Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley - english novelist, essayist, traveller and pioneer user of psychedelic drugs.
His 'Doors of Perception' (Title taken from the works of William Blake, who I'll do a thread on sometime) remains IMO one of the best accounts written of the psychedelic experience. As he wrote:

'..one brigth May morning (in 1953), I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results'

And those results were, for Huxley, a revelation he had sought for many years.
Huxley was from a quite patrician english family, a nephew of Thomas Henry Huxley the biologist. He studied at Oxford,was a ssociated with the famous 'Bloomsbury set' and enjoyed rapid success with his early novels. He had a kind of fascination with mystical experience, and had studied very widely, but had never been able to have such experience himself. For uncle Aldous, as for many others, psychedelics were to prove the key.
As Huxley makes clear, these substances are extremely powerful - not the 'party drug' some younger people mistake them for. He recounts:

'..confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement - or, to be more accurate, by a last judgement which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty , I recognized as a chair - I found myself all at once on the verge of panic. This, I felt, was going too far. Too far even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. The fear, as I analyse it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed,, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accoustomed to living in a cosy world of symbols could bear'.

'What turns up under mescaline and schizophrenia is diverse, but the diversity exhibits many common features, and these common features crop up in descriptions of Christian, Moslem and Buddhist paradises and, when the experience has taken a negative turn, in descriptions of hells'

After his initial experience, Aldous continued to experiment with psychedelic drugs, mescaline and later LSD. He became a close friend of Capt. Al Hubbard, so called 'Jhonny Appleseed of LSD', and also with Tim Leary. However, it seems Huxley thought differently than Leary - he didn't see psycedelics as being suitable for a kind of movement of mass consumption, as Leary envisioned. Huxley's plan was to give it to selected people, as he thought quite rightly that many people would not benefit but simply become disturbed by these things. Be that as it may, in the 60's the cat got out of the bag, and that was that.However, much disinformation was put out regarding LSD, and it became lumped in, in the popular mind, with other quite different things - death drugs like Heroin, Coke, Speed etc.

In his last novel, 'Island', he describes a kind of utopian society, where psychedelic substances have become part of the whole education process, and their use is fully integrated into society. Very different from his 30's vision of a control state in 'Brave New World'.

He was also involved with the Ramakrishna mission in the USA, where he lived during his final years, and contributed many items to their magazine. I have some of these in book form and I'll look out some quotes. He also wrote a very good intro to the Prabhavanda/Isherwood translation of the 'Bhagavad Gita'
Huxley's view of religion was certainly universalist in nature, and his writings are littered with quotes from many diverse spiritual sources.

On his deathbed, Huxley took LSD, and passed peacefully away from the world.


BBB's recommendations:
For a taste of Huxley's early work
'Eyeless in Gaza'
'After Many a Summer'
'Brave New World'

Later stuff:
'The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell'
'Island'
'Moksha' -1999 compilation of Huxley's psychedelic writings.

 

I agree pretty much 100% here.

People need to be prepared for the psychedelic experience.
In the case of Huxley and Leary, they were both mature and widely read people before taking it, and Leary had his background in psychology - both came to the thing with the expectation of a revelatory type experience.
Most of the younger generation I know who've tried it, haven't persisted with taking it because if you do just have that party drug approach, it's easy I suppose to get totally freaked out.
Another 'nasty habit' which caught on in the 90's over here, esp in the underground rave scene, is taking acid together with MDMA. Supposedly to 'guarantee' a good trip. To my mind that is anathema -

Conversely, I've encountered a few younger people who are spiritually inclined and have no interest in even considering that a drug could be positive. Funnily enough, whilst talking to a freind recently about just this, I dubbed them 'brave new worlders' - it just kind of slipped out, and even I myself wasn't quite sure what I meant by it....but really it's not them but the fact that as you say, we are eerily close to Brave New World/1984 these days, perhaps with a bit of Naked Lunch thrown in for good measure. Maybe many people have been 'got to' by the anti-pschedelic propaganda and lies perpetrated by our beloved rulers.


Defintely, part of COOL should be to encourage respect for these substances, and try to show people how they can be used safely and effectively. But no-one should feel under any pressure to try anything they're not personally comfortable with.

 

So the picture that is forming for me is sort of a collective shaman entity. Yes? A guide through the mystery?

I was introduced to lsd through a friend who was extraordinarily intellegent, and I suspect had vast forays into consciousness, but at last account for me he was a recovering crack/heroin junkie. He had a tattoo of a monkey on his left shoulder as a reminder. "monkey on the back."

None-the-less, I soon found myself outside my group. They were only concerned with the enhanced humour reaction and the visual affects. I however was concerned with becoming aware of some something that I had not been aware of previously. I endured the confusion of the peak, and even enjoyed it in a good setting, but was most fascinated with the period after the peak, which for me was revelatory.

Be Love

 

"Of all the sexual perversions, none is so unnatural as chastity."

Anyone here read Point Counter Point? (The quote isn't taken from it, but it's my favourite piece of Huxley wisdom). The novel is basically a huge dramatized essay on nearly every imaginable topic relevent to our modern human condition. It really makes you examine absolutely everything about existence within that tiny, genius microcosm.

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell I found to be fascinating and clarifying reads, that brought coherence to a lot of my own feelings. Haven't read Island yet, but it's next on the list. Aldous Huxley was truly one of the great men of the twentieth century, if only more people listened.

 

For the later stuff, I just have to interject with Ape and Essence, perhaps the most overlooked thing he wrote. The post-nuclear war nightmare it portrays never actually happened during the Cold War (as many pessimists believed) but we're not out of the woods as long as the war-mongers run things, so I'd say it's still highly relevent. It's also some of the sharpest satire on human idiocy I've ever read.

 

I almost agree with Huxley's Mind At Large concept. It also ties in with some of William Blakes ideas, in the other thread.

 

Id like to throw Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in here too rather than start a new thread. Ive only ready one of his books, Welcome To The Monkey House, which was a collection of short stories. A lot of which dealt with the same issues Huxley addressed, one of them being the whole strong government take over and assimilation. One of those short stories in that book was about how the government required people to physically wear things that inhibited them. Strong people wore weights, pretty people wore masks, fast people wore a ball and chain.

I dont know too much about him but for those curious he's definitely worth looking into

 

♥ ♣ :sunny: Skip ~ I Absolutely Love & Adore Aldous Huxley! He Was A Truly Psychedelic Wizdom Seer Of Cozmic Consciousness... With Or Without Actually Using Psychedelics! ♥ I Own & Have Read Many Of His Fantastic B@@KS & Tons Of His Written Articles! ♥ I Too, Lived Much Of My Life As A Monastic In A Hindu Temple Ashrama & I Was The Personal Attendant Of My Pure Enlightened Indian Guru, Until He Left His Physical Body ... I Was Constantly At My Guru's Side Serving Him In All Ways & Things! ♥ I Am A Mystic & Always Study & Practice & Meditate Upon The Vedas, Upanishads, Adi Shankara's Advaita Vedanta Teachings, Patanjali, The Mystical Yogas, Shaivism, Learning & Reading Sanskrit Etc... Along With 3+ Hours Of Meditation Daily {I Still Do This} & When I Lived At The Temple I Daily Performed Temple Pujas {Worship, Offerings Etc} Entirely In Sanskrit, Performing All Temple Duties, Growing & Taking Care Of The Many Acres Of Temple Gardens :daisy: Giving Public Temple Talks, Teaching! {I Also Study & Love The Esoteric Mystical Teachings Of The Mystic Christ Essenes Who Are Also Cruelty~Free Raw Organic Vegan Fruitarians & Lovers & Protectors Of ALL Divine Beloved Creatures & Mother Earth & Protectors Of ALL Such GOOD Beings Seen & Unseen! Jesus Christ WAS Such A Mystical Essene & Was The LEADER & TEACHER Of Them!} ♥ I Attained The Culmination Of Being A Fully Renunciate Hindu Monastic... Officially Becoming A *Sannyasini* By Having That *Sannyasini* Highest Hindu Initiation Bestowed Upon Me By My Guru & I Will Never Break My Wonderful Vows... These Vows Are Very Natural To Me! ♥ Dissolving & Ending ALL Karmas & Ending ALL Future Reincarnations... & Attaining Permanent Full Enlightenment ~ Permanently Merging In The Ambrosial Shoreless Infinite Absolute Ocean Of Sat~Chit~Ananda Brahman ~ Is The Sublime Goal I Seek To Attain In This Life!! :angel: ♥ :sunny: ♣ ♥