BlackBillBlake
07-20-2006, 11:32 PM
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.
http://img356.imageshack.us/img356/5884/huxleyaldous4medck0.jpg (http://imageshack.us/)
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.
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.
http://img356.imageshack.us/img356/5884/huxleyaldous4medck0.jpg (http://imageshack.us/)
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.