In his marvelous little book, "The Doors of Perception", Aldous Huxley quotes the Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad:
". . . we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do . . . the suggestion that 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 and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."
In referring to this state of all-knowing as Mind At Large, Huxley continues:
"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 stay alive on the 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 temporary by-pass which circumvents the reducing valve. In others, temporary by-passes 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 . . . 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." -Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954, Harper & Row.
The old notion is that a drug that makes you feel good, like booze, when you stagger around and say, "Hey, I'm great, I'm the best one on the block", that's not what we mean by feeling good or getting high. Getting high is that sense of union, wonder, revelation, merging with something that's bigger than yourself.
--Timothy Leary
