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Aldous Huxley was born on July 26th 1894 in Surrey, England and died 1963. Born into a rather interesting
family background of diverse and considerable accomplishment. English author; grandson of T.H. HUXLEY. After writing
critical essays and symbolist poetry, he turned to the novel. Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), and Point
Counter Point
His mother was a grand-daughter of Thomas Arnold, famed as a former headmaster of Rugby Public School who did much
to modernize the English educational system. On his father's side Aldous was a grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley
a scientist, educator, and Fellow of the Royal Society.
He received an upper class education, and most of his writings reflect his education. He suffered
an illness in his teens, during his years at Eton College (1908-13), that left him completely blind for two years.
He eventually regained some of his vision, but it remained seriously impaired for most of his life. He was nonetheless
able to achieve first class honors in English Language and Literature at Oxford's famous Balliol College.
In efforts to earn his living he turned to initially teaching and then to writing and his talents as a writer
became accepted and highly respected. Huxley began his writing career as a satirist of the British upper class.
As he grew older, he became more interested in writing about questions of philosophical and ethical significance.
Many of his writings deal with the conflict between the interests of the individual and society. He often dealt
with the question of profound self- realization within the context of social responsibility. It was whilst living
near Toulon in 1931 that he wrote his "Brave New World" which ranks with George Orwell's "1984"
as a worrisome vision of the future that has achieved cult status. Huxley's Brave New World addresses this
conflict in a fictional future in which free will and individuality have been sacrificed to achieve complete social
stability and is painfully clumsy at moments and brilliantly funny at others. It also raises some difficult questions
about the nature of moral choices. The novel concentrates on the various abuses of power made possible by science.
Huxley does not present his dystopian novel as an impetuous rant against science, but as a sobering warning. The
brave new world isn't an evil world because of science, but because power hungry individuals have misused it maliciously.
He became disenchanted with the then "Europe of the Dictators" and migrated to the United States of America.
He made this move in April 1937 along with a friend, the guru-like, Gerald Heard. Other works include Eyeless in
Gaza (1936) and Ape and Essence (1948). In later years he was strongly interested in mysticism and Eastern philosophy.
Huxley also published many short stories and essays.
Whilst in the United States, Huxley wrote the Perennial Philosophy (1945), perhaps his
most important non-fictional work. The Perennial Philosophy takes it's title from an expression
that may have been coined by Leibniz in association with a belief that there was much common ground between religions. This book of mysticism and universal teaching of spiritual insight was regarded by the
New York Times as, "The Masterpiece of All Anthologies."
In David King Dunaway's biography Aldous Huxley Recollected we read:-
"Huxley's studies with the Vedanta Society of southern California had taken him into the
realm of mysticism, and he was ever more serious about his meditations. Out of this hermitage and spiritual
deepening came The Perennial Philosophy, an effort to combine in an anthology what Huxley perceived as the unifying
substance of the world's religions: Mysticism."
"Religion is for people who have not yet had a spiritual experience." - ALDOUS HUXLEY
In May 1953 Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline. The mystical and transcendent experience that
followed set him off on an exploration that was to produce a revolutionary body of work about the inner reaches
of the human mind. Huxley was decades ahead of his time in his anticipation of the dangers modern culture was creating
through explosive population increase, headlong technological advance, and militant nationalism, and he saw psychedelics
as the greatest means at our disposal to "remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen
universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices." Much of Huxley's
writings following his 1953 mescaline experiment can be seen as his attempt to reveal the power of these substances
to awaken a sense of the sacred in people living in a technological society hostile to mystical revelations.
Huxley's interest in the use of Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and mescaline was in gaining higher consciousness,
recording his findings in personal experimentation with mescaline in "The Doors of Perception."
He continued to write about the possible uses of psychedelic drugs for transcendent, mystical experiences in the
1960s; Despite being intellectually written observations of his experience, these writings had a profound influence
on sixties counterculture, later gaining the status of the subculture drug movement, subsequently, Jim Morrison
adapting the name of Huxley's book for his band, The Doors. Unlike Timothy Leary, who endorsed a "turn
on, tune in and drop out" mentality for all of society to experience, Huxley was convinced that experimental
drug use should be limited only to those intellectuals and spiritualists, "the artist and the elite,"
who desired to achieve higher consciousness and not to the general public, who according to Huxley, were incapable
of handling such mind altering substances.
Moksha, a Sanskrit word meaning "liberation," is a collection of the prophetic and visionary writings
of Aldous Huxley. It includes selections from his acclaimed novels "Brave New World" and "Island,"
both of which envision societies centered around the use of psychedelics as stabilizing forces, as well as pieces
from "The Doors of Perception" and "Heaven and Hell," his famous works on consciousness
expansion. Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer, editor's of Huxley's writings in Moksha, are the directors of the
Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, the only library in the world exclusively devoted to the literature
of mind-altering drugs. Michael Horowitz was Timothy Leary's archivist and is coauthor of "The High Times
Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs." Palmer and Horowitz live in northern California and the parents of
actress, Winona Ryder. The Los Angeles Times stated, "Moksha is more than a book about psychedelics--although
it may well be the most intelligent, well-rounded one of its kind. It is also another chance to spend hours in
Huxley's fascinating company as he talks about art, literature, religion, psychology, and ecology."
Aldous Huxley died in his home in Hollywood on 22nd November 1963. He was not aware that earlier that day President
Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. With his wife by his side, Huxley ingested a dose of mescaline
while on his deathbed. Island is a monumentally important work. Read it.
"Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept
in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of
paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man;
it is what a man does with what happens to him." --ALDOUS HUXLEY (Texts and Pretexts, Introduction, 1932).
At Harvard University, Timothy Leary met Aldous Huxley and Allen Ginsburg
where they started "turning on" notable intellectuals such as William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk and
Jack Kerouac to the psychedelic experience. Huxley suggested that psychedelic plant use should only be used by
artists and the elite. Timothy Leary along with Allen Ginsberg and in the line of his professional style, believed
psychedelics should be shared with everyone and thought that the non-elite would benefit most from its use. Time
and society have revealed Leary and Ginsberg's line of reasoning with free drug to the general population, has
proven faulty, in favor of Huxley's restrictions that would have maintained responsibility and perhaps prevented
the government from fundamentally enforcing one-sided prejudice, banning drug use on a total scale with blanket
condemnation, thus preventing further scientific and spiritual experimentation in the aim of progress in learning
more about the brain, reality and higher consciousness, that is, the "peering into bits and zones of Chaos."
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