Mind at Large

For as long as life has been on this planet its sole purpose was to survive. The information on how to do this was the most important thing and often seen as the only thing. When focused on surviving individuals seem to put "blinders" on and only care what the necessities are. The ability to have "Mind at Large" is being able to tear those "blinders" off and view the world as it is as a whole. The ability to think without guidelines and to live free of ourselves; to live outside of ourselves sounds kind of strange, how can we be anyone else besides who we are? Take off those shackles, which hold you down and see that we do not solely live upon this earth, but of two worlds. We live in a reality, which is our day-to-day lives, however this alternate reality is often taken for granted; even though we experience it every night. When we sleep we leave our earthly bodies and take flight in an altered consciousness where time and space have no limitations. Aldous Huxley's essay The Doors of Perception discusses how every-single person is able to remember their own life events and is capable of possessing the foresight to see everything in the universe. This belief of "Mind at Large" previously described is displayed in both The Golem, and in The Doors of Perception; where both share similar incidents.

Athanasius Pernath is someone that seems as though nothing would happen to; someone that would not a second look to understand who he is or what he does. A brief description of Pernath is that he is middle-aged, his occupation is a gem-cutter, and he lives in Prague. He often stands in either his window or the archway of his building observing others that passes by. Pernath acts very similar to a house cat on top of a stoop, always watching but never understanding the depth of the outside world. His consciousness currently is constricted down that very narrow scope in which only a few things make since; until a book that a customer dropped off to Pernath for restoration lifted the cloak of Pernath's limited mental capacity. Once he began reading he could not put it down; the chapter known as Ibbur began his enlightenment. This incident is quite similar to Huxley's experience when he first had taken the hallucinogen known as mescalin. Huxley begins to endure the byproducts of the drug; in which he begins to see colors radiating about him. At one point Huxley closes his eyes and it "revealed a complex of gray structures" (Huxley 16). Pernath sees something similar; he notices a "ceaseless procession of grey forms and faces" (Meyrink 11). This appearance of grey forms is something that cannot be simply seen as a coincidence; it must be seen as a common theme when one experiences the "Mind at Large."

The experience of Pernath receiving the book was not solely limited to that, it also tells of his first meeting with the Golem; a mystique creature that terrorizes the Ghetto of Prague every thirty-three years. This paranormal