the real experience by a transmission, but only by experiencing it. Language and concepts lay down a sort of set of railroad tracks upon which our mind travels. This can be positive or negative, through inspirational ideas or prejudice or superstition. Once either type of idea is accepted, further experience takes place within that framework unless something happens to cause us to reconsider our 'world view'. If you've been around here for long, you can see how difficult this is for people to do, even those who wish to consider themselves philosophers.
But, it goes further than language. Even if I try to have a direct experience, I can't help but frame it through concepts already in my head. I see a bird and already think 'bird' and add all sorts of prior knowledge to my experience of seeing the bird. I can't see it in the way a child might experience a bird when seeing one for the first time, without the prejudice of the world of concepts framing the experience. Unlike the child, we frame new experiences in the lens of past experience. But, while seeing the world as the past and the future, we can't help but miss important aspects of the present. The child or the mystic does not think of the world in terms of time and space as we do.
The concepts and the language are both a blessing and a curse, Huxley says. They help us to stay alive and deal with a world that is all too complex without them. He says our brain is effectively a filter, allowing us only that sliver of experience that is relevant to surviving and accomplishing goals we have set. A part of us is still able to experience the world in the way of the child, seeing everything all at once, but accessing this aspect of ourselves is not easy. This is why he was using LSD and mescaline. The drugs partly wiped out the filtering of the brain and allowed him to see the world in a different, perhaps more real way. Meditation is another method to get at this different understanding of the world, and I imagine there are other ways.
So, maybe I've said enough or too much, so I will try to get out of my own light and see what others might have to say about this.
https://www.huxley.net/doors-of-percept ... eption.pdf
According to such a theory, 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. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man
has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call
languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which
he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of
other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is
the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for
data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the
universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various "other
worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the
awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through
the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however,
seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary bypasses
may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or
through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows,
not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass
does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but
something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material
which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.
